It’s a well-known fact that, to put it mildly, I really don’t like people.
In fact, if there were a Wikipedia entry about me there would be an entire section devoted to this fact.
Having to do my shopping on weekends isn’t doing anything to help improve my opinion of the greater mass of humanity.
Back when I first moved into the house I’d made a trip to Lowes, and while there I found a TV stand that I liked, but for whatever reason I didn’t actually buy it.
On Thursday I got my first paycheck – which was substantially larger than a typical AOL paycheck – and decided that I needed to do something with that money beyond simply paying bills.
So, with last weekend’s addition of a new audio/video component, I thought now would be a good time to check to see if the TV stand I liked was still there (my existing stand isn’t especially roomy, even without a TV actually being on it, and is rather bowed from years of having my old, heavy TV resting on it). I got there and discovered that they no longer had the one I wanted, but they had another that I liked even better, and which was nearly half the price.
The only problem was that the stand consisted of individual components that had to be purchased separately, and from what I could see one of those components was out of stock.
Naturally no one is around to help when you actually want someone to help, and every time I tried to look in other areas my efforts were stymied by the efforts of the International Conspiracy of People Who Congregate In Front of Things That Jon Wants To Look At (ICPWCIFTTJWTLA), all of which led to a marked increase in my rage levels, so, rather than shove some lady out of my way, I clenched my fists, gritted my teeth, and walked out of the store empty-handed (or rather, empty-fisted).
From there I went to Wal-Mart. Care to make a guess as to whether that made matters better or worse?
Beyond being a catalyst to get me to go out in search of a new TV stand, adding another audio/video component also increased the number of remote controls in my arsenal. A few years ago I bought a programmable remote that can “learn” the functions of other remotes, but it never worked very well at controlling a DVR, and the “teaching” process was rather long and laborious, so I decided to pick up a Logitech Harmony 890 Advanced Universal Remote, which you hook up to your computer to program.
Whenever possible, I like to buy “open box” products, as people generally return things because a) they bought the wrong thing or b) they couldn’t figure out how to work it, so the savings are generally worth whatever risk there is that the product may be faulty.
So I was pleased to see that there was an open box Harmony 890, though I was confused when I looked at the price tag and saw that it was marked as being $15 more than an unopened box. WTF? The sales person told me that this was restocked before a major price drop, and would, in fact, be over $20 cheaper than an unopened product.
So that worked out, but I was still in a pretty lousy mood.
Driving home didn’t do anything to improve my mood.
Once I got home I called Kathleen to see if she wanted to get lunch, but she had something else going on, which is probably just as well, considering that the following lyrics by Tool pretty much summed up my mood: Some say the end is near/Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon/Certainly hope we will.
Not wanting to deal with the world any longer, I took a two hour nap, then got up to attend to the programming of the remote.
It was all pretty straightforward, and I now have one remote that, like the One Ring, can rule them all.
The one area where I’ve run into some difficulties, though, is in setting up “activities.”
It’s possible, for example, to set a “Watch TV” activity, which will allow me to push one button and have my DVR turn, my TV turn on, and have my TV switch to the appropriate HDMI input.
The obstacle to this is that the programming for my TV’s remote is not an exact match, so the list of inputs is incomplete and in the wrong order, so as it tries to set it to HDMI 2, it scrolls through the inputs and stops on S-Video, or some other random input.
It would be possible to tweak the settings to fix this, but honestly, I’d rather it didn’t try choosing the HDMI input at all and simply turned the TV on –if I watch a DVD or something on the Media Lounge I usually switch back the HDMI input when I’m done anyway – but there isn’t a way to get it to not try to change the input (that I’ve been able to find), so I haven’t bothered trying to use the activities feature.
I may mess with it some more on a day when I’m feeling less volatile, and possibly even set up a custom wallpaper on the LCD screen.
I’m thinking this might be appropriate.
In any case, sorry for the infrequent nature of my posts of late, but I’m still adapting to the whole working a) at all and b) more than three days a week thing.
Besides, you’re not really missing much.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Can You Put A Price On Sanity? Yes: $17.50 A Week
Without question, the best route for me to take to and from work is the Greenway.
No stoplights, speed limit is 65, nowhere near the level of traffic of any of the other major roads.
The drawback, of course, is the expense. A one-way trip on the Greenway costs a painful $3.50.
That means that if I took it both ways, every day, my commute would cost me $35 a week, or $140 a month. As Scott put it, that would be like paying “commuter rent.”
