Month: April 2004

I finished reading Elizabeth Peter’s Lord of the Silent. I really like how she’s altered the relationship between Ramses and Ameila to be more open and more like they’re equals rather than just mother and child; however the more I see Sethos in his new relationship to the Emersons, the less I like it. It just feels a bit cheesy and make Sethos less of an interesting character. Also, while I had fun reading this book; it’s definately not one of her better works. The plot felt fairly contrived, rather than flowing smoothly like most of her earlier books did. Still, overall it was a fun read; so I’ll give it 3.75 points out of 5.

Next up, I’m reading Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century. I was in B&N the other night browsing their Sci/Fi-Fantasy selections, saying to myself that it was all schlock, when I stopped by the Orson Scott Card shelf to see if his latest Alvin the Maker book was in paperback yet (if it was, it wasn’t on the shelf) and noticed this Masterpieces book. When I saw that Mr. Card was the editor; it immediately peeked my interest as I’ve enjoyed his own work for many years now and I was curious to see who he’d pick for a collection titled Masterpieces. Then I looked over the cover and saw the top 6 names that had been choosen: Asimov, Clarke, Gibson, Heinlein, Le Guin and Pohl. All authors I’ve read and enjoyed, so I knew I’d end up buying the boo (though I made Ariesna wait a bit for me to read the first story in the book. Not very nice of me I suppose, but she’d gone wondering off looking at all the translated manga first; so I figured turn about is fair play. 🙂

Sidenote: While I was double-checking that I’d gotten the link to Mr. Card’s site correct; I noticed that apparently an Ender’s Game movie is in production! Hopefully, Hollywood won’t totally destroy it. For more details, go here.

As usual, I stayed up later than I really should have last night and it was making it hard to concentrate on the defects I’ve been testing this morning. I checked my IM list and all my break-buddies* are out of the office today. I said to hell heck with this and trotted over to the Terrapin. I knew they’d been doing good business but usually my timing it better and all the customers already have their coffee and are sitting down drinking it, rather than standing 10 deep in line waiting to get served. I finally get up the counter and order my regular, the Grand Canyon (2 shots of espresso, steamed milk, a dash of chocolate syrup and a a dash of mango syrup). I had to wait a few minutes to get my drink and as I’m standing there; I can feel myself relax as I’m inhaling that wonderful fragerence of fresh coffee. Ahhhh, life (with caffeine) is good. 🙂

After a few minutes, –mostly spent avoiding the 3 year old running around playing with a straw while her mom was yakking away on the phone– my Grand Canyon was ready and I went back to work. At first I was slowly sipping the coffee, trying to make it last, but before I knew it I was taking full swallows and now I’m reduced to licking the remains out of the cup. *sigh*

Oh well, at least I no longer feel like I’m going to fall asleep over my keyboard and should be able to get some real work done. Speaking of which, it’s time I got back to it.

* Break-Buddy -ies: (noun) A co-worker who you are willing to spend time talking to or just hanging around with during your coffee and/or smoke breaks.

Which gives you a better buzz of energy, caffeine or sugar?

Sugar will quickly give me a burst of energy; but when it’s over, I usually end up feeling totally drained. Caffeine takes longer to give me any energy but the extra energy lasts longer and I don’t crash as hard once the caffeine has worn off. So it seems like a combination of the two would be best, but if I drink say a can of Pepsi; the sugar far outweighs the caffeine and that gives me a quicker harder burst of energy with a corresponding harder crash once the sugar’s burned off.

