I must confess to running short of time to get this weeks’ column together so we’ll rerun one from April 2009.
The iPod has somehow made it into common usage and it doesn’t have but the one word on it – “MENU”. It’s got a couple of symbols too; but they usually just lead me to the wrong part of the aforementioned “MENU”.
I knew I was technologically challenged years ago. I’d go over to some friend’s house – friends whose seven or eight year old kids would be playing with their Nintendo or Atari. I’d ask them to give me a shot and within 1.6543387 minutes, without fail, they would tell me to give the controller back because it was hurting their brain watching anyone as bad as I was.
I never did get the hang of anything beyond maybe level 3 on Pong.
But the other day I was trying to burn some DVD’s of a home movie and every time the computer made another shiny disk, the DVD player would spit it out as unreadable.
Special K bought us a pretty fancy DVD machine a few years ago. The arm that it cost me has almost completely re-grown now. Anyhow this sucker is supposed to play anything and everything. I think the box said you could even play a PB&J sandwich on it too. Except I was having a deuce of a time getting it to read anything authored by my computer.
But there was hope! The DVD player would try to read the disk and after saying “NO SUPP” on its little digital display it would show a code -- C46.
I was able to figure out that the “NO SUPP” probably meant the machine didn’t support the disk as it had been written. All I had to do was to look up that C46 code in the manual and then I would have a pretty good clue on where I was going.
But no such luck – nowhere in the manual was a list of troubleshooting codes. ‘Troubleshooting’ didn’t appear in either the index or the table of contents. That’s shows how far technology has brought us – no more trouble is anticipated.
Anyhow I made one more try at burning another DVD the other night just before the Red Sox game was going to be televised. Of course it didn’t work and I wound up with thoughts of ‘burning’ a DVD player or computer or something.
I sat there considering that at least I could take a break and watch the game. I remembered it was on channel 46 on the Shaw cable and that’s when it all became clear to me. All that time the DVD player was unable to read the improperly written disc it would revert to the TV mode – playing, of course, on channel 46; hence the C46.
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Important late addition to the community calendar.
The Midway Partnership Fund (MPF) AGM Tuesday, May 6, 2014 at the Midway Curling Club at 7 p.m.
A representative from the Boundary Phoenix Foundation will be there with a short presentation about what Foundations can do for the community and what residents can do to help. The MPF distributes funds to projects that focus within the geographical area of the Village of Midway and are designed to benefit a maximum number of people in the Midway area.