Still Searching

Back to the present day. Yesterday I drove home it was a straight boring route, A roads and the motorway although I have to say that when I was looking for a service station I couldn’t see one for over half an hour but when I wasn’t I saw about four in quick succession.

Home was much as I’d left it and everything I’d set up to record seemed to be ok apart from the first two items, an old Heartbeat episode and the Drama Trails. There wasn’t anything on the Drama trails I wanted anyway, although I would like to know what interrupted the signal.

While I was away I bought Kid Rock’s album Rock N Roll Jesus. Today I’ve been listening to it non stop. I couldn’t listen to it with my Grandma in the car because of the occasional swearing. Anyway, it’s really good. I think Amen is still my favourite track but I like Blue Jeans and a Rosary a lot too along with the whole album really.

Today I didn’t really do anything, just had a morning to catch up on my sleep and spent the afternoon devouring a book. I was shocked when I reached the end because it was reasonably substantial and I’d read it in just a couple of hours. It was Deadline by Simon Kernick. I’ve read three of his books before and they’re always good. They’re set in the same world as each other but focus on a different main character each time. I didn’t like that so much at first because I wanted to know more about DI John Gallon who was the lead in the first book I read but I’ve got used to it now, it’s a different approach but interesting to read. I think the overall message is nobody is perfect and the past rarely stays there.

Today I trimmed the adverts out of the Cagney and Lacey episodes I’d transferred over and found another one where the quality is unacceptable as it keeps blipping. Unfortunately that one is an episode that was aired just last week so it’ll be several months before it comes around again which is irritating but not altogether unexpected.

I also burnt the first DVD. It’s not particularly pretty when it loads, just a generic blue screen with a thumbnail and episode name next to it in slots, with several empty slots. It’ll only take two episodes per disc as each episode is 35% so there’s just not quite enough room. That doesn’t matter though because it works and that’s the main thing. As it’s only for me it doesn’t have to look all pretty, that’s what the official boxset has to be like, hopefully when it’s eventually released. However, that does make for rather a lot of discs. There’s four for season three and that only covers seven episodes. Still, not to worry the boxes aren’t that expensive and I can put several in the same container, they do that in commercial ones so I know it’s ok.

I’m going to my grandparents tomorrow evening after dinner to escape the street. Every year on the May bank holiday they hold a street fair and every year we run away so they won’t come knocking on our door at 6am telling us to move our bloody cars. On monday we’re planning on having Chinese takeout as part of a birthday celebration. Then in the afternoon mum and I are going to go to the cinema to see Made of Honour. I’ll make sure to do a review when I come back.

I said in my last post that I’d put a TV show onto timer record and was anxiously waiting to see if it had worked. Well it did!

I then cut the adverts out and tried and failed to work out the scene selection. I’ll fiddle with that later maybe. Right now I have episodes recording from tape so I’ll get to experiment with another function, video split so I can divide the episodes recorded as one file into separate files. Then maybe depending on how it goes I might even get to record a DVD. Talk about doing the process from start to finish. Whether I do a DVD or not depends on how many episodes I can get onto it.

I haven’t quite got the full third season on tape, the episode I’m missing is airing on Tuesday. I have all of season four bar the episode they refuse to show because it’s rated as violent (it’s really not particularly considering what else they show on daytime). Then I’m missing three episodes from season five that I think were shown but that I just missed for some reason so I’ll get those when they come around again which should be starting in five weeks on the Thursday. I’m missing five episodes from season six but I’ve a funny feeling one or two of those won’t be shown because of sensitive material or something. Then there’s one episode from season seven. I’m also not sure about the quality of my taped copies, I’ve watched them several times and some of them were put on old tapes to begin with so I might try and watch the episodes when I transfer them to see if the quality is noticeably poorer in which case I’ll then record that off the TV for real, which I might just do anyway. I can do that now.

After the Cagney and Lacey episodes I think I’ll do my Diagnosis Murders. That’s starting to come out on DVD now and I’m going to buy it but the ones I have on tape are from the fifth and sixth season and they’re not out yet. Though of course I’ll be thrilled to junk my home copy when it comes out for real they definitely aren’t the best quality. After that I’ll do my Judge John Deed episodes, they’ve been really good about bringing those out, I managed to junk a lot of tapes recently because of it but it won’t hurt until it comes out for real. I’m missing three episodes (or the first half of the season) from season five so when that comes out (soon please) it’ll definitely be bought. Then I have some random episodes of Heartbeat and a couple of New Tricks episodes from Season four which the DVD boxset is due out in October so I might not bother with those.

Once it’s all done I’ll be able to get rid of or do something with over 60 VHS tapes. Thats a lot of tapes and a lot of space which I quite desperately need in my room. Way cool!