So it’s not a cost-effective solution.
The problem, though, is that taking the other likely route to and from work every day would cost me what little sanity I have remaining.
I’m convinced that Route 7 was designed by a committee consisting of the hundred maniacs who fathered Freddy Krueger.
The on-ramp from 28, for example, is clearly the product of a diseased mind, what with its two lanes that merge into one right before merging onto 7.
One thing is clear, though: I just can’t take Route 7 in the morning without going insane.
So I’ve decided that my sanity is worth $17.50 a week and that I’m going to take the Greenway in to work every morning. I’m usually out of work by 4:30, so while traffic is pretty bad on the non-Greenway route home, it’s not as bad as it would be if I left later in the day, or as bad as it is in the morning.
(The non-Greenway route still costs $.50 one way, so my total commuting cost will be $19.50 a week. Bad Math Update: It would actually be an even $20. 5 * $.50 = $2.50. Who knew? Actually, my original math was correct, I was just using the wrong numbers. For some reason - Wishful thinking? - I was figuring 4 days at $.50 instead of 5.)
I spent much of today sitting on conference calls and struggling to pay attention. I lost that struggle more often than not.
I have yet to see that cute, petite girl I talked to on the elevator last week again, though I hardly suppose that it matters.
Speaking of the elevators, yesterday while I was standing by them waiting for one to open, two guys walked by talking, and I have to believe that I totally misunderstood what was being said, or that if I didn’t mishear or misinterpret the meaning, that there was some sort of context I was missing.
Just as I was getting on the elevator, one of them inclined the folder he was carrying in my direction and, it seemed to me, said, “The worst case scenario is that you end up becoming that.”
As the elevator doors closed, I thought to myself, “Wait, what? Did he just tell that guy that becoming me is the worst case scenario? WTF? I don’t even know those people.”
As I said, I have to believe that there was something I was missing or that I misunderstood.
It actually reminded me of something that happened during my freshman year in college.
For some reason which I can’t remember, the school was closed one Friday in the fall, and Lorie and I decided to take advantage of the extra day to make a trip home for the weekend.
Totally unrelated – I’m assuming – to the Friday closure, Meat Loaf was performing at my school that Saturday.
When I got home, I called up my friends to see what they were doing for the weekend. It turns out that they were planning to head to Marquette – where I’d just come from – to see Meat Loaf on Saturday.
Lacking anything better to do if my friends weren’t going to be around, I opted to buy a ticket, and come Saturday morning I was on my way back to Marquette.
(Given that after the concert I went back home, only to head back to Marquette once again come Sunday, Lorie – we weren’t yet married, or even officially engaged – upbraided me for my stupidity. Meh. I had a good time. Note that this was a couple of years before Bat out of Hell II, and also before Mr. Loaf’s rather dramatic weight loss, which preceded his dramatic weight gain, or re-gain, I suppose.)
After various time-killing activities, my friends and I stopped by my dorm room for a while. As we were leaving, there were two girls at the end of the hall talking. One was saying to the other, “There were thes really skuzzy-looking guys walking around in the halls earlier.” Then, spotting us as we headed towards the exit, she said, loudly, “Oh good; they’re leaving.”
That one I heard loud and clear and understood perfectly, and I know it wasn’t my imagination, as Eric also heard it.
In fairness, yeah, I suppose we were pretty skuzzy-looking, but even so, it was kind of uncalled for.
(Interesting aside: while walking around in the halls being skuzzy-looking, I noticed that the mirror from Lorie’s room was cracked and in a garbage can. I then encountered Lorie’s rather dazed-looking roommate who explained that in the night she had fallen while climbing out of bed and smacked her head against the mirror, giving herself a concussion, and, presumably, seven years’ worth of bad luck.)
In any case, while it’s possible that becoming me is the worst case scenario, there’s no reason for people to go around saying it, though perhaps “I’m the worst case scenario” would make yet another good T-shirt slogan.
No stoplights, speed limit is 65, nowhere near the level of traffic of any of the other major roads.
The drawback, of course, is the expense. A one-way trip on the Greenway costs a painful $3.50.
That means that if I took it both ways, every day, my commute would cost me $35 a week, or $140 a month. As Scott put it, that would be like paying “commuter rent.”
So it’s not a cost-effective solution.
The problem, though, is that taking the other likely route to and from work every day would cost me what little sanity I have remaining.
