Have Yourself a Digital Little Christmas

Well, Christmas is over for another year. The packages have been unwrapped, the gifts examined and gushed over, the big dinner eaten, and all the pretty wrapping paper stuffed into bags and set out for the trash collector. And we'll do it all again in another 365 days or so, because that's what we do. Unless, of course, you are a Nigerian Islamic radical, in which case you'll blow up a few churches because you are a stupid psycho who thinks it's okay to kill people who don't believe the same way you do.

Christmas customs around the world vary quite a bit, don't they?

But my post-Christmas rant is not about religious bigots who are busy creating their own hell. It's about digital movies.

There was a time, not so long ago, when you went to the movies in a theater. You sat in a soft chair (usually behind someone large enough to block your view), ate overpriced popcorn, and then went home with the memory. Then the movies came to you on television. Soon they were available on VHS (or Beta) tapes you could buy or borrow to watch whenever you wanted. Then came DVDs. Then came Blu-Ray discs. And then came the digital download.

This is why God invented aspirin.

One of the gifts Agnes gave me for Christmas was a "combo pack" of the movie Cowboys and Aliens (the 21st century successor to such low-tech film classics as Billy the Kid vs Dracula). The "combo pack" includes a DVD, a Blu-Ray disc, and a coupon which allows me to obtain a digital copy of the film to play on my home computer, laptop, or tablet. How cool is that? Next, they'll be beaming the movie directly into my skull via satellite.

Well, not so fast, buckaroo. I sat down at my computer this morning to download my digital copy, a process that used to be quick and simple: you put the disc into the computer, selected the connection to the download website from the disc menu, poked in your 9,796-character redemption code, and the electrons marched down the digital highway to your computer and arranged themselves in proper formation for future viewing.

But that was obviously too easy. Now, there's a system called Ultraviolet, designed by the great-grandson of the Marquis de Sade, which requires you to give up vast amounts of personal information to create multiple accounts in order to not allow you to download the movie for which you have paid. It took me a great deal of time and agony to work my way through Ultraviolet's insanely complicated system, only to be petulantly told that my redemption code was rejected because it had already been used ... obviously by someone who carefully opened up the shrink-wrapped case, copied the code, downloaded my movie, and cleverly re-sealed the package.

I took a few minutes to send a blisteringly uncomplimentary e-mail to the Ultraviolet feedback address, where it will probably be outsourced to some Nigerian psycho who will try to blow up my computer for not acknowledging that Ultraviolet is the final and ultimate revealed way to get your movies.

It didn't take long to get over that Christmas spirit, did it?

But I'm going to take a few deep breaths, center myself, and spend my last day of Christmas vacation doing as little as humanly possible. I'm going to relax, watch my movie (from the Blu-Ray disc, of course), eat leftover Christmas dinner, and generally vegitate before having to return to the office tomorrow.

And who knows? - perhaps, in spite of all expectations to the contrary, someone at Ultraviolet might contact me with an apology and my digital download.

And Dracula might beat Billy the Kid, too.

Have a good day. Enjoy the rest of the holiday season.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Monday Odds and Ends

Yes, it's happened again - I'm running late. Agnes comes back from Germany on Wednesday afternoon, and I need to clean up all the party rubble get the house looking nice for when she returns. With this in mind, here are a few useful and/or just plain funny things from my collection...

This may help you evaluate the impact of the inevitable sex scandals that will come up in the 2012 presidential campaign season ...

There will also be the inevitable things trotted out (usually out of context) from a politician's past ...

The historian in me really likes this one ...

There's nothing like a good pun ...

And then, there's the good advice for those who didn't vote in the recent midterm elections. Or in any elections, for that matter ...

New topic: does anyone have any idea why my beloved Firefox browser suddenly stopped connecting to the internet? I upgraded to version 3.6.12 for Mac yesterday (I'm running Snow Leopard OS version 10.6.5), and ever since it petulantly refuses to find any web sites. Yes, the Internet connection is fine - I can send and receive e-mail, but for browsing I'm reduced to using Safari, which I detest. Any ideas? There's nothing on the Mozilla help sites. AARRGGHH!!

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

Wii, Wii, Wii All the Way Home...

Oui, we have a Wii.

For those of you who don't know what a Wii is, it's something which allows you to waste vast amounts of time and energy in an alternate reality.

Kind of like being a Tea Party person, but you can turn it off with the push of a button.

But anyhow...

Our son and our daughter each have Wiis, and we decided we (Wii?) ought to have one, too. After all, exercising with an oddly-featured digital copy of a personal trainer is so much nicer than doing the same exercises at the gym, where we have to endure the sideways glances and giggles of the buff, snickering gym rats as we try desperately to touch toes we haven't even seen for years.

