Movies and minor electronics geekery

I finally got my dvd player hooked up to my new TV last night, after going to Radio Shack on Sunday and buying a component-video cable. Neither the player nor the TV came with cables--and after buying one, I knew why. The cable cost forty dollars! Hard to sell a dvd player for under a hundred dollars if you've included a forty-dollar cable. Anyway, I hooked it all up, and put in a disk, which I had also bought Sunday.

It displayed in black and white. That wasn't good. I looked through both user manuals and discovered that if I was getting component video input the TV would display "Component". It was displaying "Video" instead. Hmmm, maybe my cables weren't connected quite right. I crawled back behind the TV and found that the green cable was not fully attached. Aha! This time when I turned the TV back on, I had beautiful color.

The movie was Drop Dead Gorgeous which was recommended by aliciar. I didn't find it quite as laugh-out-loud funny as she did, but then I rarely laugh out loud when I'm alone. It always seems to take a feedback loop with at least one other person to get me to do that. It did however remind me very much of Heathers, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, and I think I'll be watching it again. Now to find But I'm a Cheerleader, which Al also recommended and I had been wanting to see anyway.

Time to start a Movies I Must See list, and/or a Movies I Must Own list.

Also time to connect the VCR so I can watch Heathers again.

Pet peeves of the day

People (customer service reps, cashiers, and the like) who blame the computer when they can't do whatever it is that I need them to do for me. "I can't change your address record from here, the computer won't let me. You'll have to call our other department." Codswallop. Give me a couple hours with the system and I could make it do it. No, it's one of several other possibilities, none of which have anything at all to do with the computer. The management intentionally chose not to provide that functionality. They overlooked it. You don't have the kind of security access that would let you do it (again a management decision). The programmers at your company are incompetent. You're simply not allowed to. Or you're being recalcitrant or lazy.

Voice mail customer service systems that ask me to enter my account number on the telephone keypad and then don't do anything with it: the minute the csr gets on the phone they ask me for it again! And then they find I'm not in their service area, and transfer me somewhere else, so that I have to go through the whole rigmarole again.

These are really the same thing: inefficient system design, bad business rules, or bad programming. In a world where it is possible for me to send a message instantly to .jp or .uk or .timbuktu, why can't one branch of the cable company send a message to the other one?

It's a business rule or a failure of design, not the fault of the computer. Computers do exactly what they're instructed, which is both their greatest strength and their most irksome characteristic. As a programmer, there have been many many times I've grumbled "Do what I meant, not what I said!"

Colorgenics...

( My profile )

Awwwwwwwww fuck!

I forgot about the home inspection appointment this morning. Second time now, too.

Unpacking

While unpacking today I made the decision to give my wedding gown away to charity. I have been trying to clear my physical space in a continuing process of clearing my metaphysical space of the residue of disillusionment and anger that remains from my marriage. It was an oddly ambivalent feeling. In a way it was very easy to make this decision, yet in another it is wrenching. It's yet another acknowledgement of ending.

(no subject)

03/07/2002

G R E E T I N G S Aries

You've been the stodgy cerebral for just about long enough. Now is
the time to shed that old and brittle skin and let a new and more
youthful you come out for a while. Tune into the physical, the
sensual and the tactile. Dance to melodies that nobody else can hear,
and let yourself be moved to tears by things nobody else can see.
Perceive the world through your hands, fingers and skin. Enter a
world where words are totally unable to contain or convey the wonder
and mystery of the experience.

Spam that actually made me think!

Well it wasn't actually the content, but the fact that the header ("this is the result of your feedback form", which is fast growing to be standard in spam, and if I had my Em@iler again I'd use it to filter the stuff) was in German this time.

Donnerstag, it said, which is of course Thursday. I looked at the word for a while, remembered a conversation on wombat about Donner and Blitzen, and traced it backward to "Thunderday". "Thursday", of course, I always knew meant "Thor's Day", but it was just now that it occurred to me that "Thor" very likely also means thunder, or is at least derived from the same root.

So I went and checked at dictionary.com. thunder and Thor are indeed clearly related. It turns out that thin, astonish, detonate, intone, and tone are also related.

Because I have always had a wide vocabulary, people used to tease me in elementary school about reading the dictionary for fun, and I always denied it. It was true, of course, though I learned most words from context. If I did look something up, there was always something else interesting on the same page to read about. And then there's times like just now, when I knew perfectly well what the words were but looked them up anyway to read about their derivations.