I’m convinced that Route 7 was designed by a committee consisting of the hundred maniacs who fathered Freddy Krueger.
The on-ramp from 28, for example, is clearly the product of a diseased mind, what with its two lanes that merge into one right before merging onto 7.
One thing is clear, though: I just can’t take Route 7 in the morning without going insane.
So I’ve decided that my sanity is worth $17.50 a week and that I’m going to take the Greenway in to work every morning. I’m usually out of work by 4:30, so while traffic is pretty bad on the non-Greenway route home, it’s not as bad as it would be if I left later in the day, or as bad as it is in the morning.
(The non-Greenway route still costs $.50 one way, so my total commuting cost will be $19.50 a week. Bad Math Update: It would actually be an even $20. 5 * $.50 = $2.50. Who knew? Actually, my original math was correct, I was just using the wrong numbers. For some reason - Wishful thinking? - I was figuring 4 days at $.50 instead of 5.)
I spent much of today sitting on conference calls and struggling to pay attention. I lost that struggle more often than not.
I have yet to see that cute, petite girl I talked to on the elevator last week again, though I hardly suppose that it matters.
Speaking of the elevators, yesterday while I was standing by them waiting for one to open, two guys walked by talking, and I have to believe that I totally misunderstood what was being said, or that if I didn’t mishear or misinterpret the meaning, that there was some sort of context I was missing.
Just as I was getting on the elevator, one of them inclined the folder he was carrying in my direction and, it seemed to me, said, “The worst case scenario is that you end up becoming that.”
As the elevator doors closed, I thought to myself, “Wait, what? Did he just tell that guy that becoming me is the worst case scenario? WTF? I don’t even know those people.”
As I said, I have to believe that there was something I was missing or that I misunderstood.
It actually reminded me of something that happened during my freshman year in college.
For some reason which I can’t remember, the school was closed one Friday in the fall, and Lorie and I decided to take advantage of the extra day to make a trip home for the weekend.
Totally unrelated – I’m assuming – to the Friday closure, Meat Loaf was performing at my school that Saturday.
When I got home, I called up my friends to see what they were doing for the weekend. It turns out that they were planning to head to Marquette – where I’d just come from – to see Meat Loaf on Saturday.
Lacking anything better to do if my friends weren’t going to be around, I opted to buy a ticket, and come Saturday morning I was on my way back to Marquette.
(Given that after the concert I went back home, only to head back to Marquette once again come Sunday, Lorie – we weren’t yet married, or even officially engaged – upbraided me for my stupidity. Meh. I had a good time. Note that this was a couple of years before Bat out of Hell II, and also before Mr. Loaf’s rather dramatic weight loss, which preceded his dramatic weight gain, or re-gain, I suppose.)
After various time-killing activities, my friends and I stopped by my dorm room for a while. As we were leaving, there were two girls at the end of the hall talking. One was saying to the other, “There were thes really skuzzy-looking guys walking around in the halls earlier.” Then, spotting us as we headed towards the exit, she said, loudly, “Oh good; they’re leaving.”
That one I heard loud and clear and understood perfectly, and I know it wasn’t my imagination, as Eric also heard it.
In fairness, yeah, I suppose we were pretty skuzzy-looking, but even so, it was kind of uncalled for.
(Interesting aside: while walking around in the halls being skuzzy-looking, I noticed that the mirror from Lorie’s room was cracked and in a garbage can. I then encountered Lorie’s rather dazed-looking roommate who explained that in the night she had fallen while climbing out of bed and smacked her head against the mirror, giving herself a concussion, and, presumably, seven years’ worth of bad luck.)
In any case, while it’s possible that becoming me is the worst case scenario, there’s no reason for people to go around saying it, though perhaps “I’m the worst case scenario” would make yet another good T-shirt slogan.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Doing What You're Telling People Not To Do In Order To Tell Them Not To Do It
When I first started my job at the college back in 1997 it took about 3 weeks for my computer to arrive.
In order to get any work done I had to make use of my boss’ computer whenever he was away, or else go up to the art lab and use one of the student workstations, as they had all of the software I needed for my job.
This meant that I didn’t have a lot of free time for things like Web surfing and e-mail.
At the time I had something of a modern-day pen pal relationship carried on mostly via e-mail, so when I got home from my first day at work, I checked my mail and found a message from my friend bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t gotten a message from me all day and concluding that “maybe taking this new job wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
She was joking, of course, but it comes to mind as I consider how lax I’ve been in posting here.
