In just about one month’s time we completely rewrote the site with a new look, a greatly improved standards-based framework, and a new backend system to power it all. Still some bugs and the usual gremlins to try and work out, but it’s been one of the smoother site launches I’ve ever been involved with.

Inform.com's fresh new look. Already I'm planning how to improve the design.

The best part about all of this is that the project is really just starting out. Our original plans were much more ambitious, and now that we have this new modern framework up and running, we should be able to start testing, tweaking, and tuning the site as we try to grow our numbers.

Be sure to share your impressions and ideas.

The better part of this week has been a good old-fashioned bug hunt and code cleaning. Its been so long since I had my hands in one of this magnitude that I forgot how rewarding it can feel when you finally best a bug and inch that much closer to the finish line. Of course, that’s usually countered by some persitant pain in the ass bug that won’t die matter how hard you try; usually a cross browser issue. And when you still need to factor in that curmudgeon of web standards know. As IE6…ugh. Here’s hoping this will be the last big project I have to deal with that piece of shit.

I’ve certainly earned my cookie today.

It’s funny how much living you do before your life ever starts. Your world is measured in minutes and seconds, not days and weeks. Much is exciting and new, but still so much more feels stable and unchanging — solid like the earth itself. You have no clue that the thoughts and ideas you hold so dear are going to morph and change as time cozies up to have its wicked ways with you. Times had been rough before, but you were sure that was the worst it was ever going to get. You and yours had earned your peace — the bad days were gone, and the sweet life was yours for the taking once again.

Oh for that morning, it would be my reality. That morning….

Mom and I were driving to work in the minivan, talking about plans for the day. She told me she would be late getting home because she had a doctor’s appointment; a fact that version of me wouldn’t have inquired further about. But for some reason, the way she said it belied the fact that she had concern. The answer was going to be upsetting, and she had no desire to broach the subject. If only — she knew she must. She had found a lump.

That night, some of my friends and I had ventured out to the Seaside boardwalk, with designs on slacking and nothing of consequence. As you might expect, my mind was elsewhere. When my silence finally was pressed to subject, I told my friends. To a person, everyone reassured me. One soul even offered up a personal tale of his mother’s own triumph over this looming specter. The sentiment was comforting, though my inner cynic begged to differ, knowing this time…something was…different. Mom was always so strong, but in that briefest of moments, I had sensed how this was different by the way she told me.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that night the clock on my life had officially started.

The beginnings of ends

The fight was back and forth, with more than a few times it looking like mom was getting the upper hand. In the end, her foe was just far too relentless. I did all I could to help, but to this day I still lament those moments for not being able to do more. There is still guilt in those moments I tried to live my old life and not in the reality I was facing. But you have to be scared to learn when you can escape from life and when you have to face the music.

During her final week, she had been resting in what was once my bedroom in our little ranch style on River Avenue. I was in a basement bedroom just below it. My job had me keeping late hours, which meant a quiet house in which I heard my mom’s laboring through the floor, whether I wanted to or not. No matter if I was trying to sleep, or lost in my cyber life as I tried desperately to escape. But there were no delusions anymore. I knew what was happening now, and I knew that soon enough, I was going to have to face it all. Unfair or not, life would never be the same.

Ten years to the day, my mother passed away — surrounded by loved ones in the room of my innocence.

Her hands were still warm when I rushed to my bedroom, to mark the time in what had until that moment been my escape from that reality. I never could have dreamed how it would become the genesis of my new reality.

Riding in the wake of passing ships

Today, Shannon and I gathered to spend the afternoon together. We picked up some flowers, visited mom’s grave, and went to have an early dinner at the Squan Tavern; a place she had been named employee of the year at (while she was holding down two jobs, no less!). Just the fact that ten years on and we were sharing that meal together — still thick as thieves — would make mom smile.

I had to grow up quickly in the months that followed, but it’s amazing how little I tend to think about that these days. There are new circuses of strife and folly to face, and I can’t escape into fond memories of a once ago as often as I’d like to if I want my own personal storybook to continue. Both Shannon and I admitted to not knowing if we’d be as mature and stable as we are had mom not left our lives so soon, though I still think we would have done okay. But there’s a part of me that’s quite certain I would probably have lived quite comfortably in my basement bedroom world for years and years. There was a great deal of comfort in that life.

