Whenever I am optimistic and not expecting trouble, this state of oblivion
usually gets cut short, badly, when it rains problems.
On the other hand, if I expect bad things and worry, a lot less trouble
finds its way to me. This sucks.
(more...)
Juhuuuuh! Heute hat die Post endlich mein Weihnachtsgeschenk aus Ö vorbei
gebracht: Alle 19 Kottan-Folgen,
auf 8 DVDs.
Ah, Nostalgie pur. Böse Wiener Gfrasta. Inspektor gibt's kan. 70er Jahre Schädelweh-Tapeten. Danzer-Gstanzln. Ambros. Wunderbar.
Danke, liebe Frau Mutter!
Next Wednesday my daughter Cornelia is arriving in Oz, to spend
a fun and action-packed year 2008 with me. Well, let's hope the action
is of the Good Type...either way, there goes my independence.
In other non-news the weather still sucks completely, it's been so wet and humid over the last weeks that some of my leather gear (bike suit and mountain boots; what did YOU think?) started to get mouldy on the surface. This sucks.
Work sucks, too, with disorganized chaos worse than usual, even factoring in that it's the first week of the semester. But numbers are up, I have about 13 for the networking subject and about 7 for the Silly Subject. What I don't have is a correct timetable, exact enrolment figures, and fun. What I also won't have in two weeks' time is a clueful unix-savvy counterpart in the central it services dept, because that fellow is throwing in the towel.
Not that I can fault him at all; the management and marketing hordes have grown like mushrooms in the wet, while we peons are being kept like mushrooms.
Apropos mushrooms, it's been wet enough for quite some mushrooms to grow in my backyard. Some look very similar to small Parasol but I won't try them.
Should you end up with this cheap DVD recorder you'll note that by default it is region-crippled.
The thing has divx support, records to dvd and dvd-rewritables
and has vga-out, which is why I bought it for AU$130:
my Zensonic Z330 player is badly on the way out.
Region-lockout is at least close to breaching the law in this country and thus region-free gear is actually way more common - and legal.
Should you - like me - be very pissed off by the manual not saying anything about how to make the fellow region-free, don't despair. I voided my warranty by opening the box, found out that it uses a Mediatek MT8105DE chipset - and that on a no-name unidentifyable mainboard. No go so far.
However, looking around further I found out that the sequence Power on, Setup button, 8 1 0 5 gives you its internal system info screen (alas, with the region unchangeable). On a Hungarian board I found the crucial info that Setup, 5 0 1 8 gives you a menu with the region changeable (use 0 for any). Hit setup afterwards, power off and on again and everything works. (apprently the firmware is similar to another noname called chili/yanada dvr-8500x, for which i found the 5018 thing...)
This success helps at least a bit to offset the disappointment of lots of shite weather in the last 8 weeks (and counting). The farmers are happy, the dams fullish, the beaches are gone and the wind howls and/or it rains. Soon I'll have to develop gills and webbed fingers - unless the mould gets me before.
