#5 - Finish reading Stephen King's Dark Tower series

Free at last!  As of about 7:00PM yesterday, Monday, April 25, I can say that I have completed Stephen King's Dark Tower septology (imagine taking a trilogy and beating yourself over the head with an additional  four volumes.)  That's right, Volume VII - The Dark Tower, the sequel to the sequel to the sequel to the sequel to the sequel to the sequel of Dark Tower Volume I - The Gunslinger.

I had read the first four volumes way back around the dawn of time, Volume IV probably sometime not too long after it was published in 1997.  After that I pretty much forgot about the series, not really even tracking whether the author had written any other books in the series.

I reintroduced myself to the series when Jake was in Loma Linda, having downloaded an audiobook of The Gunslinger to have something to listen to during those long nights in the hospital.  I never finished it in the hospital because, 1) it was impossible to focus on it - I kept falling asleep and having to rewind my iPod to find where last I was awake - and, 2) because I had forgotten that there is a character of a young kid named Jake who dies (a couple times) in the book.

Anyway, I eventually started listening to the book on some road trip or other and got back into the thing.  I had forgotten nearly everything, so I got the next two installments on audiobook and eventually re-read the paperback edition I had of Volume IV - Wizard and Glass.  Somewhere along the line I got Nick interested in it and ended up buying him the remaining volumes for his birthday.

Parts of the first four volumes were excellent, although when I reached the end of Volume IV this time around I recalled one of the reasons I had sort of dropped the series the first time; it started to get fairly stupid right toward the end.

Anyway, forging ahead, the excellent parts became fewer and farther between.  It was becoming excruciating, in fact.  Saner people asked questions like, "If you're not enjoying it why don't you stop reading?"  C'mon, by the time I reached Volume VII I had invested in probably about four thousand three hundred pages, plus change.  Can you imagine how many miles my lips moved during that amount of reading?  At this point I had to suffer through.

So, I used parts of the 12-hour drive home from Arcata to finish up the final hundred pages or so.

I'm glad I finished it because now that I know how it ends I can definitely say that is was....LONG.

Oh well, it is behind me now and I thank God.

Postscript: In pasting the above link to the official Dark Tower web site I happened upon a frightening piece of news; The Dark Tower - The Movie!  Then OMG!  In 2012 he's COMING OUT WITH A VOLUME VIII!!!!!  Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!

#56 - Install an IR remote repeater

OK, this one is pretty boring, unless you are a woman (Denise) who wants her husband (me) to clean up all the A/V remote controls and what not that are piled on the coffee table.

As some may know, we somewhat recently installed new cabinets in our family room and the cable box, Xbox 360, etc. are now all housed inside the cabinets.  I have remote controls for the TV, cable box, sound system and Xbox and need at least three of the four for any given activity.  (Well, that's not entirely true - I only need one remote if I want to listen to my iPod through the Yamaha sound bar.)

Anyway, all of the remotes use infrared, which does not work through a closed cabinet door.  So in addition to the clutter of the remotes all over the room I add the clutter of the open cabinets anytime we're watching TV.

So, this week I bought a Logitech Harmony 700 universal remote control along with a Harmony IR Extender System, basically a set of doohickies with an IR receiver that you mount outside the cabinet and some IR transmitters that you mount inside the cabinet with the AV equipment.  The receiver catches the IR commands from the remote control and relays them to the emitters inside the cabinet and, voila, the equipment responds to your remote's plaintive infrared cries.

The universal remote controls all the devices, automagically selecting the right combination of features for any requested activity.

Want to watch TV?  Push the "Watch TV" button and the remote turns on the TV, selects the HDMI input, turns on the cable box and turns on the sound system.

Switch to a movie?  Push "Watch a Movie" and it turns off the cable box, turns on the Xbox, selects the correct input on the TV and now you're ready to stream Netflix.

An added benefit of the new remote control is that it eliminates use of the game controller when streaming movies with the Xbox.  I felt like a moron controlling movies with the joysticks and triggers and miscellaneous buttons on the controller.  Now I can watch movies with the standard tool of the couch potato trade.