As attentive collective vultures probably already know, Bitscape's DVD player broke down in the middle of the week; all attempts to use undocumented magic to revive it failed. This prompted Bitscape to vow never to buy a Sony player again, and then begin a quest for a new player, one that would hopefully be of better quality and last much longer.

After reading people's comments about various brands and models, Bitscape (who sometimes talks about himself in the third person for no apparent reason) concluded that a Pioneer DV 440 would be an excellent choice. As of Thursday night, all the local retailers were completely sold out of that particular model. (But there were plenty of Sonys available. Yipee, another player that will break in a year! Hah.) The Best Buy sales guy thought that there might be more arriving Saturday morning. Bitscape concluded that he would return at that time, and if there were still none of the chosen brand available, he would go ahead and buy another suitable unit. (Toshiba, or maybe JVC.)

I mark this as one occassion when a Best Buy sales person was actually helpful. I went in at the crack of dawn this morning, and found the shelves stacked with plenty of Pioneer DV 440s. Snagged one, and happily paid US$159 plus the ridiculously high sales tax (>8%). It was one of the more expensive of the players Best Buy carried, but still significantly cheaper than what I paid 19 months ago when I bought my Sony. Welcome to the world of disposable DVD players.

Carted the player home, and within minutes, had the drop-in replacement pumping out Sarah McLachlan music. Played with it for a few minutes, and concluded that the functionality is more than adequate for my "needs" (as expected based on the reviews of others). The onscreen menus aren't as pretty as Sony's, and I miss my Sony remote. (That's the one thing Sony really did well; other manufactures could learn a LOT about how to design a good remote from Sony). If this player lasts longer, and doesn't sporadically skip and freeze after a year of use, I'll consdider it a worthwhile tradeoff.

I began to get the apartment in readiness, as I had invited the other family members over for breakfast. Mom, dad, and bouncing arrived, and proceeded to play some Monkeyball while I cooked Delicious Dish [tm, even though the title is a blatent ripoff]. After breakfast ("breakfast" being a relative term, since it was served at around 1300), hung out for a while, and dad used Dagobah to check his email since he currently has no ISP account.

Before he came, I queried bouncing about whether he had any mp3 cds, but he said he didn't have any on hand at the moment. (My player purportedly supports playing mp3 discs, but I don't have any here right now. It might be a feature that could come in useful at some undefined future occassion.)

It has come to my attention that I am once again in this mythical state of being "on vacation". It's more than just time off from work. It's a state of mind. I've already stated poking at the lounge code. I will neither confirm nor deny rumors (which I may have started) about the complete transition of Bitscape's Lounge into using xml/xslt for page rendering. Further, I will neither confirm nor deny rumors (which I may also have started) about possible features to be added to the Content Collective code. It's vacation. I'm relaxing, thank you!

In semi-related news, after a few regressions I noticed in 0.9.6, Mozilla 0.9.7 looks to be another rockin' release. The DOM inspector is a fun little toy. Go ahead, try it with this page. I dare you.

[Bitscape gets distrated RTFM about some of the less obvious settings on the player.]

Oh yeah, I was gonna see if this one will do VCDs. (Don't ask. Bitscape got a test VCD last week from Zan Lynx, which did not work at all in the Sony, even though that player theoretically supported the VCD format. (Zan Lynx thought it might have been because it was a CDR instead of a factory pressed disc.)) And what do you know. It actually works on this one. How nice. It's good to know you can play a format that virtually nobody ever uses in practice.

I'm feeling very lackadaisical this afternoon. I'm going to do my Christmas shopping at some point in the near future. Probably tomorrow.

After some thought, I've decided that I'm going to get back into the New Year's resolution game. (Oh boy, here we go again!) This time, in the hopes of coming up with things that are more realistic and measurable, I'm formulating them a little bit more in advance. I've got some general ideas, but not totally nailed down yet. Right now, I'll just say that my resolution for the vacation is to figure out exactly what the New Year's resolutions will be by January. It should be interesting.

Right now, I think it's time to watch some Babylon 5.