Last night, mere moments after I had finished yesterday's piece of "content", who might have entered the Louisville Compound? None other than bouncing, accompanied by the illustrious Scott.

Scott hung out at the compound, we discussed various matters, and probably laughed a little too hard when it came to the topic of press releases. What could be more hilarious?

I attempted to convince the not so avid content vultures to read the press release for themselves, they laughed at the thought of such "content". When I informed them that the press release included not only text, but a jpeg as well, the two jumped up instantly and darted to find a web browser.

In a shocking exhibit of nongeekiness, Festery was completely powered down when we entered bouncing's room. bouncing flipped the power switch. Before Festery finished booting, we went down to the Lair so the two non-farmers could observe the official news regarding this famous event first hand.

(Since I'm babbling about it, I may as well put up a link for anyone reading this later, and for those not paying attention to the Content Solutions fun.)

After more than a few laughs (leaving jokes themselves unrepeated at this juncture), Scott became distracted by the DVD setup, and revealed that he was a Kevin Spacey fan. We watched the American Beauty behind the scenes featurette, and some of the DVD commentary, and then relocated up to bouncing's room to find Festery ready to go. bouncing demoed some wacky web interface software he's been working on. (In Python, of course.) We watched some RealVideo of Phillip Greenspun's lecturing, and Scott proposed the idea of putting things on our websites which are "beyond content".

Such ideas were tossed around for a while, until shortly after 2100, bouncing suggested the possibility of food. We considered hitting one of the late night places, Scott called his brother to coordinate, and Scott's brother offered to buy pizza delivered to his house. He also revealed that he had just purchased a DVD player, and any titles we wanted to rent or bring would be welcome.

I threw a subset of my collection into my backpack, we jumped into Scott's car, and headed to Boulder. On the way, Scott told us of the wonders of his new job at Sun, where all the employees get to use Solaris, and nary a Microsoft "standard" is shoved down the throat of anyone. Oooooooh. Aaahhhhhhh.

We arrived on the scene, and Peter (yeah, I normally don't do real names without explicit permission, but since it's right there on the site... well...) showed us the setup. We hung out for a while, ordered the pizza (pepperoni + garlic... mmmmmm), and Peter demonstrated dictation into his PC with the ViaVoice software he had recently purchased.

The pizza arrived, and we decided it was time for the movie. I had displayed the available selection to the others, and they wanted to watch LA Confidential, which was fine with me, because I hadn't seen the DVD yet either. But when it was time to start the movie....

Peter's tv was most uncooperative. No matter what we did, the damn thing refused to switch input source. We tried S-Video. We tried the RCA video in jacks. Both of them. We tried messing with the settings. Switches, remotes, autoprogramming. The damn thing would only accept the input from the RF line.

Four computer geeks in one room, taking turns struggling, plugging and unplugging cables, flipping switches for nearly two hours. When one or two of us would get tired and frustrated, and stop to eat some pizza, someone else would jump back in and try to figure it out. We theorized that perhaps the option to use external video input had only been available on the tv's original remote. Such an option was nonexistent on the universal remote we had.

At one point, I had the thought to wire the DVD player to the VCR, take the coax cable out of the wall socket, and route it from the VCR to tv. In fact, I attempted it once during one of my runs, but either the VCR did not send a signal, or the tv had not, at that time, been properly setup to receive it. (Who knows, with all the configuration mangling that had been going on.)

Later though, bouncing attempted the same thing. And it worked. (I think I know what he did different, which was to actually push the "Play" button on the VCR to activate its signal, instead of my earlier approach, which consisted of hitting the TV/VCR toggle. More on that next paragraph.) A signal from DVD, to VCR, to tv! Tada! Nearly midnight, and it was up.

Upon the VCR's "play", there was quite the surprise waiting. Right smack near the white creamy end of a... how shall I put this? Okay, the direct way. Porn video. Peter suddenly realized why his absent roommate had not wanted to turn on the VCR during a previous occassion. That was quite the laugh. Good thing he hadn't been trying to get it working while the grandparents were visiting for Thanksgiving. lol.

Well, with the system finally working, and most of the pizza devoured, we proceeded to watch the film. LA Confidential. Good movie. Quality filmmaking. Blah blah blah. (Maybe I'll write more about it when my new should-be-working-very-soon-now movielog entry system is finished.)

After that, it was after 0200, and we were quite beat, and at least 3 out of 4 of us needed to get up and go to work in the morning. So Scott shuttled bouncing and I to his nearby temporary vehicle at the Tridog land. When I stepped into bouncing's temporary vehicle, I was almost overwhelmed by the hotel smell. It might have smelled even more like a hotel than a real hotel does!

After arriving back at the Compound, I considered typing content, but decided that would be futile at such an hour. Went to bed, and got my whopping 3.5 hours of sleep before waking up to go to work.

Obviously, for those who look at timestamps at least, the workday today was short. Quite happily (and maybe somewhat surprisingly, given my lack of sleep), I was in much better spirits today than earlier this week.

Even still, drowsiness was inevitable. So, I think I will now attempt to catch up a little of that sleep, and ponder the future of Enterprise Content Solutions. (Translation: A Content Solutions discussion in which the topic revolves around Star Trek.) Alrighty. Nighty night. I'll probably wake back up in a couple hours. Until then, let bliss reign.