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Weather, DVD player giving up the ghost?
Dec. 30th, 2007 01:51 pmHi all,
Thursday woke up to an inch or two of new snow, but the temp got so warm that it had mostly melted by early afternoon.
Friday it snowed, and snowed hard most of the day. By Saturday morning, we had a good four to six inches of snow. Saturday, I wanted to update this blog but spent the ***entire day*** trying to get an update of McAfee anti-virus to install on my system. It was AWFUL! First, I tried to do a simple update -- but I was informed my product was "no longer available" and I'd have to buy a different product. McAfee then tried to sell me two different products that were (a) much more expensive and (b) full of "useful features" I definately did NOT want (like "site monitoring" -- which is a PC way of saying "censorship" -- I'm an adult, dammit, and I'm going to read fanfic if I want to. And I don't need no corporation telling me what I can and can't read, or telling me fanfic net is a porn site or whatever idiotic thing they might do. But I scanned thru' and found a basic anti-virus/firewall -- essentially the same product I bought last year, and purchased that. But, of course, you can't get a CD mailed to you anymore (tho' they charged me $12.00 for a "recovery CD") you have to download the software. Well, I went thru' the hoops, put in my debit/credit card info, and started the download. TWO HOURS later, it had finally downloaded, started installing, and then forced me to uninstall SpyBot Search and Destroy (my favorite spyware catcher). It took another half hour to install and set-up the anti-virus (and it still tried to install "site advisor", or rather "cite censor", which I unchecked). Finally, I turned off the PC completely, went to church, dinner, and running of errands, got home, turned the computer on again, and ran a FULL scan (which took about two hours). Fortunately, that worked. So now, all I need to do is download a new version of Spybot and everything should be good. (Well, that and defrag my hard drive, even if it takes hours).
Onto happier subjects. I watched *Stardust* last night and it was just as enjoyable and fun a movie as I thought it was last summer when I first saw it. The DVD tho' was having trouble. It was breaking up during the previews at the beginning of the DVD. I took the dvd out, put it in again, and when I hit "play" it skipped ahead and started the actual movie -- which played fine. But I started watching the "making of" featurette, and halfway thru' it just stopped playing-- the picture froze. I stopped the DVD, and since it was late, went to bed.
This morning, tried the DVD again, and same skipping. Ran a "dishwasher" DVD, tried again, same problem. Pulled out a different DVD -- "The Professionals" Season 4 Disc 2 and watched "Discovered in a Graveyard" and it played perfectly -- no groans from the DVD player, no other sounds, no break-up, no skipping.
So at this point -- I'm not sure if it's the DVD player, since I'm having trouble with DW S2 and Stardust, and the final disc of "Jeeves and Wooster"; or if, somehow, by bad luck, I got a bunch of bad DVDs.
OR, if somehow, they've changed the encoding again on R1 NTSC DVDs and my multi-region/multi-system DVD player can't handle the new encoding. It's research time, I suppose. Not to mention I may have to hook-up my old DVD player and try the new DVDs on it to see if they play.
In a word-- AAAAARRRRGHHH! I really can't afford to buy a new DVD player right now. But with a couple of hundred of DVDs in my collection (I added up all the DVDs, including the multi-disc sets and I actually have, in terms of actual, individual, DVDs, over a 1000), I can't really afford to be without a player. And I can't buy a cheap one, because I have like 15-20 R2 PAL DVDs, which I actually watch, so I'm not going to buy something that won't play the R2 PAL DVDs.
G0shawk asked what type of Ipod I got. It's an 8-gig Nano, greenish-blue color. My first choice would have been either pink (traditional or hot pink) or silver. But they were sold out of those colors at Target, so it was black or the blueish green. I went with blueish green. And I do love it, even though getting it set-up was a headache. But, I love having something I can use to listen to podcasts (getting caught up --yea!) or to listen to music at work. The little earphones that go in your ears, tho', I find kinda' painful (I have small ears), so I think I'm going to have to go earphone shopping. I saw some gelatin ones at Barnes and Noble (of all places!) that I might get -- or something that goes over the ears, rather than in them.