Unfortunately, unlike the e-mail situation in that job (and my friend’s eagerness to receive messages from me), I don’t foresee that changing any time soon.
Not much of note happened today anyway, though, oddly enough, the one interesting thing that did happen actually relates to e-mail.
Sometime over the weekend some employee decided to try out his new e-mail account by sending out a test e-mail.
To everyone in the company.
Naturally, many people, confused as to who this person was and why they were receiving the e-mail sent out a response asking “Who are you and why are you sending me this?” or words to that effect.
Of course, they didn’t just hit “Reply” when sending this message, and instead hit “Reply All,” which meant that all employees had yet another pointless e-mail wending their way towards their inboxes.
A lot of people did this before (and even after) someone finally got sick of getting all of the e-mails and did a “Reply All” saying “Don’t ‘Reply All’ on this message.”
All told, there were 114 pointless messages waiting for me when I got in this morning.
This sort of thing used to happen at AOL all the time. It was almost comforting to be on such familiar ground.
In order to get any work done I had to make use of my boss’ computer whenever he was away, or else go up to the art lab and use one of the student workstations, as they had all of the software I needed for my job.
This meant that I didn’t have a lot of free time for things like Web surfing and e-mail.
At the time I had something of a modern-day pen pal relationship carried on mostly via e-mail, so when I got home from my first day at work, I checked my mail and found a message from my friend bemoaning the fact that she hadn’t gotten a message from me all day and concluding that “maybe taking this new job wasn’t such a good idea after all.”
She was joking, of course, but it comes to mind as I consider how lax I’ve been in posting here.
Unfortunately, unlike the e-mail situation in that job (and my friend’s eagerness to receive messages from me), I don’t foresee that changing any time soon.
Not much of note happened today anyway, though, oddly enough, the one interesting thing that did happen actually relates to e-mail.
Sometime over the weekend some employee decided to try out his new e-mail account by sending out a test e-mail.
To everyone in the company.
Naturally, many people, confused as to who this person was and why they were receiving the e-mail sent out a response asking “Who are you and why are you sending me this?” or words to that effect.
Of course, they didn’t just hit “Reply” when sending this message, and instead hit “Reply All,” which meant that all employees had yet another pointless e-mail wending their way towards their inboxes.
A lot of people did this before (and even after) someone finally got sick of getting all of the e-mails and did a “Reply All” saying “Don’t ‘Reply All’ on this message.”
All told, there were 114 pointless messages waiting for me when I got in this morning.
This sort of thing used to happen at AOL all the time. It was almost comforting to be on such familiar ground.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
New Toy, New Headaches
When I got up this morning I contemplated spending the whole day not doing anything, but my thoughts kept going back to something I’d seen at Best Buy yesterday when I’d bought the new case for my cell phone, and this thought, coupled with the realization that I once again have a steady paycheck, which means that I can once again make the occasional gadget purchase, led me to set aside my plan to have no plans for the day.
For a while now, especially since I bought the HDTV, I’ve wanted to have something that would allow me to stream content from my computer to my TV.
I also want to be able to do the reverse, which is why I plan to eventually buy a Media Center PC with Cable Card tuners so that I can do things like make screen captures from HD content.
However, that’s down the road (maybe tax time), so in the meantime, I decided to pick up one of these, along with an HDMI cable to connect it to the TV.
I got home, took it out of the box, hooked it up via the HDMI cable, turned it on, turned the TV on, set the TV to the correct HDMI input and waited.
And waited.
The TV kept insisting that there was no input detected. I kept insisting that there was.
The TV won the argument.
In a “Duh” moment, I realized that since the device didn’t actually come with an HDMI cable, it was probably not set by default to send a signal out via HDMI. I hooked up the attached S-Video cable, and voila!
It was a minor irritation, but proved to be a pale harbinger of what was to come.
The next step was setting up the network connection. This was guaranteed to be simple on the box, as all I needed to do was run the Wireless Connection Setup Wizard on one of my networked PCs and save the resulting information to a USB drive, then hook up the USB drive to the Media Lounge, which would read the configuration data and connect to my network.
That was the theory, anyway.
For the next several hours I attempted to put theory into practice with no success.
The Media Lounge was copying the configuration data, and my network could see that it was trying to establish a connection, but no connection was being created, and the Media Lounge was failing to grab an IP address from my router.
