A Short Letter Home: Beware the dark side

Sunday, June 04, 2006

Beware the dark side

I'm talking about the dark side of the TV screen here. We just ended a weeks long attempt to finish viewing the original Star Wars trilogy. You may recall that I had shown the kids Star Wars (I can't bring myself to call it "Episode IV".) back in February. That was just after we got our college supplied DVD player fixed. The kids loved it and showing them the subsequent films seemed like an obvious treat. However, Yau Neih thought that The Empire Strikes Back might be too intense for Ga Dai, so we planned on just letting her read the novelization when we got back to the States. However, I started to get a hankering to watch Empire and Return of the Jedi myself. After a limited amount of soul searching, I broke down and bought those two DVDs. The children of course, were quite anxious to watch them. Little did we know how challenging that would be.

The first glitch came when I tried to preview Empire to note the intense scenes. I popped the disk into my laptop, but the movie didn't even get off the planet Hoth before it started having spasms. It wasn't the first time I've had problems with a DVD in my machine, so I shrugged and moved over to the TV and DVD player. (I would have gone for that option first, but there's no place to plug in my headphones) The movie played fine and over time I was able to preview Empire and the first act of Jedi. So finally the big night came. The girls and I sat down, popped the DVD in the machine and let it roll. We enjoyed everyone's adventures on Hoth, but we no sooner got to Dagobah when the screen froze. In futility, I started punching buttons on the remote. I couldn't back up, jump forward or even access a menu. The only button that worked was the "Eject" button. The DVD tray obediently slid out of the machine. I then sent it back to it's place, but the machine merely thought a moment and then displayed the dreaded "ndisk" message on it's LED. The same message that it had been displaying back in February before we got it fixed. We tried to reload the disk a few more times, as well as trying other DVDs and CDs. No dice. Movie night was cancelled.

The first chance we got, we sent the DVD player back to the shop. Two students took it in for us. They had taken it in the last time--alone, since they thought that our presence would result in an automatic inflation in the repair costs. They left and later that afternoon they returned with a working DVD player. It didn't cost us anything since the repair guy couldn't find a problem. He had plugged the machine in and loaded up a DVD with nary a problem. I plugged it in myself and, sure enough, Empire loaded up just fine. I apologized to the students, thanked them, and then returned to the day's schooling. That evening the girls and I sat down, fired up the machine and watched the blasted "ndisk" message come up again. I ejected and reloaded the disk and this time it worked. We went to the scene where we had left off and gratefully watched the movie... for about ten minutes or so. Then the picture froze and I repeated my actions from the previous movie night. We all went to bed disappointed.

The machine went back to the shop the third time and this time they did something to it. We were getting impatient, so rather than relying overmuch on the students, we had them convey the problem to the tech and we picked the machine up ourselves. We brought it home and were able to sit down and enjoy the rest of the movie. There was great rejoicing.

The next Wednesday, we fired up the machine again and started watching Return of the Jedi. I didn't want the kids up overly late, so we just watched the action on Tatooine. We planned to watch the rest on Saturday, complete with snacks. Saturday afternoon soon came around and we got ready for the matinee. Yau Neih fried up some chau ze (or however you spell it) (I have no idea if it has an American equivalent--it's vaguely reminiscent of Fritos) and poured out some glasses of Pepsi. We popped in the DVD and watched... the flurshugginer "ndisk" message. I started poking at the machine and started using a technique which I nicknamed "voodoo". In this case "voodoo" is attempting to change random parameters in the hope that you might accidentally fix the problem. Something must have worked, because I was finally able to get it to accept the disk and start playing. This time I think we got almost an hour out of it. But then, as the rebel fleet came out of hyperspace and all heck broke loose on the planet below, the DVD player must have had too much Ewok action and once again froze up on us.

Further voodoo failed to work. I turned to my laptop, but it, too, let me down, refusing to play and freezing up on Tatooine. (Now there's a mixture of metaphors for you.) We gave up. Turned off our electronics. Started doing dishes. (Is there anything more calming than doing dishes.) Yau Neih suggested that we should attempt to borrow our neighbors DVD player and finish watching the film. That was a great idea, however, they had taken a weekend road trip and wouldn't be back until Sunday night. Still, it was a viable plan and we stuck to it until I remembered the computer in the English Department office. It's a brand new machine and I thought it just might have a DVD drive. By this point we were a mixture of desperation and pessimism. We decided to give the computer a try, but just in case someone else was using the machine, only Yau Neih went over. We didn't all want to venture over there only to get disappointed. So off Yau Neih went and a few minutes later we got a call. The computer was free!

When I got over to the office, I fired up the machine and popped in the disk. It asked if I wanted to install some such software. I initially tried to avoid it, but it's a Chinese machine and so I was limited when I tried to find an alternative. Whatever I installed, it worked fine and the screen was soon filled with the FBI warning that I had seen so many times in the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately, when the opening titles started, the audio didn't. I spent over an hour poking about trying to find sound settings. We even asked some students for help. I suspect that the DVD drive was never hooked into the sound card, but I wasn't about to pop the machine open to check. Finally, as dinner time descended upon us, we gave up and called it a day.

We drowned our sorrows in homemade french fries. The DVD itself worked fine on the school computer, so we held out hope that we could finish watching it on our neighbor's machine. After dinner and dishes, we ventured over to English corner. As we came to the apartment complex where the corner is held, we met up with Roxie and her kids. Roxie's another expatriate in town whose family had recently returned from the States. Her kids and ours have gotten into the habit of playing together while Ga Dai and I go to the neighborhood English corner. Anyway, Roxie asked us if we would mind if the kids went over to their flat to play indoors. Her husband was out of town and she couldn't both supervise her older kids playing outside and get her youngest one in bed. We, of course, said we had no problem with her proposal. But then the proverbial light bulb went off over Yau Neih's head. "Would your kids be interested in watching the last half hour or so of Return of the Jedi?" she asked. Well, it turned out that since her kids had seen Jedi long ago, they were quite amenable to the idea. So we went off to English corner while Ga Dai went chasing home to fetch the DVD.

To end the tale, the DVD worked fine in Roxie's DVD player and my kids had the joy of finally seeing the end of the longest trilogy on Earth. And there was great rejoicing.... then again, I never got to see those added scenes at the end of the film....