Technophobia Again!

Quotation of the day: John Lennon – This is for love i'm doing this. And Art.

Hi, everyone.

My ongoing love / hate affair with technology continues. That new DVD player i bought a few weeks ago has been giving me grief.

Jen at the pub lent me her copy of the DVD of the first season of "The Big Bang Theory" – a series she loves but which i'd never seen. The first time i tried to watch it, the volume kept going from loud to soft to muted altogether. I just figured a plug had come loose somewhere, but had no time to play with it, and watched the the first couple of episodes of the series on my computer instead (well, i just now finished watching the first half and it definitely has its laugh-out-loud moments!), resolving to deal with the problem the next day.

 

The next evening, i tried to watch an episode of "The Sweeney" (season 2) and it played back with no trouble, but the following evening i decided to press my luck and watch another episode of "The Sweeney" and ... i had the same volume problem -- which convinced me that there was a plug that i hadn't seated properly or had put in the wrong jack (and there are a lot of jacks back there!)

Then, i tried to watch the recent (2010) Roman Polanski film "The Ghost Writer," and all i could get was a loud HUMMMMMM!  Grr, grr, i said to myself.  I'm not a technician, why is nothing ever plug-and-play compliant?!?  So i played with the cords a bit (a bit more, that is), unplugged one and eureka! the sound was perfect and remained so throughout this really rather excellent film.

Stuff And Nonsense

Quotation of the day -- Robert Louis Stevenson: That house of voluntary bondage ... with its inscrutable recluse.

And so, last week, i bought a new DVD player. The old one died on me. It's a Toshiba SD7300 (oh, look, there's a picture of it)

and it has 1080p Upconversion and REGZA-LINK ® (HDMI CEC) , which would probably impress me more if i knew what they hell they were.

It took me five days (five days!) to figure out how to get it to play DVDs in colour. (It played DVDs from day one, but only in black and white.) Well, i have an older television, which means i have to run an RF modulator betwixt the TV and the DVD player, which means six different plugs, which means, er i don't remember the law of permutations but it means loads of possibilities! But i got it sorted eventually, clever clogs that i am. And the first (and so far only) film i watched?

Enjoyable.

So, finally, it's a day off for me here at Spriggs Towers. I spent the morning doing, or trying to anyway, some serious housework, a task made immeasurably more difficult by the fact that my little Cate insisted on helping (until she became bored and went to sleep underneath the futon).  Now i'm just taking a wee break, having a beer, listening to the new Colin James "best of" CD and thinking about having lunch before returning to the domestic slog.

Later, brothers & sisters....