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Home Electronics Horror
Sep. 1st, 2003 01:02 pmYesterday, during the game, Tom had to pause several times to run upstairs and change the DVD for his kids and his cousin-in-law, who was fully grown, but still had no inkling how to work Tom's player. And while at first that seemed kind of funny, someone pointed out that *no one* could work anyone else's home electronics setup -- only the person who'd installed it would have any idea what hooked up to what in what order and what setting each thing had to be in to get the data to flow correctly, and what remote to use to do that.
So we went around the table giving the requested example -- 'what do you do to switch from watching television to watching a DVD?' In my case it was 'Put the DVD in the PS2, find the special remote used only for this and hit the 'input' button, then pick up the PS2 controller and figure out which button was 'play''. This was BY FAR the simplest set of steps, although of course the real barrier is obscurity rather than complexity per se.
Normally, of course, I watch DVDs on my computer, since the PS2 is a truly horrible DVD player, both in picture quality and reliability. The computer is better, but still tends to skip and lose sound a lot. June, from Furtoonia, responded to my complaints along those lines by suggesting I buy a cheap DVD player, which would supposedly work better.
So, today, I decided to head out and see if I could get one. No, wait, that's not accurate -- I decided to head out and see if I could find 'Disgaea' for sale at Best Buy, and found that I could not, and while I was there remembered the suggestion and walked over to the DVD player aisle.
And sure enough, there were players on sale for cheap. Like, $35. The lurking salesman saw me looking at the cheap one, and suggested that I'd be better off buying the $50 one which was a lot more reliable... okay, I can buy that. 'So, how do you plan on hooking it up?'
"Well," I said, "It says it supports coaxial, so I was going to hook it up through my VCR."
"Oh, no, you can't do that! If you hook it up through your VCR it'll flash light and dark and look horrible!"
"Okay... then I'll hook my VCR up through it?"
"No, it doesn't have an input." Which, of course, meant that hooking it up as coaxial was entirely out of the question, since I'd need to hook my CABLE up as well. The alternative was component inputs, which my TV had but which were occupied by my PS2. The salesman tried to get me to buy an expensive switchbox, but that would have brought the total price (including the extra cables I'd need) up to something like $120, which is more than I'm willing to drop on this experiment to supposedly make DVDs less of a pain in the ass, especially since a switchbox is a pain in the ass in and of itself.
Sometimes I fucking hate technology.
So we went around the table giving the requested example -- 'what do you do to switch from watching television to watching a DVD?' In my case it was 'Put the DVD in the PS2, find the special remote used only for this and hit the 'input' button, then pick up the PS2 controller and figure out which button was 'play''. This was BY FAR the simplest set of steps, although of course the real barrier is obscurity rather than complexity per se.
Normally, of course, I watch DVDs on my computer, since the PS2 is a truly horrible DVD player, both in picture quality and reliability. The computer is better, but still tends to skip and lose sound a lot. June, from Furtoonia, responded to my complaints along those lines by suggesting I buy a cheap DVD player, which would supposedly work better.
So, today, I decided to head out and see if I could get one. No, wait, that's not accurate -- I decided to head out and see if I could find 'Disgaea' for sale at Best Buy, and found that I could not, and while I was there remembered the suggestion and walked over to the DVD player aisle.
And sure enough, there were players on sale for cheap. Like, $35. The lurking salesman saw me looking at the cheap one, and suggested that I'd be better off buying the $50 one which was a lot more reliable... okay, I can buy that. 'So, how do you plan on hooking it up?'
"Well," I said, "It says it supports coaxial, so I was going to hook it up through my VCR."
"Oh, no, you can't do that! If you hook it up through your VCR it'll flash light and dark and look horrible!"
"Okay... then I'll hook my VCR up through it?"
"No, it doesn't have an input." Which, of course, meant that hooking it up as coaxial was entirely out of the question, since I'd need to hook my CABLE up as well. The alternative was component inputs, which my TV had but which were occupied by my PS2. The salesman tried to get me to buy an expensive switchbox, but that would have brought the total price (including the extra cables I'd need) up to something like $120, which is more than I'm willing to drop on this experiment to supposedly make DVDs less of a pain in the ass, especially since a switchbox is a pain in the ass in and of itself.
Sometimes I fucking hate technology.
