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I get possums around the house time to time. I think maybe because I have an outdoor fish pond they are attracted to it. Fortunately for us, my dog is a hunting dog by nature and tends to chase and sometimes kill any small animal that intrudes. The unfortunate part is the possums are nocturnal so they show up at night and my dog finds them and barks at them constantly. This makes sleeping difficult. This happened a couple nights ago. I had to go outside and see what was going on. The dog and the possum were faced to faced barking and hissing at each other. I guess Happy (my dog’s name) was reluctant to attack it, so they were just having a shouting match. I took a water hose and sprayed the possum so that it would run. Of course once it let down its defense and turned away, my dog took it down. At least I thought so. It was no where to be found the next day. Either it faked death and ran away or Happy “disposed” of it somehow. Hope he didn’t eat it.

Little things about Macs, bug the hell out of me. You can’t right click a file and cut, and then go to another location and paste it. They want you do copy, paste and delete the original; or open both source and target folders and click and drag; or do a crazy click and drag navigation through finder. The silly thing is the Cut option is there in Edit, it’s just grayed out. Do not understand!! This is on top of the unzipping behavior that bugs the crap out of me too. By default double clicking a zip just unzips it in that location. I’d like to extract it to a location without having to move the zip first. It’s just annoying. I always find myself working around or doing things the way they want me to. Damn communists.

I was an early adopter of the DVD format thanks to some promotional offers from now defunct online stores. I’ve always had an appreciation for movies and had owned a few VHS tapes during a time when most people just rented. I quickly ramped up my movie purchases with the DVD format and next thing I knew I was at 400+ titles. I had to have bookshelves installed in my room to store them. People questioned: why I needed to buy so many? How many do I even watch more than once? Why don’t you just download/rent them?

Well, at first it was the idea of owning my favorite movies so I can watch them whenever. Then it became more a hobby of just collecting movies I liked for any reason. “This one had great gunfights.” “This one has great surround sound.” “I love this actress.” Why didn’t I just pirate like everyone else? Well I have an appreciation for quality and I didn’t want to sacrifice video or sound by downloading a divx video. Then when Blu-ray emerged as the HD format winner, I started questioning why I do this when it becomes obsolete. I started getting rid of my DVDs and getting them on Blu-ray, but this time I halted before it got out of hand. I started to think back how many times I had re-bought the same movie over and over. Terminator 2, Terminator 2 Ultimate Edition, Terminator 2 Extreme Edition. I wasn’t about to do this over again. And it is happening again with Blu-ray: Terminator 2, Terminator 2 Skynet Edition… As a collector you want the best version of the format, and the studios keep milking us for it.

So I’ve decided the movie industry can suck it. As much as I enjoy the HD format, I can live without it. As much as I love having physical cases sitting on my shelf of all my favorite movies, I can live without spending the cash and real estate. It’s so much more convenient to have all your movies in a digital format on your hard drive. Especially with tools like XBMC and the skinning designs of Aeon, this makes it even more enjoyable. But of course this suggests an unethical acquisition of the movies. I still watch movies in the theaters and pay the ridiculous inflated price of a movie ticket. I still will buy a Blu-ray disc once in awhile for a movie I really love. But for the most part I’ll just download avi’s like everyone else.