But my, oh my — how time does fly! The world can’t be made to wait, much as you wish you could just hit the pause button from time to time. There’s always this subtle little nudging, stabbing you in the back. A voice unheard repeats the same mantra, again and again: move forward. It was that constant pressure from the seen and unseen that led to a sense of quiet desperation, which in turn led to a career I dared not dream for, so vibrant and rewarding. You never know what the waves in life’s events will do with you once they take hold.

In the end, I have to turn to the words Shannon and I finally agreed to when we were ready to buy mom her well-deserved headstone. We argued for years about what we wanted; a testament to how mom raised two completely different individuals. In the end, it’s the simple things that tend to ring truest:

Best friend
Beloved mother
Gone too soon

I think she would have liked that.

It’s now a shade over one month since I started working full time at Inform, and quite the busy month at that. We’re probably two weeks away from launching a new site overhaul, and I don’t see the workload fluxuating anytime soon. Then again, after a summer of just staring at my apartment walls all day, that’s actually a good thing.

The new job is set in the Murray Hill section of midtown; a spot that actually makes it easier to walk to the office from the bus terminal than to deal with the Subways. I timed the difference one day, and all that climbing up and down steps and waiting for trains saved me a grand total of 10 minutes. I’m sure I’ll use them more when winter rolls around, but for now I’m enjoying my twice daily hike across midtown.

But by far the biggest change would have to be in the personal side of my life. You see, shortly after starting my new job I also I broke up with my girlfriend Jill after a year and a half. It’s not something I planned to do, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was thinking about this for a while. I’m leaving out the gory details, and will probably keep any future relationship talk from these pages for a very long time. I certainly wouldn’t mind if she still wanted to be friends, but in the end, all I can do is wish her the best of luck in her life and leave the ball in her court.

Since last week I’ve been hanging my shingle at Inform as resident web designer. Yeah, last you heard I was doing part-time work at OMGPOP. Well, it turned out not to be a good fit on either side the relationship. Put it this way: I’ve already put in more hours at the new gig than I did there. Had I not been scrounging up freelance work and carpet-bombing New York with my resume, I might have actually written about it. Still, good guys and good games — best of luck.

More later. I have to get back to finishing one of those aforementioned freelance projects.

The new duds (currently under development)

What you see pictured above is my grand attempt to rectify that situation. The future 8th incarnation of Fischler.org has been responsible for many a sleepless, caffeine-fueled night, and will be an ongoing distraction of substantial proportions until the day I get it out the door.

Looks sweet. So why isn’t it done yet?

If all I was worried about updating was the look of the site, I can guarantee you’d already be staring at the living, breathing code, and I would have easily kept to that insane two week launch schedule I twittered about almost two months ago. But that picture doesn’t begin to tell how big of a rewrite this is. This is by and far the largest re-imaging of this site since it was officially launched back in August of ‘99.

The project has grown in scale exponentially, and there are a handful of reasons why. Topping the list would be my desire to cram over 3 years worth of knowledge I gained at Lime (including those things I only read about or heard others talk about while there) into a singular jewel I could be proud of– a summation of my true skill level. Then there’s the fact that for every time I manage to implement one new feature, I’d stumble across two other features in my research that I’d just have to include on the “to-do” list.

Usually I’d be far more stingy in deciding how much time and what part of the project I’d spend my energy on, but while I wasn’t really a fan of the way I got all this “free time” to work on my own projects, it’s a luxury I’ve tried to make good use of. I’d have to say it was a contributing factor as well.

Putting best practices to practice

Once I realized what was happening, I started taking steps to bring the project back into focus. All my code has been put under source control (Subversion, if you’re curious), which has saved my ass a few times with coding blunders and has made it super easy to port my work between my laptop and my desktop. There’s also the use of a CSS framework (Blueprint) to reset default browser styles and and help out with layout out the content.

I'm actually *gasp* planning things out!

On the project management side of things, I’ve even started pinning task cards to my itsy-bitsy cork board (ala the agile project management school of thought) and crafting some paper prototypes to help me play with feature and layout work. These are the very places where my previous redesigns have bottlenecked and either slowed down or outright killed work in progress.

C’mon, this is just the same ol’ song and dance, right?

Not a chance, though I wouldn’t doubt the thoughts considering the number of false starts I’ve crowed about in the past. This isn’t one of those “just talk” sessions. The last two months have been like folding the timeline and jumping back to 1997, when I was teaching myself the core skills I’d wind up making my career out of. I’m heading into my 10th year as a professional, and I’ll be damned if I let this place reflect poorly of me any longer.