(I should note here that even if I never got it set up to work with my network, it would still be worthwhile, as in addition to being able to stream media wirelessly, the Media Lounge can also read media of a USB drive, and copying a file to a thumb drive or an external hard drive and then plugging into the Media Lounge is still faster and more efficient than burning a DVD. However, I really, really wanted to get it working with my network and was getting really, really pissed off.)
In desperation, I actually called tech support. The guy who answered started off okay, but as the call progressed he became more and more Indian and thus harder and harder to understand.
By the time I’d called I’d managed to get the Media Lounge to acquire an IP address, but I still couldn’t access my network.
After first telling me that there was something wrong with my router because it wasn’t assigning an IP in the correct range, which I dismissed because my computers work just fine with the IPs they have, he eventually concluded that the problem was an encryption mismatch.
(Also, per the instructions on the phone when I’d first called in, I’d installed Network Magic on Hugin. The network map it provided showed me that the Media Lounge was part of the network, even though it couldn’t access my network.)
He wanted me to check my router’s configuration to see what encryption level it was set at.
This was a problem because the last time I had a Verizon tech out, he changed the log in information for the router from the default and neglected to give me the new information.
From D-Link’s perspective, this was where the call ended, as there was nothing he could do.
From my perspective, this is where I found myself up a creek.
It was possible that I could reset the router to the default settings, but I was reluctant to do this, as the last time I’d done so I totally killed my Internet connection. Of course, that was actually not the direct result of the reset. When I reset the router it wasn’t able to reconnect to the Internet because my connection wasn’t built properly in Verizon’s network. The reset simply revealed this problem.
Even so, I was reluctant to attempt it, but finally concluded that it had to be done.
So I broke out a paper clip and pressed the reset button on the back of the router, then walked away for ten minutes, hoping to find a lit-up Internet light when I returned.
Luck, for once, was with me, and the Internet light was glowing green when I returned. I logged into my router, confirmed the encryption level, rebooted Hugin to force it to reconnect to Internet, and then prepared to call D-Link back to tell them that the encryption levels matched.
As I made my way downstairs to pick up the fully-charged phone (the other phone’s battery had died shortly after I actually got through to D-Link), I noticed that my TV, rather than telling me that it couldn’t find a DHCP server, was instead asking me to select a DHCP server from the list.
So I did, and when I clicked on the Media selection, I saw a list of all of the available media on my computer, and when I ran the Internet Connection Test it was actually successful.
So somehow amid the resetting I resolved whatever issue was preventing the Media Lounge from connecting.
And the whole “simple” process only took about 4 and a half hours.
But at least it’s working now, and it works very well.
Of course, the thing that had really gotten me to thinking about buying the Media Lounge is that I’ve invited Scott to come over tomorrow, since we both have the day off, to hang out and watch some DVDs.
I had something on my computer that I wanted us to watch, and I didn’t feel like burning a DVD, and didn’t want us to have to crowd around my computer to watch it.
So here’s where the bitter irony comes into play. After taking a break from messing with the wireless settings, I decided to simply copy the file onto my thumb drive so that we could plug it into the Media Lounge and watch it from there. However, when I tested it, the Media Lounge could only play back the video, as apparently the audio codec was unrecognized. I ran the file through Windows Movie Maker to create a new WMV file, hoping that it would correct this problem.
It did – kind of. When I watched the file (via streaming), the audio was present, but was choppy and weird sounding (people’s voices had sounded phlegmy and distorted), and as a bonus, the video was now messed up.
So in the end I had to burn a DVD anyway.
*Sigh*
Still, the end result of it all is that I can finally stream video, audio, and pictures to my TV, so I guess I need to take my victories where I can find them.
For a while now, especially since I bought the HDTV, I’ve wanted to have something that would allow me to stream content from my computer to my TV.
I also want to be able to do the reverse, which is why I plan to eventually buy a Media Center PC with Cable Card tuners so that I can do things like make screen captures from HD content.
However, that’s down the road (maybe tax time), so in the meantime, I decided to pick up one of these, along with an HDMI cable to connect it to the TV.
I got home, took it out of the box, hooked it up via the HDMI cable, turned it on, turned the TV on, set the TV to the correct HDMI input and waited.
And waited.
The TV kept insisting that there was no input detected. I kept insisting that there was.
The TV won the argument.
