How To: Media Organization

I would just like to welcome you to the first of my How To series. I have decided to start with something simple, yet at the same time can make all the difference in the world. I know that we all have videos, music, and photos all over our hard drive(s). Windows 7 does a pretty damn good job by default organizing all these different libraries that we accumulate throughout the years. Now, I will tell you something that you may not want to hear: not every computer is ideal for media storage/usage. Here is a cold fact about it: Media content takes up a lot of storage. This screenshot of the Windows File Manager tells us a lot of things that are important: The movie "No Strings Attached" takes up 1.25GB of space. It tells us to where and from where I am moving the file. For moving a large amount of files, the time remaining and progress bar will be more useful; but for me, when I see the 112 MB/second speed, that is all I need to know. That is the transfer speed from my 1TB drive to my 2TB drive. That is pretty fast for mechanical storage, on a SATA 3 Gb/s port. This next image to the left is just a quick screenshot of my entire desktop. This is what was filing my monitor and what I was seeing at the time. The window on the right is the My Computer window. This gives us access to all of my hard drives, libraries, and many other things. Naming your hard drives (if you have multiples) will help keep everything organized and easier to access at a glance. Let's break down my hard drive situation: I have my C:\Windows drive which is just for my Windows installation, and my programs. I also have my D:\Storage drive, which is just a mostly empty 1TB hard drive, which will soon house all my Steam games (Cause those take up a lot of space). Finally, I have my F:\Media drive, which is a 2TB drive that houses my media on this computer. Once I open my Media folder, you see the screen on the left. I have subfolders for Documents, Movies, Music, Photos, Television, Unsorted, and Video on Demand. Each contains what it is titled. The Unsorted is a temporary home folder to video files before I am able to sort and properly name the files. This keeps them in one place and easy to find and organize. In case you were wondering, I have unsorted video files due to the fact that I encode all my video files on this computer due to the speediness of my Core i5-760. It takes about 20 minutes for a movie, even less for a television show. Then I will upload them to the HTPC, which also has a 2TB hard drive waiting to be filed to the brim of breaking. Now let's explore the main folders that reside on my Media drive. First up: Movies.

Above is a screenshot of my Movies folder. Each movie gets its own sub-folder. This makes for a large amount of folders, but makes it easier to organize. This is especially important if you are using a media center program such as XBMC which allows for additional content. Media Managers such as Ember Media Manager "scrape" your movies and then match them up with detailed information from online databases; such as imdb.com. Then it will store information for each movie within its folder. This information can contain plot details, ratings, actors, production crew, summaries, genres, etc.. Windows 7 comes with Windows Media Center, which when set up correctly, can be a powerful Media Center program. Unfortunately, it does not support the files and information found during a scrape. So it all depends on your choice of media center program. I would recommend Windows Media Center to beginners due to the fact that on first run, it helps you set up the program. Also, it taps directly into your Libraries, so assuming you have them pointing to your media content, you will be set to go. If you do not have the Windows 7 incarnation of Windows Media Center, then XBMC is your best option. It is free, lightweight, and highly customizable. It is simple to use yet powerful. It supports all the information files, movie stills, and fanart. This is great if you like to be able to choose how the content is presented, and you can see a summary of the movie or television show. To the right is a screenshot of the inside of the Transformers movie folder. As you can see, it is empty except for the movie file itself, which is fine by me. I would rather have a large amount of folders within folders because I feel it is a lot cleaner and more organized. Next up is the television folder. Once again, opening this folder reveals more folders. Each sub0folder here contains a single television show. This helps separate video files so if you want to watch just a certain season of Show X, you can be sure that you are only getting those episodes.
And before you ask, yes there are separate folders for each season of the television show within their main folder. Now this is not as important to have, it is just something I like to do. This also holds much more weight when you are using XMBC and media scraper to add extra curricular information to your content. In all reality, you can have all the information and more than you would find on TV guide or the Guide program on DishNetwork or DirectTV. If you so happen to record television shows onto your computer, you might as well have all the information that you would be able to find from a guide program on your television. Now once again, this file system can differ from person to person. I am just showing you how I organize all my media content. The next screenshot shows the Season 3 folder of the show The Big Bang Theory. As you can see, I have a uniform naming scheme in this folder. Note: this is my old naming scheme. I am working on updating all the file names to be homogeneous throughout my media, especially the television folder. You can also see that in the list of episodes, there is a change in the icon about 2/3 of the way down. This is because I have two different file formats in this folder. I am working on converting all the videos to .m4v files. This is the iTunes, Zune, Windows Media Center, and Android friendly file format for visual media. The .mkv file format is an open source file format, but it is not supported by Windows Media Center, iTunes and Zune. This makes it kind of a strange fight: Open source software and formats are much better in theory, but I also want the formats that are widely supported. Once again, we fall back to the Law of Averages. The next screenshot shows how a final and more polished folder will look once finished. This season of The Big Bang Theory has my new naming scheme, all the files are homogeneous, and this makes for a better looking and more organized file system. I chose to use extra large thumbnails so that we can actually see the preview thumbnail. This makes it a little more visually interesting, in my opinion.