With no absolute deadline, the goal until now has been to get as much of the “new and improved” into this site as possible. The beast has swelled, but very soon a line in the sand will be drawn and I shall tame said beast into a properly stable release. After that, the plan is to iterate the hell out of it — rolling out little tweaks and features as I create them.

Really, It’d be a shame if I put all that effort and energy into a redesign and had nothing to show for it…again.

Here’s the breakdown: last Wednesday I started working with the fine folks over at OMGPOP, a game company with some stellar multiplayer Flash games and a decent upside ahead of it. Not a bad gig at all, but there is a downside: they can only afford to have me there part-time at the moment.

Yep, two months of searching and that’s the best this ecconomy will offer me. It gets me out of the apartment and off the unemployment doles, but I’d rather be there for 40 hours a week and not 20.

Sadly, life doesn’t always give us what we want, right when we want it. But I’m not complaining here, just explaining. After all, good things come to those who wait, and right now, patience is a virtue I have no choice but to exercise.

Clutch playing at House of Blues in Atlantic City

While I made the drive for the music, I decided to stay and get a sense of things — maybe even try my luck at a game of chance. I wandered through 6 or 7 of the boardwalk casinos, trying to find the least expensive blackjack table I could, but even the $15 tables I saw at Caesars weren’t low enough for me. I’m just now getting some work hours after two months of being on the sidelines (more on that later), so gambling away chunks of my grocery money is hard to justify. Still, just experiencing the sights and sounds of the casinos, the boardwalk, and the surrounding streets was more than enough excitement for me.

It was more of a trek than I usually make for a show, but I had a blast and would certainly do it again. Hell, maybe I’ll even get up the nerve to sit at one of those blackjack tables next time. Of course, the odds of all that happening go up if the right band(s) decide to book some performance dates.

Meanwhile, our hero has:

• Helped install a rooftop TV antenna (without breaking my neck).
• Seen a parade chocked full of Mermaids and muscle cars (in a lovely rain sauce).
• Favored friends and strangers alike with my presence at bar-b-q or two.
• Finally stepped foot on the High Line…and it was good.
• Repeatedly learned that web developers are more in-demand than web designers, and that recruiters can’t tell the two apart. Seriously: READ the resume and not just the damn Dice keywords!

There…I feel a bit better. With this paragraph I hereby proclaim the ends of the first half of 2009. Far more tumultuous than I ever dreamed it would be, but that’s life, right? Anyway, stay tuned for the second half, because I guarantee things will be just as exciting. After all, unemployment can’t last forever, right? ^_^

For once I’m not bemoaning the fact I find it hard to post as prodigiously as I used to, but how with age has come a level of self-censorship my younger self would have laughed at.  Many have always thought it peculiar to write about your inner most thoughts, advertising them to complete strangers.  All the more strange when I think about how much of an introvert I tend to be.

Chances are the idea of it all held a great deal of magic to me, in the fact that I was unique in what I was doing in that point.  An early adopter in this new field, free to do what he wanted — to redefine his poor self image by bearing his soul and becoming enigmatic and mysterious instead of off center and to looked at as a walking oddity of social inadequacy — worthy of psychological study in his own eyes.  But the very act of writing was cathartic.  The more life started to give to me, the more I shared, the more people reacted, and the better I felt about me.

But as the rest of the world work up to the reality of personal publishing that the internet brought, I felt the internal censor that permeated my real conversations begin to creep into my virtual sessions of shouting into the void.  And what’s more, those who came after me found much greater success with it then I could ever have dreamed possible.  No longer was I unique, but I now I wasn’t even as good as what I was doing as I felt I was.

That’s why it’s so much harder to write than it used to be.

There was also more of a willingness to share the large mistakes I made in my life, and peer into the inner darkness of my true self.  Even if you’ve read my words and though I’ve exposed a lot what goes on in my head, trust me — I haven’t even scratched the surface.  Over the last month and a half I found that to be true beyond truth.  Some seriously dark and misguided thoughts ran through my head; sinking me into levels of depression I hadn’t faced in a while.

I know there were ways it showed outwardly, and it spurred on some self-destructive behavior — mostly in my dietary choices and lack of motivation to leave my bed when I didn’t absolutely have to.  Then again, being forced back into the sea of uncertainty about employment will make you think of terrible could be’s and horrible what if’s — given enough time and silence.

All the more reason to now redouble my efforts of seeking catharsis, just like this.

