Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Modern Love (sans Bowie)

I’ve been lamenting the loss of my combo VHS\DVD player for a few weeks, now. It stopped functioning in small pieces. Much like an elderly person slowly losing control of their faculties. The first thing it did was to refuse to read DVDs all the way through. This wasn’t too bad, since I could view my DVDs on my PC (which is a newer model with a decent LCD screen). But when the VHS player decided to take an extended holiday, that was just unacceptable. I have some tapes of obscure films that never made it to DVD release and I was not a happy camper. Especially since I’m cheap and my wife had informed me that the combo player was pretty expensive. However, I had failed to realize an important fact. The combo player was expensive when we first bought it, which was a few weeks just before the fall of the Roman Empire. Prices have changed, needless to say. I saw a good deal for about $70 on Overstock.com (highly recommended – they have great deals and $2 shipping across the board!). But, as it turned out, when I found myself at the local Wal-Mart Superstore, this past Saturday, I decided to check out what they had to offer. Sure enough, I found pretty much the same deal and loaded it into my shopping cart. However, something told me to turn around and take a look at the opposite shelving.

There sat my reason for praising the Modern Era. (not to mention marveling at how certain areas of technology will occasionally slip by me – affordable technology, that is – not the technology, itself). Here, we had the VHS\DVD combo units that allowed dubbing from VHS to DVD and visa-versa. Thus the clouds parted, the sun shone and the angels sang.
And YES, it wasn’t that expensive.

Once home, I was amazed at how user friendly the setup and user interfaces were. The first thing I did was to watch my “Castle of Blood” DVD. The one with the scenes removed for American audiences that appeared in their original French. Next up was the pièce de résistance. A VHS copy of “Return of Dracula” starring Francis Lederer with the original Chiller Theater intro (the newer one with the 6- fingered hand) that I effortlessly dubbed to a blank DVD. Life is good.

Yesterday, I decided to take the steps necessary to have my domain hosted at Host Monster, which seemed like a good deal. This was the first step in accomplishing two things. One was setting myself up on WordPress, which mentioned that I would have more options if I used my own site. The other is to actually set up my own personal website (like I had at one point in the dim recesses of the past). Who knows, a new adventure may await.

Next up – Has my domain transferred yet or do I have to come over there Mydomain.com?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home