Music is the final folder I want to discuss. But I am not going to provide a detailed structure here due to the fact that which ever program you use to rip your audio CDs will make the structure for you. A basic structure goes like this: Artist>Albums>Songs. Everyone names their files differently. You don't need to have the artist and album in the song file name due to its tagging and metadata. These will provide all the information needed to properly organize the music in their respective programs. One thing I would suggest to anyone is to use a Lossless codec when ripping their audio. The files will take up more space, but will have a higher audio quality. This is if you have the space to do so, like an external hard drive, or a separate drive in your computer just for music. If not, then the standard MP3 format will do just fine. I say this because you probably do not have a high end sound system or pair of headphones that you use with your computer. Not many do. Music files are also heading the way of the Dodo due to new programs and services such as Pandora and Spotify. Google Music is also a great way to offload your music collection so you can free up some hard drive space. The options are endless, and now is the time to buy in and try everything.

Well, I hope that you enjoyed my little tour/How To. This is a test run, so this may continue, and it may not. It all depends upon you, the reader. Let me know what you are interested in seeing in the comments.

How-To: Blog.

I have a day off. It feels great knowing that I don't have any other obligations today except the usual, which is taking Jayme to work. It didn't help that I dodn't sleep worth shit last night, and I apparently I had a conversation that I don't really remember. But apparently it was a good one...And I woke up to find all my text messages deleted from my phone. So there is some voodoo magic at work here in our house. Either that or I am pretty damn coordinated while asleep. Either way.

One of my friends recently was dumped by her boyfriend (now ex-boyfriend). It had been a while since we had really talked, and it is nice getting the chance to have conversations like our old ones. It is difficult because I am trying to help her get over the bastard, but at the same trying not to make it seem like I am just hitting on her cause I know that she is single. I am trying to find a middle ground, and it is diffcult. I will admit it, I asked her out on a date. But I was doing in this manner: I don't mean for it to be a romantic date. I meant it more as a friend date, and a way for her to be able to say "Yes, I went out on a date with someone other than bastard". But maybe I am going about it the wrong way. Or maybe I'm just fucking insane. Who knows. I am what I am. I have issues, yes. I don't care if you know it or not, and the 3 people who might read this already know of those issues. I am not backing down from that.

I still don't understand females. I was having this discussion with a friend, and she said that she didn't know what to wear out to a bar because she didn't know if there would be hot guys there. I just had this reaction: What the fuck? Who cares what you wear. Why is there so much emphasis on what girls wear? And why do they always have to go out and spend sooo much money on clothes to look "hot"? I don't know if this holds true to other guys, but I have this straight attitude about it: just be comfortable. I was hanging out with a friend, and she asked me what she should wear. I told her to be comfortable, and then she replied "I think I'm going to dress up for you". Why? I don't want you to. I told her that. There is not reason to spend so much time and effort to try and look "hot". If I like you, then I don't give a fuck what you wear. I'm not going to lie; there are some styles that I like a lot more than others. But I will NEVER tell a girl how to dress. I don't see the point of being with a girl if you want to try to change her. Maybe I'm strange or whatever, but it is how I am.

