On a temporary hiatus while I get sh-t done.
October 2010
9 posts
The trials and tribulations of DVD watching
So my kids have some friends over tonight, and my wife thought it would be nice for them to be able to watch a DVD. That way they could be entertained, she could kick back and read a book, and I could get some work done. Simple, right?
Oh, heck no.
Here’s what was required before the kiddies could watch the movie:
- Turn on the TV
- Cycle through seven inputs, three times, trying to figure out which input is the DVD
- Insert the DVD, after which it appeared to lock up the DVD player
- Press Eject and wait at least 30 seconds until DVD player spit out the disc
- Clean the (rental) disc on my t-shirt and press down on the RFID ring around the center (it’s rented from an automated machine) and reinsert
- Turn up volume using remote, realize it’s TV volume instead of DVD player (which has an integrated amplifier) volume
- Find remote to the DVD player
- Send one of the kids off on a four-minute quest for two AA batteries for the remote, since they swiped the original batteries weeks ago
- Install batteries in the DVD remote
- Eject the disc and clean it again, this time with more attention, come to find out it wasn’t being read by the DVD player due to a minute speck of dust
- Reinsert the disc and fast-forward through the previews
- Wait for the FBI warning
- Press play on the main menu, and go downstairs
- Go back upstairs because kids say the “volume isn’t working”
- Figure out that it’s due to the DVD player defaulting to 5-channel, even though I only have two speakers attached and there’s no middle channel for spoken audio
- Cycle through Spanish and French to get to English 2-channel
- Go back downstairs
- Go back upstairs because kids say the “volume isn’t working again”; interrogate to see which buttons they mashed on the remote, they swear the only thing they did was to skip to the next chapter
- After much poking of buttons, figure out that the English 2-channel from before was a fluke, and it will only do English 5-channel now, so no spoken audio
- Poke around in the closet, under the TV, and in several cardboard boxes looking for another speaker I can plug in as the center channel
- Realize that I can hack it by plugging the left speaker into the center channel jack, as long as I give it a bit of a shove
- Try to check and see if the center audio is coming out correctly, but the movie dialog now incorporates someone speaking French - with subtitles - so I’m not sure if it’s now on French audio with subtitles, or just the movie
- Stand there and wait a good 90 seconds for the guy to say, in French, “Let’s speak English please”, and then verify that English is truly issuing forth from the left-cum-center speaker
- Go down stairs and sit in front of my Keynote document
- Write this, and post.
Someone needs to reinvent the home entertainment industry, stat.
Mobile creation, rather than consumption
Interesting - with all of this focus on how the iPad (and mobile in general) is supposedly good only for consumption, and not for content creation, I’m strangely having the opposite experience. With my new Motorola Charm, I’m finding that I am creating a lot more content (for example, this) on my mobile. However, due to the small display, I’m doing most of my content consumption on the laptop these days. Interesting, indeed.
Microsoft Word and page numbering
Really, I’m not sitting here looking for things to grouse about in the latest version of Microsoft Word for the Mac. No, rather, they are just coming at me, in a fast and furious stream that has shifted from minor annoyance to an awestruck sense of wonder.
The latest? Just printed out a five page document, and there in the footer of each page, it says very clearly:
Page 1 of 1
Page 2 of 2
Page 3 of 3
Page 4 of 4
Page 5 of 5
“Ah-ha!”, I think, “I just screwed up the fields in the footer. I just need to go in and replace the second one with the total number of pages rather than the current page number.”
So I go in and double-click on the footer, and like magic, it suddenly says:
Page 3 of 5
Just like that, it updates itself, smugly laughing at my recent waste of toner, and just crying out for me to write this post.