I recently found out from some friends of mine that our local Target was selling a $50 Philips DVD player that has an extremely simple hack you can use to change the region of the player (more on that later). As an added bonus, this player has component video. I figured at that price; I just had to check it out, so last night I headed over to Target and found the player hidden in the back corner of their “electronics” section. The shelf model was a decent, blue color but all 4 of the remaining boxed versions were a nasty neon-orange color. I also found that Target was selling them for $59.48 and oddly enough; the boxes weren’t sealed. In fact, while I was standing around there debating whether or not to actually buy the thing, I decided to open one of the boxes up and look through it. The player and all of it’s accessories were wrapped up in plastic bags and shut inside of a clear, plastic shell. I looked over the owner’s manual and at the hookups on the back of the player, confirming that this cheap, little player actually had component video. It did, so I bought the unit and a generic component video cable. I bought this generic cable, as the player only comes with an RCA audio/video cable and I opted not to spend the money on a better cable because I doubt the player will put out sufficiently good video signal to make it worth investing in a pricier cable.

$59.48 | Philips DVP320F DVD Player
$09.99 | Generic Component Video Cable
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$69.47 | SubTotal
$03.48 | IA Sales Tax
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$72.95 | Total Cost

When I got home; I immediately started hooking the player up to the rest of my A/V gear. I was expecting this to be the most painful part of the whole deal, but the component video cable let me plug the player directly into the empty plugs on the back of my TV (my other DVD player only has S-Video out) and there was an empty set of audio inputs on the my amplifier/stero unit. Plus there was still 1 free power outlet on the surge protector! 🙂

There’s a couple of things I should mention at this point:

  • This is a cheap player and some of those cost savings really show. One in particular is the back panel of the player where all the hookups are; this panel is a thin sheet of plastic and I could feel it flexing like it was going to break as I attached the power cord.
  • The remote is only slightly larger than a credit card and thinner than a CD jewel case; but don’t let the small size fool you, they packed a lot of buttons on to this little remote. This is both good and bad. Good in that the remote has lots of features; bad in that to do so all the buttons are equally tiny. Some additional notes about the remote:
  • The remote is made of a cheap plastic and feels like you could crush it with hardly a thought.
  • The remote is powered by a flat battery (like those used in watches) and that in and of itself isn’t a bad thing but opening the battery compartment reveals that the battery is held in place by a couple of plastic tongs that are part of the cover to the battery compartment. A much better solution would have been to have the batter compartment cover a seperate piece altogether that screws into place, alas Philips didn’t go that route on this player.

After getting everything hooked up; I immediately tested out the region hack that had been mentioned to me. This hack allows you to set your player to whatever region you desire and you can accomplish this by:

  1. Turn the player on.
  2. Open the disc tray, but do not insert a disc.
  3. Press 999 on the remote.
  4. Press the number of the region you want the player to use (e.g. 0 for no region).

After doing that, you should see a bit of white text appear on the screen in the upper left saying…
Region: 0 or whatever region that you were switching the player to. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any non-region1 DVDs handy to test with, so I can’t say for absolute certainty that this works now but I feel confident that it does. What I did have handy was the next disc in The Avengers – The Complete Emma Peel Megaset. I popped it in and started playing it. The video quality seemed pretty good to my eyes, but then I was watching remastered copies of 1967 color television; so your mileage might vary.

Some additional notes:

  • The DVP320F spins up much faster than my old DVD player.
  • The remote as a button that takes you directly to the root menu of the DVD. I haven’t tried it on a lot of discs yet, but it seems to work pretty damn well (hopefully allowing you to skip the “enforced” trailer watching).
  • The player officially supports normal DVDs, DVD+R, DVD+RW, Audio CDs, VCD, SVCD, Photo CDs, discs with straight MPEG files burned to them. Rumor has it that DVD-R discs will work too.
  • Unlike my old player, when you pause your movie on the DVP320F; it leaves a still image on the screen (my old player switched to a stupid graphic which looked like a piece of movie film and written on one of the frames was Intermission. I’ve always hated that about my old player.
  • The DVP320F has a zoom feature that will zoom into the center of the screen about 8 times and when and can zoom out to show more picture up to about 1/16 err… “anti-zoom”. Unfortunately, there’s only one button for this feature; so you have it press it multiple times, cycling through all zoom modes if you want to get back to the regular 1/1 zoom setting.

If I get a chance and the inclination; I’ll see about taking some pics of the player and adding them to this post. Of course, people making requests increases the odds of me doing this…