Drew’s Inner Dialogue

I’ve told friends (also in medical school) that I love Scrubs…but that I haven’t watched whatever the most current season is. When they discuss the show, and I say that, they don’t really understand. Then I mention that I have them on my Tivo, and I’m going to watch them in chunks (or all at once, time permitting). I find it really adds to the flavor of a show to be able to maintain that kind of continuity as a viewer.

Some shows benefit enormously from this method - Farscape and Firefly being two of them. Those 2 shows (cancelled before their time, darn it) are well written with deep characters. Watching several episodes in a sitting allows me to embed myself in their universe a bit more thoroughly. Of course, when you reach the end of a season (or a series, darn it!), the abruptness is somewhat painful. Plus, it means no more Claudia Black or Summer Glau.

This can backfire, though. In my case, my Tivo hard drive (hacked and upgraded) basically died sometime last fall. I very quickly set about replacing it with an even larger upgraded hard drive (currently allowing me to connect my DirecTivo with my Mac for downloading and burning episodes). However, it meant that the first few episodes of shows from that fall were gone for good, and I hadn’t watched them yet. Bitorrent to the rescue, barely, and slowly. Now I try to keep things backed up.

Here’s an article that pretty well matches my sentiment:
The joy of watching HBO on DVD. By Sam Anderson

I’ve been overhauling my photo album, and I came across this photo from a few years ago. Our medical school class had a halloween bowling party, and I had just started using my original Digital Rebel. I spotted this guy in the arcade, and had to snap a shot.

Of course, it immediately reminded me of the song, “Cows With Guns”, by Dana Lyons, which I first heard in 1999 at Duke.

You owe it to yourself to track down this song, and actually listen to the lyrics. It’s “moo-tacular”, whatever that means…

After seeing what the electricity surge did in Carmel, I need to improve and consolidate the surge protectors I have on my own equipment here at home.

This is what I’ve chosen:

Several weeks ago I heard a clip on a local radio station. The DJ played a recording of Martin Gore, of Depeche Mode, explaining that his inspiration for their recent hit — “Precious” — was his experience growing up when his parents divorced.

I already liked the song, but now I listened to the lyrics, and it definitely tells that story.

Which, unfortunately, relates to my current experiences within my own family.

OPPO OPDV971H Digital HD-Ready Up-Converting DVD Player

Manufacturing Info available here: OPPO Digital

Basically, it upconverts DVD video for high definition TV sets, and will also handle other formats like DIVX.

She Wants Revenge, a fairly local band, had been getting heavy rotation time on iTunes for the past few weeks. I heard the single “Tear You Apart” once or twice on the local station X 103.9 (an awesome station that’s gone through a few big -and helpful- changes lately), and now it’s getting some airtime on KROQ 106.9 (a larger, more renowned station). Once I figured out who it was based on a Google search after hearing it on KCAL in the car, I tracked down the album as well. Highly recommended.
Won’t be too long before the album spreads across the country, methinks.
David Margolis probably already knows about them (how does he do that?!), but if not, I bet he’ll like it. (Dave…I want to join your webring, but I’m not sure where your most current site is…there are a lot of David Margoli on Google.)

Interesting. I’m not entirely sure where the data for this search comes from, but it strikes me as mostly accurate. (For example, try searching for “Smith” here.) Essentially, the darker the color, the more people with a given surname live in that particular state.
Here’s an example, using my surname “Elliston”:

Justin Alston, a buddy from my years at Duke, has appeared in a TV commercial. Jason and Sarah mentioned they had heard of such a thing while we had our way with Las Vegas. Upon returning home, I was watching The Simpsons… and there he was! I’d seen a few of the VW “Fast” commercials (they’re pretty good!), but not this particular one. He’s ordering Chinese delivery for dinner on a rainy night, and decides to pick it up himself anyway (he let his “fast” do the thinking).

A couple of things - I haven’t seen him for quite awhile, and while I’m thinking about it I need to see if I can reach him. The commercial doesn’t seem to be based in LA (it’s raining, thundering, and lightning, for goodness sakes - that simply doesn’t happen here), but that’s where he’s living and working.