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The DVD scanning system

News ·Friday October 20, 2006 @ 00:16 EDT (link)

Everyone knows that Rhode Island really isn't a state, it's just a joke perpetuated by New Englanders on the rest of the country for their own amusement.

New England is really one state, it just gets twelve Senatorial votes and has a particularly byzantine internal tax code.

—Slashdot comment

Days of major terrorist attacks in New York: 1, ever.

Number of major earthquakes on the West coast: about 5 or 6 in the past century, spread out from California to Alaska.

Percentage of years in which Buffalo, New York has freeze-your-ass-off winters: 100.

—Slashdot comment

I drove into Seattle to pick up my scanner this morning before work; no trouble, found the guy's building, parked conveniently (so probably illegally) right outside, called up, and picked up the scanner and receipt. It worked as soon as I plugged it in; I scanned some codes from the book to turn it into a "keyboard wedge" scanner which means it simulates typing in the barcodes it scans and hitting enter. I immediately started scanning my juice cans, books, whatever.

Later on at home I wrote some HTML::Mason perl code so I could scan in DVDs and have it automatically fetch title, cover art, genre, length, etc. from DVDSpot, using WWW::Mechanize to fetch the pages and images. I just added the View All code. Interesting: IE shows the entire tooltip (title attribute), but Firefox cuts it off rather early. The scanner, the DVD list, and feedback for eBay. Only four DVDs couldn't be matched via DVDspot: Entrapment (fullscreen and "Special Edition", but that usually doesn't matter), the Anacondas Collection (but I suspect scanning the two DVDs it contains would work), Transporter 2, and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

Honey finished the Mario game on her Nintendo DS that we picked up Monday. She also put in her notice at AMEC Earth and Environmental (last day November 2).

Today someone posted this link about Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary instituting a ban on speaking in tongues to the internal Christians at Microsoft list. I refrained from posting something along the lines of "just exactly how is that bad"? They may be baptists, but at least they know some things are just batcrap insane.