GAH!

Thursday night, there was a movie on that I wanted to record. It was actually on twice that night, but I didn't catch the first showing because I was watching the Smallville season finale (which was awesome, by the way--even though I hate it when Patrick J. is right about spoiler-y things).

The movie was Bulletproof Monk, and I'd seen it before, so I knew it was awesome. So, at 10:30, I started to record the second showing of the movie, all the while pausing the recording during commercials.

While I watched/recorded the movie, I got through Unit 8 of my Dutch tapes (recording them to my computer, that is, not really listening to them and learning anything). Actually, I managed to get that far before then--while I was watching Smallville.

After Smallville was over, I had decided to play the Smallville Legends: Justice & Doom game online. So, I got into that, and eventually the movie started, so I started recording that.

Shortly after the movie started, I noticed that it was taking a loooooong time to load one of the parts of the game, so I thought I might try defragmenting my hard drive. I knew defragging would take a while, so I just let it go while I watched the movie.

About 20 minutes before the movie ended (around 12:40 Friday morning), the defrag was complete. So, I went back to the game.

Problem is, I still had the movie paused, because the defrag ended during a commercial break. I completely forgot to press record again until I realized that the movie had been on again for at least two minutes, and I'd missed my cue!

And it wasn't just a couple seconds' worth of movie, so it wasn't worth pressing record again and just filling in what they would have said in my head--no. So, I pressed stop, and since I didn't know when the movie would be on TV again, I just deleted the whole thing off of the disc.

I had been recording on Long Play, so I have almost half of a disc to record another movie on. And depending on which speed I record it on, that could be almost four hours of movie there.

I figure, I'll just buy the movie when I can afford to splurge on a DVD again--it's just not worth sitting through another two-and-a-half hours to record something I should've already had.

Friday was boring, but okay.

Saturday, I went to see Shrek the Third with Anna, Kayla and the crowd. Anna and Kayla had to sit in a different row, because Anna's had surgery on her ankle and that was the only place her wheelchair would fit. The rest of us were stuck sitting in the very front row of the theater.

The movie was pretty cool though.

I went to Mom & Dad's house for Anna's birthday dinner yesterday. It was Dad's home-made pizza. Yum!

I am such a geek.

So, I have these tapes, right? They're foreign language tapes. Pimsleur Language Programs' Speak and Read Essential Dutch. I've had them for at least a year and a half, and got them before I even thought of registering for that class down at the Belgian Embassy.

But my tape player is old, and sometimes doesn't work right. So I don't like to use it.

The other day, I was thinking, "If only I could get that onto CD--or my ipod--then that would be awesome, 'cause then I'd feel like listening to it more often." (You're supposed to listen to no more than one new unit per day, but if you didn't feel comfortable with the previous unit, you just repeat it the next day.)

And then I realized: I can do BOTH!

I got a cord a couple weeks back that connects headphone-jack-to-headphone-jack. Well, in this case, it's really headphone-jack-to-microphone-jack. And I've got a hard drive that will hold 160 GIGABYTES, so I have plenty of space for that kind of thing.

Today, I plugged the cord into the headphone jack of my tape player, with the other end plugged into the microphone jack of my laptop. Then, I plugged in my headphones to the laptop (so I wouldn't bug my roommates), and opened my Audacity program.

Holy Toledo, IT WORKS! It came through loud and clear, and I was able to record it and then export the recording to MP3! I also managed to get rid of the static (there was a lot of it) using Audacity's "Noise Removal" effect.

I've decided I'm going to record each of the ten units, plus each of the ten reading exercises, into twenty different "tracks."

And--this is the REALLY GEEKY part--I'm going to get some blank CDs, hook up my laptop to my VCR/DVD-R, and make my own CDs! I'd forgotten until this evening that my VCR/DVD-R could do that.

Once I've finished the Dutch course, I've got quite a few other cassettes (French, Finnish, and actual music tapes) which I can transfer to CD!

So, totally a geek.