In a “Duh” moment, I realized that since the device didn’t actually come with an HDMI cable, it was probably not set by default to send a signal out via HDMI. I hooked up the attached S-Video cable, and voila!
It was a minor irritation, but proved to be a pale harbinger of what was to come.
The next step was setting up the network connection. This was guaranteed to be simple on the box, as all I needed to do was run the Wireless Connection Setup Wizard on one of my networked PCs and save the resulting information to a USB drive, then hook up the USB drive to the Media Lounge, which would read the configuration data and connect to my network.
That was the theory, anyway.
For the next several hours I attempted to put theory into practice with no success.
The Media Lounge was copying the configuration data, and my network could see that it was trying to establish a connection, but no connection was being created, and the Media Lounge was failing to grab an IP address from my router.
(I should note here that even if I never got it set up to work with my network, it would still be worthwhile, as in addition to being able to stream media wirelessly, the Media Lounge can also read media of a USB drive, and copying a file to a thumb drive or an external hard drive and then plugging into the Media Lounge is still faster and more efficient than burning a DVD. However, I really, really wanted to get it working with my network and was getting really, really pissed off.)
In desperation, I actually called tech support. The guy who answered started off okay, but as the call progressed he became more and more Indian and thus harder and harder to understand.
By the time I’d called I’d managed to get the Media Lounge to acquire an IP address, but I still couldn’t access my network.
After first telling me that there was something wrong with my router because it wasn’t assigning an IP in the correct range, which I dismissed because my computers work just fine with the IPs they have, he eventually concluded that the problem was an encryption mismatch.
(Also, per the instructions on the phone when I’d first called in, I’d installed Network Magic on Hugin. The network map it provided showed me that the Media Lounge was part of the network, even though it couldn’t access my network.)
He wanted me to check my router’s configuration to see what encryption level it was set at.
This was a problem because the last time I had a Verizon tech out, he changed the log in information for the router from the default and neglected to give me the new information.
From D-Link’s perspective, this was where the call ended, as there was nothing he could do.
From my perspective, this is where I found myself up a creek.
It was possible that I could reset the router to the default settings, but I was reluctant to do this, as the last time I’d done so I totally killed my Internet connection. Of course, that was actually not the direct result of the reset. When I reset the router it wasn’t able to reconnect to the Internet because my connection wasn’t built properly in Verizon’s network. The reset simply revealed this problem.
Even so, I was reluctant to attempt it, but finally concluded that it had to be done.
So I broke out a paper clip and pressed the reset button on the back of the router, then walked away for ten minutes, hoping to find a lit-up Internet light when I returned.
Luck, for once, was with me, and the Internet light was glowing green when I returned. I logged into my router, confirmed the encryption level, rebooted Hugin to force it to reconnect to Internet, and then prepared to call D-Link back to tell them that the encryption levels matched.
As I made my way downstairs to pick up the fully-charged phone (the other phone’s battery had died shortly after I actually got through to D-Link), I noticed that my TV, rather than telling me that it couldn’t find a DHCP server, was instead asking me to select a DHCP server from the list.
So I did, and when I clicked on the Media selection, I saw a list of all of the available media on my computer, and when I ran the Internet Connection Test it was actually successful.
So somehow amid the resetting I resolved whatever issue was preventing the Media Lounge from connecting.
And the whole “simple” process only took about 4 and a half hours.
But at least it’s working now, and it works very well.
Of course, the thing that had really gotten me to thinking about buying the Media Lounge is that I’ve invited Scott to come over tomorrow, since we both have the day off, to hang out and watch some DVDs.
I had something on my computer that I wanted us to watch, and I didn’t feel like burning a DVD, and didn’t want us to have to crowd around my computer to watch it.
So here’s where the bitter irony comes into play. After taking a break from messing with the wireless settings, I decided to simply copy the file onto my thumb drive so that we could plug it into the Media Lounge and watch it from there. However, when I tested it, the Media Lounge could only play back the video, as apparently the audio codec was unrecognized. I ran the file through Windows Movie Maker to create a new WMV file, hoping that it would correct this problem.
It did – kind of. When I watched the file (via streaming), the audio was present, but was choppy and weird sounding (people’s voices had sounded phlegmy and distorted), and as a bonus, the video was now messed up.
So in the end I had to burn a DVD anyway.
*Sigh*
Still, the end result of it all is that I can finally stream video, audio, and pictures to my TV, so I guess I need to take my victories where I can find them.
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