Shortly after six it was out the door and onto the Light Rail to Hoboken Terminal — bike in hand.  The ferry terminal looked closed, so I descended into the PATH station where I found similarly situated citizens.  In fact, there was more people with bikes than without on the platforms, and those numbers only grew as we headed to the World Trade Center station, and exploded exponentially when I reached the intersection of Warren and Church.

Just me and 30,000 friends

This past Sunday was the 31st annual Five Boro Bike Tour, and sick or well, rain or shine, I was there to press my luck — 42 miles on two wheels.  I had never done anything like this before, so just finishing was going to be a big accomplishment.

Just before 8:30, the pack of riders I was in finally started moving — not the first get on the course, I’m sure.  But did I ever try to catch them.  I kept a pretty brisk pace as I raced up 6th Ave. from lower Manhattan to Central Park.  I just can’t properly describe how exhilarating it is to ride unobstructed through those streets!  Even if I had only ridden than leg of the course, I think it would have been worth the effort.  The only real obstacles were the few impatient pedestrians who tried to dart across the course instead of heading to one of the intersections being controlled by the bike wardens or police.

Through, over, past, down, up, and down again

Things slowed down as we entered the bottleneck of Central Park.  Still, it gave me a chance to enjoy the view more.  Strangely enough, while we had control over the majority of the road, the bikes had to give up use of the bike lanes on this day.  The joggers apparently needed somewhere to run without the threat of becoming a speed bump — go figure.

Soon enough there was a steady pace going and the scene of trees was replaced by the stately looking buildings in Harlem.  The first boro crossing of the day was at hand, and I was getting excited.  Up the entrance ramp of the Madison Avenue Bridge we rode, across the Harlem River to the south Bronx, and less than 4 minutes later we were crossing the Third Avenue Bridge and leaving the south Bronx.  It almost feels like cheating to call that a trip into the boogie-down, but if the organizers count it, I guess I can too.

Back in Manhattan, we began the next leg of our trip by heading south on FDR Drive.  I started to see a bit more variety in the types of bikes being used, with recumbent bikes, two person bikes, and even some guy riding a unicycle.  There were also groups of riders with similar helmet adornments:  beer bottles, wine glasses, birds, butterflies, carrots, and some with just handfuls of cable ties arranged into interesting configurations.

Of Queens and bridges, parks and pandemonium

As the Queensboro Bridge appeared on the horizon, the true scale of this event started to dawn on me.  To see a street full of riders was one thing, but to see riders from one end of the bridge deck to the other was somewhat awe inspiring.  Somehow I managed to make the assent up the bridge without having to get off my bike at any point — a feat I would not be able to repeat on many of the other assents on the course.  While all the rain and mist was conspiring to rob us of the truly grand views we could have had, it was still cool to see the 100 year old double cantilever bridge up close and at a leisurely pace.

We descended and turned north as we made our way to Astoria Park and the not-quite halfway point rest stop set up under the RFK, er, Triborough Bridge.  There was free food for the riders in the form of bananas, orange slices, and the like.  I got an additional pick me up with some kisses from my girlfriend Jill and some smiles from my friend Erin, who were both volunteering at the rest area for the afternoon.  I was there just long enough to chow down and then it was back onto the course.

Now the real work begins

As the course snaked its way down along the riverfront towards the Pulaski Bridge and Brooklyn, the rain started to pick up, and the weariness in my muscles started to grow.  Every mile was felt more acutely than the last one, and making it to the end of the course would mean going five miles further on a ride than I ever have before.

Of course, I’ve never been one to do things the easy way.  Part of my pain was due to the fact that I was one of about dozen people who decided wearing jeans on the trip was a good idea.  Jeans and athletics are normal for me.  I’ve worn jeans for roller hockey, touch football, basketball, bike rides; summer or winter, spring or fall.  Of course, I forgot to figure in the fact that wet denim is heavy as all hell and my pants would be acting like a sponge.  My pack was still full, and I was gradually gaining weight with every revolution of the pedals.  Viola!  Instant agony multiplier.

Onward we rode; through Greenpoint and Williamsburg, past the Navy Yard and Brooklyn Bridge Park (both present and future).  The twists and turns in the course were reinvigorated me a bit, as did the near miss I had when someone in front of me had a blowout.  But that all adrenaline drained soon after I turned onto the B.Q.E.

