Monday report
Dec. 9th, 2003 01:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterWell, today was interesting, in a bit of the Chinese sense. I'm wanting to crawl into bed now, so I'll try to keep this brief. Work was busy busy busy, with a lot of long calls, obscure issues, and people who didn't speak good English...sometimes two of three of the above. Midway through it, my friend who was sending me The Two Towers for Christmas checked the status of the order and found out that it had been shipped by UPS, who had subsequently tried to deliver it to me, and hadn't been able to (since I was at work). On lunchbreak, I called them, then called my brother Aaron, to see if Aaron could pick it up for me (since I was afraid the UPS center would close before I was off work). And then, due to the time I spent doing that, had time to get my lunch (at Subway) but not to eat it. I snacked instead, figuring I could eat it on my next break or after work.
About 6:45, the UPS folks called me back to let me know they were holding my package, and would be there for me to go get it until 8:00. I called my brother to let him know; he was babysitting a neighbor's kids and wouldn't be able to get it right away. Then I pestered my supervisor for undertime, so I could go home a little early and snag it myself. He came through, and at 7:08 (actually, at 7, but I got a complex call right before he told me I was in) I got to head out. I'd gotten directions to the vicinity of the place from my web-enabled cellphone, but still had a little trouble finding it. In the end, I had to ask a driver sitting in the cab of a UPS big rig truck for directions the rest of the way there. (As I often do when I encounter a UPS driver, I asked him if he knew my Dad's friend, Lamont Nelson, who was a UPS driver and fellow clock collector himself. The fellow said he did know him, that he was a nice guy, and he'd retired last year. I often get a response like that when I ask about the guy...just goes to show that if you are a nice guy, word gets around, I guess.) I found that not only did I have the Amazon package, I had another package, too—a Christmas present for my niece. I hastened home with them...
...to find another package awaiting in my mailbox. This one was an envelope full of DVDs, and it sure startled me—because three of those DVDs had been supposed to be sent to Florida (to my friend who sent me the LotR DVD, in fact), and one to New Hampshire! Someone at the DVD vendor apparently didn't bother to make sure the shipping and billing addresses were different. I sent in a complaint email, and we'll see what comes of it. Meanwhile, I need to be up and gone a little early tomorrow so's I can get one of the DVDs mailed out. (The other three, I'm going to keep until a couple more DVDs arrive—more expensive versions of one of the discs in the Florida consortment. That way I can substitute a more expensive disc for the cheaper disc, and give the cheaper one as a gift to someone who won't care as much about the more expensive features. So, the misdelivery wasn't entirely a bad thing...)
Subsequently, watching the LotR: TTT DVD, I played around a little with methods of remote control, so that I could be sitting on my sofa or in a chair and still be able to control the DVD player. One method that I had considered was to use my Wallstreet Powerbook to run a VNC session so that I could control the DVD through a little window onto my own desktop from the laptop. It didn't work out too well...it caused the DVD picture to freeze while the audio continued on. So eventually I bit the bullet and dug out my old RealMagic Remote Control and hooked it to my serial port...and after a bit of researching around and fiddling and discovering that the serial ports on the back of my computer were actually cross-labelled (com 1 was labelled com 2 and vice versa) and finding I needed to disable the mouse driver in Device Manager, I managed to get the remote to work with the trial version of Remote Selector.
Remote Selector is an amazing program. I registered the first version of it, and the second version is even better, so I'll probably end up registering it, too. It's probably the best region-hacking software I've yet seen for Windows computers, and the fact that it lets you program a remote control device to work with a supported player is just gravy. It has a smooth, no-nonsense interface, and fades nicely into the background so that you hardly even notice it's there...you just notice that you can play DVDs without macrovision and without user prohibitions (like minutes-long unskippable FBI warnings or studio logos). I like it enough that I'm going to go ahead and pay money for it, and then remove and discard the registered version of DVD Region-Free that I got off of BitTorrent and didn't have to pay for. It's just that good; if you want to play multiregional DVDs on, and use a remote control in, Windows, it's the must-have utility software to get.
I guess the entry wasn't that short after all. Oh well.
About 6:45, the UPS folks called me back to let me know they were holding my package, and would be there for me to go get it until 8:00. I called my brother to let him know; he was babysitting a neighbor's kids and wouldn't be able to get it right away. Then I pestered my supervisor for undertime, so I could go home a little early and snag it myself. He came through, and at 7:08 (actually, at 7, but I got a complex call right before he told me I was in) I got to head out. I'd gotten directions to the vicinity of the place from my web-enabled cellphone, but still had a little trouble finding it. In the end, I had to ask a driver sitting in the cab of a UPS big rig truck for directions the rest of the way there. (As I often do when I encounter a UPS driver, I asked him if he knew my Dad's friend, Lamont Nelson, who was a UPS driver and fellow clock collector himself. The fellow said he did know him, that he was a nice guy, and he'd retired last year. I often get a response like that when I ask about the guy...just goes to show that if you are a nice guy, word gets around, I guess.) I found that not only did I have the Amazon package, I had another package, too—a Christmas present for my niece. I hastened home with them...
...to find another package awaiting in my mailbox. This one was an envelope full of DVDs, and it sure startled me—because three of those DVDs had been supposed to be sent to Florida (to my friend who sent me the LotR DVD, in fact), and one to New Hampshire! Someone at the DVD vendor apparently didn't bother to make sure the shipping and billing addresses were different. I sent in a complaint email, and we'll see what comes of it. Meanwhile, I need to be up and gone a little early tomorrow so's I can get one of the DVDs mailed out. (The other three, I'm going to keep until a couple more DVDs arrive—more expensive versions of one of the discs in the Florida consortment. That way I can substitute a more expensive disc for the cheaper disc, and give the cheaper one as a gift to someone who won't care as much about the more expensive features. So, the misdelivery wasn't entirely a bad thing...)
Subsequently, watching the LotR: TTT DVD, I played around a little with methods of remote control, so that I could be sitting on my sofa or in a chair and still be able to control the DVD player. One method that I had considered was to use my Wallstreet Powerbook to run a VNC session so that I could control the DVD through a little window onto my own desktop from the laptop. It didn't work out too well...it caused the DVD picture to freeze while the audio continued on. So eventually I bit the bullet and dug out my old RealMagic Remote Control and hooked it to my serial port...and after a bit of researching around and fiddling and discovering that the serial ports on the back of my computer were actually cross-labelled (com 1 was labelled com 2 and vice versa) and finding I needed to disable the mouse driver in Device Manager, I managed to get the remote to work with the trial version of Remote Selector.
Remote Selector is an amazing program. I registered the first version of it, and the second version is even better, so I'll probably end up registering it, too. It's probably the best region-hacking software I've yet seen for Windows computers, and the fact that it lets you program a remote control device to work with a supported player is just gravy. It has a smooth, no-nonsense interface, and fades nicely into the background so that you hardly even notice it's there...you just notice that you can play DVDs without macrovision and without user prohibitions (like minutes-long unskippable FBI warnings or studio logos). I like it enough that I'm going to go ahead and pay money for it, and then remove and discard the registered version of DVD Region-Free that I got off of BitTorrent and didn't have to pay for. It's just that good; if you want to play multiregional DVDs on, and use a remote control in, Windows, it's the must-have utility software to get.
I guess the entry wasn't that short after all. Oh well.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-09 05:14 am (UTC)Yup, he's a nice guy. It would always confused me at first, because it seems to me that we had two guys with the last name of Nelson.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-09 07:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-12-09 07:54 am (UTC)