I had something bad happen to my beloved desktop. My hard drive containing my windows install died on me. I took this as a sign that it was time to upgrade my baby. I decided on an SSD, which is a hard drive that is made up of flash memory modules, much like the storage of an iPod, iPad, iPhone, ZuneHD, flash drives, and Android phones. It offers a shit load of performance over the traditional 7,200 RPM hard drives. I love it. In other technology news, my phone is being fucking stupid again. I used to enjoy being able to see everyone's pretty face with their contact name due to it using their facebook photos for their contact photos. But sometime it decided to stop doing so. So I'm not so sure how I am going to remedy this, or if I ever want to try to spend all the time to try to fix it. It is whatever. I would like to fix it, if it will be easy because I like my phone actually doing what it is billed to do. But maybe I am just wanting too much from the piece of technology. I will try to fix it later and see what happens.

Expect an update later on tonight. I'm thinking of doing a small screenshot tour of my desktop and how I use it daily. I'm also thinking of doing some How-To's, but that all depends on if my readers would like me to try that. Leave me a comment and let me know what you think and if you want me to, what would you like me to cover? If I know how to do what you request, I will post. If not, then expect some reseach so then I can pass on the info to you.

My SSD is faster than your HDD

I would like to start off by apologizing for the absence. I have been busy with work and other things that seem to be occupying my life lately. This morning I had a bad morning...I had a complete hard drive failure of my trusty Samsung 500GB Windows drive. So I ponied up and replaced it with a 240GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD. And I just have to say... Holy Shit. This is stupid fast. I cried during the first boot. It boots on average in 15 seconds. Yeah. I know you are jealous. I decided the lesser amount of space is worth the stupid fast performance. Yes, I just used Stupid Fast for a second, and more recently, a third time. On a related technology note, I was invited to Google+ by Kristen Magers, a long time friend of mine. I also was given the opportunity to get Spotify. And this is a great product and service. I think it will be wortth the premium price if they decide to limit the amount of music you can listen to in a month. Included in the premium is offline access, and access on my cell phone. Which isn't a big deal for me because my battery barely lasts through a day on standby. But anyway. Also, there has a been a big cry out against Netflix due to their raising prices starting September. I don't see why this is such a big deal. Netflix is a business who is looking to evolve their content delivery methods. They want to move to an entirly streaming service, which they cannot do unless they pony up to pay the money to get the content. I would be fine with a streaming only plan, except for the fact that a lot of the shows I like are only on DVD currently. Which needs to change for me to get a streaming only plan.

I am taking the advice of MaximumPC [once again] and using a new program to rip my audio tracks...again. I'm using Exact Audio Copy which matches the data to make sure that you get every bit of audio data that you are entitled to. The options a little confusing at first, but I worked through it and hopefully I get better quality audio. But the current issue that I am running into is that it is not ripping so that the Zune software will see it. {UPDATE} I just figured that part out. I was sending the audio tracks to the wrong location. My Bad. But I figured it all out and hopefully I can snyc it to my Zune this weekend and everything will be all good.

I started using Google+. And I must say, this is what I have been expecting from social networking. It forces you to sort and manage your friends, family, followers, and such. It is a clean interface, and it lets you choose who you share your shit with everytime you update your status, etc. I like it. And I also like how it is integrated with Google. Say what you want. But Google knows how to integrate new products with their existing products, which makes it easier to connect with everything. I will be using it more and getting deeper into the features and will give some feedback.