B.Q.E. to Gowanus to Belt Parkway to hell

Leaving downtown Brooklyn behind, we were now biking on expressways all the way to the Verrazano.  You would think that would make it somewhat easier, but this was the point when the rain and wind was actually the hardest all trip  The climb over the Gowanus Canal was more brutal for me than the Queensboro had been, and the whole Gowanus Expressway was elevated above the buildings, giving the elements all the more power to make the riders miserable.

By the time we hit the Belt Parkway, I was damn near delirious.  I kept waiting to see the outline of the Verrazano, but with all the rain and mist, I couldn’t be sure if I even would see it until I was almost on top of it.  I must have walked my bike about a half-dozen times to give my legs somewhat of a rest, and I laughed quite crazily when I finally made out the bottom of the Brooklyn tower of the bridge.

Putting it into perspective

I didn’t even try to peddle my way up to the bridge deck level of the Verrazano — I knew that was a fools errand in the state I was in.  Instead, I took that opportunity to rest and snap some pictures, enjoying a structure I could never see on foot if not for this event.  As I looked down upon the Belt Parkway, I really had a growing sense of accomplishment, knowing I had just survived that crowded, rain soaked mess.

Of course, there was a greater sense of accomplishment when I finally reached that magical equilibrium point on the bridge where it stopped ascending and started descending into Staten Island.  Hooray! — the long, long coast had begun!

There was a festival set up at the foot of the bridge, on the grounds of Fort Worth.  Free massages, music, food…and all I wanted was a quick bite to eat and to head home.  As far as I had come and as much as I had accomplished, I was still far from Weehawken, and the Staten Island Ferry terminal was still three miles away.

In the end, I found that salvation looks very much like a street sign….

NOTE: More pictures from the tour are available on my Flickr page.

The setup

Most of this past week was spent working from the relative comfort of my futon while I hacked, coughed, shivered, and sweated through some kind of bug — no, NOT the swine flu, thank you.  Today was actually the first day I felt decent enough to head into the office.  Lucky me, huh?

As luck would have it, we were slated to have an early morning meeting to plan out the work for the next few weeks.  We all assembled in the conference room, with large sheets of paper carefully taped to the walls, ready to capture all the scrawls and scratches recapping what we did and planning out what were were about to do.

Then our CEO Steve started speaking, and I knew it wasn’t quite going to be run-of-the mill Friday.

The knockdown

I didn’t have to hear too many words to know this wasn’t going to be good.  When you start hearing “burn rate” and “reduce” in close proximity and delivered with a melancholy tone, you know the axe is going to be falling.  Even though Weplay is gaining a ton of new users (the 150,000 mark was just recently crossed), the advertising market just sucks right now, and things weren’t good enough to keep the staff at its current levels and somehow make it through the year.

We all returned to our desks and waited for our one on one conversations to tell us if we were gone or not.  I was under no delusions:  a contract worker only there for a few months had zero chance of ending up on the right side of the axe blade.  I started cleaning up my desk and the data on my laptop.

The body count was at least 5, counting myself.  Could have been more, but once your number is called, you really don’t hang around too long after that.

The dust off

So just a few hours after leaving my apartment, there I was staring back at the mess I call home.  I laid down for a little while, planning on getting some extra sleep.  But my cold also robbed me of some much needed prep time for the TD Bank Five Boro Bike Tour this Sunday, and Jill did remind me that exercise is helpful in recovering from sickness.  To bury my head in sleep or go out and face the day — what to choose?

I packed my laptop, grabbed my mountain bike, and took a short ride to a riverfront park where I finished my last invoice for Weplay.

Strange enough, this happens to be my sister’s birthday.  It also happens to be the second time I’ve become unemployed on this day.  Yeah…happy birthday, Shannon!

The summary

So a little more than three months have passed and I’m more or less in the same situation I was in before.  Well, at least this time around I don’t have to rebuild my portfolio from scratch.

I wish the remaining Weplay staff all the best.  It’s a great site with a great bunch of people backing it.  As for yours truly, I’ll be back in the saddle before you know it.  In the meantime, if anyone has any web or graphic design work they need done, I’m all ears.

Just sayin’.

Cool door, huh?  Well, behind it much time and energy has been spent, cranking out work for Weplay.  Work which has been actually getting in the hands of users, too (a small example).  I love that fact.  Too many times in my career I’ve done my best work only to watch it be doomed to the portfolio ghetto; only to be see the light of day on job interviews and those quiet nights when I want to reminisce and die a little inside.

Just sayin’.

