Darkavich's Daily Ramblings Ramblings of a Mad Sys-Admin

Ok, so I purchased a copy of Casino Royal from Costco. It’s the 1st DVD I ever bought at costco. I brought it home and popped it into my DVD and it would not play, the dvd player just spun and spun… I figured, “crap” it’s a bad dvd. So I only get to costco about twice a year. So I popped into target and bought another copy. No luv! It didn’t work.

So I forgot about it for a month or so. I was talking with a coworker and he said there was lots of talk on the boards about this dvd. So I went and searched and found out that not only was everyone in the world having problems with this DVD, but dozens of other titles. It turns out that Sony in their ultimate wisdom, have changed the copy protection and of course it’s broke LOTS of dvd players, mine included.

So I thought, wonderful! I am going to have to return them. I decided to try the hi-tech way and I went to their web site and tried the contact us link.

I sent the following message:

To: Sony Consumer Mailbox
Subject: My DVD will not play

I have two disks of Casino Royale that will not play. From the DVD
boards it sounds like this is a flaw with the copy protection on this
disk.

Can you please tell me what is going on and fix my DVD’s?

I received the following reply in 8 hours.

Dear Valued Customer,

Thank you for your patience as we researched the compatibilty issues between our DVDs and a few DVD players.

In order to receive replacement(s) for the DVD(s) in which you experienced trouble please reply to this email with your name, the make and model number of your DVD player, the UPC # of the movie title(s) that you are experiencing an issue with and also your home address . Your replacements will be sent via FedEx therefore PO Boxes cannot be used.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Regards,

SPHE Consumer Affairs Team 2

I sent them the information they requested on wednesday and tonight (Friday) there was a fed-ex on more doorstep with two copies of the bad DVD’s!

So Sony, while I recognize the fact you can do whatever you like to try to protect your media (Personally, I think its going to be your downfall) but you need to make sure it’s backwards compatible with all technology.

I do acknowledge and applaud the fact you made it very easy to replace my media at your cost.

Thank You!

On a side note, I emailed Toshiba (the maker of my DVD player) and they emailed me back the next day as well telling me there is a firmware upgrade for my model to fix this. I am still waiting for my firmware disk (guess it didn’t ship fedex). More on that once it arrives.

I picked up an external drive for my Tivo3 this week. I was informed of how to add a 2nd drive to my tivo..

I had some trouble that turned out to be the crappy connectors on esata cables. I followed the surgery instructions here and all is good now.

I can now record 98 hours of Hi-Def shows.

I purchased a GPS last year for the MS150 Bike Tour. I never got around to using it and now I am feeling guilty with it sitting on the shelf.

Yesterday, I attended a hands on class at REI. This was a four hour class that taught me all the basics of my specific unit and how to operate it for finding locations, tracking, and generating routes.

I have known about Geocaching for a while. I even had a premium account with Geocaching.com. So this morning, Angie and I headed out to find some of the cache’s around our house.

We ended up finding four caches today. We got a lot of good exercise (walked about 4 miles) and used our powers of observation to try and find the hidden treasures.

Thanks Bert for this pointer. Check out Jott.Com

This site lets you call from your phone and record messages that can be sent as audio or text. It’s amazing how well it works with my voice. Only problem is that my mail client thinks it’s junk mail….

Found this cool tool called Text Expander. It’s a tool that lets you create aliases that will expand to text when you type them.