One of the things about having six years worth of posts here is that it serves as the journal I’ve never been disciplined enough to keep.  Very sporadically updated, mind you, but it still comes in handy from time to time.

For example, I can look back at April of 2009 and find something I’ve written where I say that I’m not crazy enough to rip a couple thousand DVDs.

Oh, the follies of youth.

Anyway, I finished up our collection of TV shows on DVD last month, and co-incidentally had to swap out the last remaining 2TB drive in the Drobo for a 3TB.  The server now has something like 20TB of drives hanging off it, which is small by some standards but mind-boggling from the point of view of someone who grew up with floppy discs holding 90KB per side.

I had to go back and re-rip Alias, because that was one of the first shows I did, and it was also the first show I ripped where the order of the titles on the disc didn’t match the episode order – so, for example, the episodes were laid out on disc as 3 1 2 4 and I ripped them as 1 2 3 4 and it got quite confusing trying to watch.  I distinctly remember ripping it the first time and just feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of ripping and encoding FIVE WHOLE SEASONS worth of a TV show.

The second time was just, well, I’ll use these three machines to rip the discs, and that will take a day while I’m doing other stuff, and then I just tell the encoding box to convert a season a night into something that will play on the AppleTV.  It’s an entirely different mindset, and it makes me feel a little dumb, now, for buying the complete X-Files off of iTunes because I found the thought of ripping the discs we owned to be too intimidating.

All I have left, now, is a couple of shelves of anime DVDs.  I’ll admit to taking shortcuts with the Takahashi shows and just downloading them when possible, because 50 DVDs of Urusei Yatsura could break a man. 🙂