That's all for now!
--Olivia
Thursday woke up to an inch or two of new snow, but the temp got so warm that it had mostly melted by early afternoon.
Friday it snowed, and snowed hard most of the day. By Saturday morning, we had a good four to six inches of snow. Saturday, I wanted to update this blog but spent the ***entire day*** trying to get an update of McAfee anti-virus to install on my system. It was AWFUL! First, I tried to do a simple update -- but I was informed my product was "no longer available" and I'd have to buy a different product. McAfee then tried to sell me two different products that were (a) much more expensive and (b) full of "useful features" I definately did NOT want (like "site monitoring" -- which is a PC way of saying "censorship" -- I'm an adult, dammit, and I'm going to read fanfic if I want to. And I don't need no corporation telling me what I can and can't read, or telling me fanfic net is a porn site or whatever idiotic thing they might do. But I scanned thru' and found a basic anti-virus/firewall -- essentially the same product I bought last year, and purchased that. But, of course, you can't get a CD mailed to you anymore (tho' they charged me $12.00 for a "recovery CD") you have to download the software. Well, I went thru' the hoops, put in my debit/credit card info, and started the download. TWO HOURS later, it had finally downloaded, started installing, and then forced me to uninstall SpyBot Search and Destroy (my favorite spyware catcher). It took another half hour to install and set-up the anti-virus (and it still tried to install "site advisor", or rather "cite censor", which I unchecked). Finally, I turned off the PC completely, went to church, dinner, and running of errands, got home, turned the computer on again, and ran a FULL scan (which took about two hours). Fortunately, that worked. So now, all I need to do is download a new version of Spybot and everything should be good. (Well, that and defrag my hard drive, even if it takes hours).
Onto happier subjects. I watched *Stardust* last night and it was just as enjoyable and fun a movie as I thought it was last summer when I first saw it. The DVD tho' was having trouble. It was breaking up during the previews at the beginning of the DVD. I took the dvd out, put it in again, and when I hit "play" it skipped ahead and started the actual movie -- which played fine. But I started watching the "making of" featurette, and halfway thru' it just stopped playing-- the picture froze. I stopped the DVD, and since it was late, went to bed.
This morning, tried the DVD again, and same skipping. Ran a "dishwasher" DVD, tried again, same problem. Pulled out a different DVD -- "The Professionals" Season 4 Disc 2 and watched "Discovered in a Graveyard" and it played perfectly -- no groans from the DVD player, no other sounds, no break-up, no skipping.
So at this point -- I'm not sure if it's the DVD player, since I'm having trouble with DW S2 and Stardust, and the final disc of "Jeeves and Wooster"; or if, somehow, by bad luck, I got a bunch of bad DVDs.
OR, if somehow, they've changed the encoding again on R1 NTSC DVDs and my multi-region/multi-system DVD player can't handle the new encoding. It's research time, I suppose. Not to mention I may have to hook-up my old DVD player and try the new DVDs on it to see if they play.
In a word-- AAAAARRRRGHHH! I really can't afford to buy a new DVD player right now. But with a couple of hundred of DVDs in my collection (I added up all the DVDs, including the multi-disc sets and I actually have, in terms of actual, individual, DVDs, over a 1000), I can't really afford to be without a player. And I can't buy a cheap one, because I have like 15-20 R2 PAL DVDs, which I actually watch, so I'm not going to buy something that won't play the R2 PAL DVDs.
G0shawk asked what type of Ipod I got. It's an 8-gig Nano, greenish-blue color. My first choice would have been either pink (traditional or hot pink) or silver. But they were sold out of those colors at Target, so it was black or the blueish green. I went with blueish green. And I do love it, even though getting it set-up was a headache. But, I love having something I can use to listen to podcasts (getting caught up --yea!) or to listen to music at work. The little earphones that go in your ears, tho', I find kinda' painful (I have small ears), so I think I'm going to have to go earphone shopping. I saw some gelatin ones at Barnes and Noble (of all places!) that I might get -- or something that goes over the ears, rather than in them.
That's all for now!
--Olivia