The Wii is easy to install, assuming you have:

a. Access to an electrical engineer; and,

b. A space-age television with faster-than-light drive, a plagrastic variognometer calibrated in versts per angstrom per fortnight (squared), and the correct input plugs in an accessible location. (Note: There is no such thing as an accessible location when your TV is mounted on the wall...every available input plug you need is conveniently located on the back of the set, where it's dark, full of cobwebs, you cannot see anything, and you have about 1.5 inches of space in which to work.)

Miraculously, I managed to properly install not only the Wii, but also the wireless balance board. The wireless balance board is a high-tech device designed to transmit embarrassing information about your weight and body fat index to the Wii by way of the television set. Taken as a whole, the Wii system enables you to be insulted not by a living, breathing, sweating gym rat, but by a pudgy digital copy of yourself (cleverly known as a Mii, oui?).

So, we have a Wii. And we each have a Mii. My Mii is a wee me (as Fiona might say). And my Mii mocks me. What have Wii done...or we done?

Stay tuned to find out if my Mii gradually turns sleek and svelte instead of pudgy.

Wii'll let you know.

Oui.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo

The Perfect Crime

The "perfect crime" is a staple of detective fiction and police procedural novels. Every writer dreams of devising a crime so clever and well-plotted that the criminal escapes scot-free while the forces of law and order scratch their heads and bump into each other in a futile attempt to close the case.

There probably aren't any "perfect crimes," though. DNA analysis, computer forensics, telephone wiretaps, good police work, and all the neat stuff you see on TV shows like NCIS, Bones, and CSI make getting away with a crime pretty much a thing of the past. Unless, of course, you succeed in looting an entire economy, in which case you're pretty much guaranteed to escape meaningful punishment.

But wait - there is a perfect crime in the making, and I'm sharing the story with you so that when I'm gone, the perpetrators can be brought to justice.

I refer to the sinister plot hatched by an unnamed software company to drive me to suicide by trying to use their product.

We have something like 758,000 VHS tapes stacked on shelves here at home, most of them dance videos Agnes bought over a 20+ year career teaching ballroom dance. As you know, VHS tapes take up quite a bit of space compared to DVDs or CDs, and so in an attempt to recover some of our limited shelf space, Agnes decided it would be a good project to transfer all those VHS tapes to DVDs.

Well, yes, it's a good idea...but like so many good ideas, it ain't quite as easy as hooking the VHS player to a DVD recorder and lettin' 'er rip. You need to insert chapter breaks and menus to allow you to search the DVD. And there's the rub...

Some years ago, I spent the GNP of an average African country to buy a spiffy software program that would let me make and edit movies. That software proved to be so complicated to use that my head started to smoke, and so it sat unused for a long time...until yesterday.

We were able to copy the VHS tape to the computer's hard drive with no problem. Inserting the chapter markers was a little bit of a problem. Figuring out how to insert a top-level menu was a fairly big problem. Figuring out how to edit the menus was an insurmountable problem.

After two telephone conversations with tech support people in Ouagadougou whose English was barely up to the task (and who referred me to each other to solve the problem), I ended up conducting two lengthy online chats with two more tech support people who finally ended up deciding that my expensive program would not allow us to do that which we expected it to do, and we would have to upgrade to the newer (and more expensive version) of the software. Of course, in true modern software fashion, the program comes in three versions: "basic," "ultimate," and "ultimate collection," the price of each escalates astronomically. And, naturally, the ability to insert multiple menus (which we need to do to make the DVDs useful), is only available in the "ultimate" and "ultimate collection" versions of the software.

AARRGGHH!!

So I bit the bullet and ordered the "ultimate" version of the program. I downloaded the installation file, saved it to the computer, then double-clicked to install it ... only to get a message telling me that it was "not a valid Win32 application."

DOUBLE AARRGGHH!!

Another online chat with yet another drone, who tells me that the file must have been corrupted during the download, and I should download it again. I do this. The file downloads correctly. I double-click to install it.

And...

About an hour and a half later, after endless extractions of compressed files, two system reboots, acceptance of huge legalistic User Agreements written in Old Church Slavonic, and the sacrifice of two chickens and a small goat, the installation is complete.

Does it work? I don't know. It took so long to troubleshoot the original program, get straight answers from tech support, download the installation files, and install them, that we ran out of time to see if it all works.

I'm going back to work today. Agnes will get to try out the program on her own. She will no doubt call me to ask how it works...

And I'll shoot myself.

The perfect crime.

She'll probably split the insurance money with those guys in Ouagadougou.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow...if I haven't done myself in.

Bilbo