I am taking this chance of a clean Windows install to take a different route when it comes to software. I am trying a new approach to certain programs that I used to not be able to live without. I am trying the SMPlayer instead of my trusty KMPlayer. I am still going to install the KMPlayer as a backup, in case I dislike SMPlayer. It isn't too bad...but not what I am used to. I am thinking of reverting back to The KMPlayer just due to its familiarity and I like the interface and full keyboard control is a great touch, as you know how much I like my keyboard short cuts. I love them. It pains me that I can't use them all when I am at work while working on the depressing Pentium III machines running Windows 2000 Professional. Yeah. Pre Windows XP. Pre Windows ME. It is that old. I am glad that they didn't make the tragic mistake of upgrading the OS with such old and dated and underpowered hardware. This would have made the computers too slow to even use, even for the Access Databases for location look up. I was told by Morgan that we are getting new computers at work within the next week, or at least sometime new. And while I am typing this, I am realizing that I have not looked at the keyboard during this entire paragraph. I have made many typos, but I am good at correcting my spelling and grammer mistakes. It just reminds me how much I love this keyboard. I think I will take the time to set up at least one bank of Macros to streamline my computing experience.

Great Interwebz.

I finshed my first week at my new job. It is a pretty sweet place to work. The guys are great, and they are willing to help me out whenever I have a question or need to learn something new. Morgan is a awesome guy and he knows his shit. I work all next week, and I have Tuesday off. I will be spending that day with the lovely Miranda Nash. We're gonna go check out the final installment of the Harry Potter series. I am hoping that the second part is just as captivating as the first part. I am also thinking of going back through and re-reading all the HP books, or at least all the ones that we own, which I think is the first 6.

I'm also continuing work on a new design for my website. I did start out with a template in Dreamweaver, but I was unhappy with using the template. So I have been working on starting from scratch and coding it all, one piece at a time. I also exported all the styling to an external style sheet, which the correct way of doing this so I can just link the .css file and then editing the content. I also am changing the image preview style. On the current website, the image previews are small scale versions of the entire photo. This is fine so people can see the image before they view the entire photo. I am changing it to squares ones that show parts of the photo, but not the whole photo. This is to (hopefully) make the visitor more curious and invite them to click on the photo to view it in the full image. I may also change the full views to be larger so you get a higher quality photo. But the issue with this is that it may fuck with the load times and take a lot longer for those with a slower internet connection. This is just something that I will have to test out and let you help me.

I will try to get a better post tomorrow. I haven't been thinking about things too much lately. I just have been busy with work and I hopefully can get my brain together and expand on a single coherent thought.

Chicago Cubs Headgear: Pro Style!

I started my new job today. It is a pretty laid back place and I think I am going to enjoy working there. I am hoping that the next couple days go by quickly and I'm looking forward to this next week. I am nearing the finishing of the Mac Pro case. I have one more main structural part to spray with color. I have most of the plastic pieces to paint still, but those only require the color...no real prep work. Then I can start the reassembly of the computer. I will be sure to take a lot of photos once all the color is there and maybe some video. Hopefully the assembly goes smoothly. I kept everything and let's just hope I remember how everything goes back togather. I am hoping that is goes a little easier than the tear down. I will need to purchase some double sided tape or some super glue to hold a couple pieces back in their place, but it may be unnecessary. I am hoping to shoot the color tomorrow morning, and it will be dry by the time I get ready to leave for work. And I just remembered that I need to mask off and shoot the blue on the exterior of the side panel and inner shell. Oh well. That will be done tomorrow. I am thinking of painting all the plastic pieces tomorrow morning and let it dry for the day. Then I will be painting the reverse sides when it dries enough. I think that maybe sunday I will be able to assemble it all together and get it up and running. But anyway, here is a photo of my new hat! It is hard to find a Cubs hat in Columbus. But until next time!

BETA Testing and Design

Today I was relaxing at Caribou when I decided to work on something. I haven't done something like this for a while, and I think that it might be time to work on perfecting. Here is a fact: I am never happy with my website. I feel that it can always be improved, and I am working on how to improve it. I am sticking with the same basic colors, and I think that this is an improvement over the current design. This is more minimalistic, and removes many of the distractions that the current site contains. So, here is a preview of what I've been working on, and I will share the link to my BETA design page and will be asking the few of you here for some feedback.

I can already see a few tweaks that I need to make, such as making the scroll bar disappear. This should scale to your browser window. Here is the link for the BETA Design Page.