I’m also happy to be working behind that door at a pretty exciting time in the relatively short history of the company.  There’s really an exciting air to the place.  The team has built a rather solid base, and has managed to organically grow the traffic and membership numbers, represented with a healthy upward arc.  And this past Tuesday the first of many publicity events took place with Derek Jeter introducing us to the nation on Good Morning America.  I have to say, that was pretty cool.

Just sayin’.

Well, there’s piles of paperwork to sort and receipts to organize.  Taxes to be paid and planning to be done.  Sleep to be missed and so on and so forth.

Not saying goodnight…just sayin’.

Jill and I at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens last spring.

To my ever-loving girlfriend:

You deemed me “wickedly adorable”, and managed to deal with my special brand of insanity.  You managed to teach me how to smile, and gave me many chances to practice.  You might never realize just how much I grew as a person, all because you came into my life.

There were many ups and downs through the year just past, and there’s certain to be more in the years ahead.  But you managed to keep me steadfast and level headed — a level of comfort I have been missing for quite some time.  I think with you at my side, I might just be able to make it through whatever life throws at me.

Here’s to the best thing to happen to me in a long, long time.

Happy first anniversary, Jill.  I love you.

My relatively new Samsung HDTV and Playstation 3 has received some use, though certainly not to their full potential.  While I didn’t go crazy and spend way outside my budget for either piece, I sure wasn’t getting my money’s worth out of them.  Add to that the stacks of DVDs that I still haven’t watched years after getting them — taking up valuable real estate in my cluttered little apartment — and I started to get downright depressed with the situation.

You already know the solution to this problem

While watching a DVD has historically been a once in a blue moon kind of activity, you’ll find my TiVo constantly cleaned out of shows.  When everything is just a few clicks away on the remote, it’s quite easy to get sucked into watching more and more.  For a long time I’ve toyed with the idea of ripping all my DVDs onto my computer, which would not only give me easier access to the videos themselves, but would allow me to pack up the discs and shove them in the closet, right next to my CDs.

In fact, those CDs are the best example of what’s in store for this project.  Back at the beginning of the decade I was dealing with over 500 CDs.  No place to put them and I would only listen to a handful at a time.  When I started ripping my CDs onto my computer, how I dealt with music completely changed.  It honestly improved my quality of life.

With the TV, the PS3, and my iMac awash with ample storage space, I finally have the parts to try the same thing with my video collection.

Notes from the lab

While I have the hardware to try, it wasn’t until very recently that all the software needed to pull this off decided to straighten up and fly right.

Just like when I made the move from CDs to MP3s, I had to do a lot of experimenting to see what worked and what didn’t.  I tried a multitude of ripping programs, tweaking settings all the while.  In the end, I chose to go with two programs:  Roxio Toast and Handbrake.

Why two?  While Roxio is the easier one to work with, it’s set to recognize the CSS encryption the studios put on some of their discs, and won’t rip them.  Considering I paid about $20 a pop for each of those discs, that really pisses me off.  Thanks, Hollywood!  I feel so loved right now.

That’s where Handbrake comes in.  Couple it with VLC on your Mac and those CSS encrypted discs become an open book.  Its almost enough to make me choose Handbrake outright.  But while the program gives you many more options — almost too many — its user interface leaves a lot to be desired.

Considering how many discs I’m going to have to go through and how long each of them is going to take to rip, a simplified interface is key — if for no other reason than my personal sanity.

A shaky bridge gets solidified

Once you have the videos, you still need to get them from one place to another.  On the Mac to PS3 front,  this is handled by Nullriver’s MediaLink: a preference panel software that bridges the gap and exposes your computer’s file system to the PS3.

But while things worked fine with videos and podcasts I downloaded, it seemed like nothing that I ripped myself would play.  At most the video would play for a minute or two before an error screen would rear its ugly head.  I kept tweaking settings and re-ripping movies, but nothing I did seemed to make things any better

Then the MediaLink’s 1.7 update showed up.  Suddenly everything that the PS3 could play, did.  No network issues.  Everything was solid as granite.  That was my green light.

The saving graces and looking ahead

While this is no small task, it’s certainly not as large as my CD project — 500 discs versus 160, at most.  I’ll also be aided by the fact that a recently purchased MacBook has given me a second machine with enough horsepower to rip discs, and I can it with me to work so I can take care of some there.  This will speed things up considerably.

And once I’m done with all of that, I have a stack of old VHS tapes I’d like to try and import.  Lets just say the research has already begun on that front.

Viva la digital!