April 21, 2000

I just had a visit to the bathroom. I go into the stall and have a seat, and next to me, in the cup holder that is built into the toilet paper dispenser is a styrofoam cup, with a plastic spoon in it. It's filled about half way up with water. Now at first I didn't think anyhting of it, but then as I was gettin my business done, I started thinking. Why is there a plastic spoon in a cup, that's half full of water? In the bathroom no less! What was going on here, in this peacful procelain sactuary that would require a plastic spoon and a styrofoam cup?

The best I can come up with is maybe somone had a drink, and was eating something (pudding maybe?) and then left the spoon - wait... pudding won't work because the spoon was clean, so was the water it was in. Oh well I give up and will stop rambling now. The spoon mystery will have to go unsolved for now.

When I was at work, I called the store that sold me the DVD-ROM drive and asked them for an RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization) number. I called the technical support department of the store. One of the guys in the store (being the persistent things they are), told me to check the decoder first. I haven't thought of that, so I searched in deja.com for anything about this mess. I came across something called "Remote Selector" from the web (http://www.remoteselector.com). I came back from home, installed the DVD-ROM drive and all that jazz. However, I also downloaded and installed the Remote Selector. I went to the software, and disabled the regional code checking in the decoder and slipped in the sample DVD.

IT WORKED!

Well, the sample DVD movie is a low-budget direct-to-video affair, but it works.

That's it! I'm getting Full Metal Jacket and Robocop (Criterion Collection)!

Amaretto flavored coffee. Paid holiday. Rise at ~9:30, nothing edible sounds interesting. Node a little, read a little, shower and dress and shopping. The new Edward's isn't open yet, the ShopRite parking lot is packed, and I still don't feel like doing laundry. I'll just have to shop computers...
Micro Exchange has a 21" monitor for ~$600, I can't really justify that. They have a nice flat-screen monitor for... ACK! $1800!?! oh well. Finally, they have a $415 Compaq box, I would really really like a Win98 machine to run my USB scanner, I have a few hundred in my "I-don't-buy-cigarettes-anymore reward fund"... I get it home, and hey! It even has a NIC already! I feel like I actually didn't get rooked! Office 2000 pre-installed! Yay!
My sister invites me for Easter brunch. I borrow a vitamin count book from Dad, and retrieve my copy of Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Carl Jung) from the old house. The meal of the day is dry flax flakes. The scanner works, woohoo, I put up a more satisfactory picture of myself on my Yahoo Briefcase. Dial-Up Networking seems more stable than under NT. With all the excitement, I need to get to bed early.