Trekkin' with the Ladies

It's Sunday. I didn't really sleep last night. Yesterday was a long day at work. Underdstaffed, a busy Saturday, and a different manager. It's like we're playing a game show and every week we have a different manager closing and coming to help us out. Usually on a Saturday night at closing, we set the sale ad signs for the next week's sale. Kelly, the manager stepping in, informed us that at her store, they tear down all the old ad signs, and then they set the new ads on Monday morning, when everyone is fresh and not tired as hell from a day of running around and dealing with bitchy customers. So Home Accents was completely set, along with Scrapbooking and part of Floral. Then Kelly made the decision that we are going to tear down all the old signs, and then we were heading home. Nothing we were going to argue. But here is what pissed me off about yesterday: When I arrived at work, I was informed that I needed to make sure I did a good job cleaning the restrooms because they haven't been cleaned in a few days. I don't mind cleaning the restrooms. I get upset when someone doesn't do their job correctly and then I have to cover their ass. And to make it worse, we didn't have all supplies needed. I understand that there are only two people that do the closing duties of the stock room. But the "solution" is to have him come in at 8 AM and "clean" the restrooms and get the trash, etc. But he doesn't. There is no possible way that he can with the amount of trash in the trash cans, and how many rolls of toilet paper I needed to replace. If there is only to be two people that clean the restrooms, and I'm only doing so once a week, then why is the schedule set so no one cleans them for a few days? Doesn't make any sense to me.

Today I did something that I don't normally do: I went to the mall. Namely, I needed to go shopping for a pair fo Steel Toe work boots and I needed to get some black shirts. I ended up finding both at Sears and JCPenny, respectively. After finding what I needed, I eneded up buying a Cubs hat and getting a hair cut. But I noticed something while I was talking around. It seemed that all at girls that were younger (by younger I mean either there with a parent, dropped off, or just old enough to drive) girls were wearing the same type of outfits: All were wearing either spaghetti strap tanks or strap-less tops with short, tight jean shorts. And it seems that each one was wearing a push up bra to try and show off their boobs. Now a few things came into my mind: A-How are parents letting their daughters leave the house like this? and B-What started this fashion trend? And it was just the under-18 crowd. The "older" females were wearing bermuda shorts, jeans, skirts, and a nice top with it. And moms dress like moms. One thing that might be causing this is that this is the time of a young person's life were it is becoming increasingly more and more popular to have a boyfriend. And yes, statistically, teen pregnancy is on the decline. But it seems that girls are trying really hard to be "sexy" at a young age. When I was that age, all the girls I knew wore jeans, or longer shorts when outside of school. Granted, I went to a Catholic School where we, as students, could actually get in trouble and punished by the school administration if we were to wear inappropriate clothing outside of school, but at a school related event. But in the 5 years since my high school graduation, it appears that fashion for girls that age has taken a drastic turn, which in my opinion, is a turn for the worse. I think about it this way: kids these days are discoving their sexuality earlier and earlier in life. I know that high school children having sex is nothing new. There were kids having sex when I went to high school. I wasn't one of the them. I lost my virginity when I was 20. I'm not ashamed to say that. I'm not ashamed to say that I've only had sex with 2 people. I'm not ashamed of anything in my past when it comes to girls and sex. Like anyone else, I do have a regret or two. And those people involved know what they are. While I do regret one of them more than others, I did what no one else thought I would do: I kept my word and my promise that I made to her at the very beginning. Some may call me stupid. At times, I do feel like I made the wrong decision. But at the same time, I know that she is better off. I need to move on from that. I've been trying. But some convention wisdom suggests that we can not be completely over a former love until we begin a relationship with a new person. I know that I've covered the tradgey that is my dating history. I'm still looking for that girl. The one who can fix me and remove me from my past. I have told every ex girlfriend (that I still have communication with) that I am happy for them when they find themselves someone who makes them happy. I told the same thing to a girl who I was talking to and then just changed her mind about me and started dating another guy. I told her that I'm glad that she is happy and that is what matters to me. She seemed...shocked. But I meant it. I'm happy when my friends are happy. I'm happy when girls I like are happy, whether it involves me or not. I will never tell a girl to choose me. I will tell her to choose what makes her happy. This may be a bad thing, considering I may have lost a couple potentional girlfriends to this. I will be the first to admit that it is my fault for my current relationship situation. But I think that I take a different approach with girls than most guys. When I ask a girl out, there are a few factors/facts that I feel are worth noting:

1: I won't ask a girl out unless I am sure that I like her and that she may like me.

