I recently bought “Stranger Than Fiction” from Best Buy, figured I’d watch it tonight.  I put it in my DVD player, a Sony DVPCX995V, and it began to read the disc.

Then, the damn thing shut down.

I was really confused.  I messed around with it for a few minutes, then I jumped into a chat session with a Sony representative.  After suggesting the DVD was scratched or the wrong region, (uh huh, sure), he THEN recommended I reset the whole player.

Now, the thing is, this player requires you to manually type in the names of DVDs where it can’t read the standard demographic information.  I’ve got 300 discs in that player, I’d rather not lose that information.  So then he gave me a phone number to tech support and wished me luck.

But you’d better believe I started searching the Internet for any other reports of this nonsense.  It didn’t take long before I found this Amazon discussion and a blog post on erkkila.org.  A number of DVD players, a number of new DVDs… sounds fishy.

Here are the numbers I have so far:

Sony Pictures: (800) 860-2878
DVP-CX995V Support: (800) 222-7669

This does not bode well for Sony.  Is there some kind of write protection on these DVDs?

MySpace has all sorts of problems: a terrible user interface, poorly implemented HTML, notorious scalability problems, and a user base ranging from stay-at-home moms to porn stars, from preteens to the technically elite.

Yet for me, being a MySpace-r myself, there is an even larger issue: their insistence on perpetuating ignorance to avoid addressing not only the formerly mentioned issues, but also their own laziness and incompetence.  I’ve had it.  This blog is going out to all those people who have, at one point or another, had “weird things” happen on their account… let’s see if this will help.

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Books to the ceiling,/ Books to the sky,/ My pile of books is a mile high./ How I love them! How I need them!/ I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them. – Arnold Lobel

I’ve been recently inspired to catch up on a lot of my programming fundamentals, digging up old notes and textbooks from my parent’s house.  It’s amazing how much slips your mind in those years… and I think my brain is rebelling from a lack of sleep.  Work has been killing me these last few weeks.

The stack of books on my nightstand has been tempting me every evening, books I’ve recently bought or borrowed, a few I’ve pulled from my shelves: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, Bob Woodward’s State of Denial… I even cracked open Homer’s Odyssey.  But every time I take a moment, no matter the time of day, I always end up falling asleep within ten pages or so.

It’s because I’ve had a lot of late nights… a lot of code to write and review.  You’d think I’d be in a better mood: I finally was given the time to implement what I call “preview panes,” or hovering blocks of detail that appear when hovering over an object.  I also got the time to design semi-opaque module-level dialogs.  They’re awesome looking, and the users are going to love them.  But apparently I’m officially ”booked” for the rest of the year, (and then some), on a whole set of projects.

I’m a busy, busy bee.  And there’s so much I want to learn… things I want my brain to recall, apply, relate.  It’s just been frustrating.  And you know me… my mind is incredibly multi-threaded.  Between family, friends, work, study and my random ponderings… I guess it’s doing the best it can.

But some good news:  I think I’m going to launch a couple of new sites soon… A Google Maps mash-up and that Everybody Calm Down commentary I mentioned once in a blue moon ago.

I’ve just gotta find the time.  Anybody got some lying around?  *sigh*

Regarding: Viacom asks YouTube to purge certain clips

Many are speculating on the latest request by Viacom (read: Comedy Central) that YouTube (read: Google) take down clips of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert’s The Colbert Report and South Park. I’m not speculating on the business dealings… it’s typical copyright protection by a popular source. I’m just disappointed that such “hip, young sources of entertainment,” that are usually so clever and cutting edge with their business dealings, missed such a fantastic, progressive opportunity.

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