2: I'm not asking for a full on relationship when I ask a girl out; I'm just asking for a chance.

3: I'm old fashioned when it comes to dating. I like to pick up the girl, and drive her and pay for everything.

4: I will do the best in my ability to treat you like a queen.

I feel like the way that many guys approach dating and girls that it is something that most girls don't think about with me. I'm not going to try and get you in bed. I WILL call/text/talk to you the next day. If I can tell that you had a good time and are willing, I will ask you out again. If not, I will continue to talk to you and let you cut your losses and move on. I can't be mad at a girl if she gives me a chance and we find out that we just won't work out. I can't be upset about that. I can and will be upset when I get stood up and/or forgotten. I've had that happen to me before. The worst if when "something came up" and she is forced to cancel on me. I know that you just don't wanna go with me. If you didn't want to in the first place, why not just tell me? I had a girl in high school lead me on for the second half of my senior year and the following summer. It was a constant hell because she was like hot and cold, but one of her best friends was trying to help me out and she would give me some advice. And when I would take her advice and apply it, the girl was cold. When I was about to give up on her, she was hot again. It was like trying to sleep when you're sick; you get cold so you cover up, then you get hot and start sweating so you kick off the covers. Imagine that, except it is your emotions getting the shit end of it all. I can take a lot of bullshit, and I have taken a lot of bullshit for girls while in relationships. That is nothing new for me. I'm working on building back up my self esteem. I am working on recognizing said bullshit and trying to remove it from my life. I don't need any other distractions in my life. I have enough without someone trying to destroy me from the inside-out. I am hoping to stumble across the right girl for me that will not feed me any bullshit and help keep me on the path that I am currently on. Maybe she can help me forget my past and help me look towards the future. I am hoping that this is someone that I come across soon. I feel like I am at about 95% ready for a girlfriend. Almost there.

In unrelated news, I start my new job tomorrow. I go in for orientation at 1. I'm excited but nervous. From what I was told, the first few weeks will be training, safety video watching, and certification. I really can't wait.

I'm getting the Mac painted a little more each day. I'm also working on ripping the CD collection onto the HTPC so we can enjoy some music while playing games or working in the kitchen. The CD collection is a decent size, then I will be adding to it any and all downloaded audio that we have saved up on my desktop and Jayme's iMac. This will give us a wide variety and hopefully set up streaming to a laptop in the garage while playing cards or having a drink and cigar. I'm really excited to finish this project as it is one that I can mark off my list. Tomorrow I will be stopping by Home Depot to pick up some more paint. I need at least two cans of blue, and one can of clear, maybe two just to feel safe. I also need to pick up a couple 1/4" metal screw on pipe clamps. I will be using these while converting my night stand into a charging station. I will be mounting the surge protector to the inside of the cabinet. A hole will be drilled to allow the plug to reach outside to the wall. My cell phone charger will be plugged in, with a hole just large enough for the plug to pass through near the top of the cabinet, near the top. THe pipe clamp will be installed to help ensure that the cable stays in place for when I go to charge it at night. I think that using a couple of my zip tie anchors to keep the cable organized inside the cabinet. This is a simple project that will help keep cables organized and keep wires off the ground and out of the reach of the cute puppies.

Star Trek is awesome. I started watching The Original Series. Sci-Fi is all it's 1966 glory. This is obviously a remastered HD version, but still sandboxed in the 4:3 aspect ratio. It is still a pretty damn good show and I'm glad that I am given the opportunity to experience this classic piece of Sci-Fi television.