DVD troubleshooting

A few months ago we got a new DVD player for the library, courtesy of the Friends. New, not refurbished. Good brand. Blu-ray, although we don't carry any Blu-ray DVDs at present, as far as I know. I was at my desk, working on tomorrow's class on Windows Files & Folders, when a little after 1 PM one of my co-workers came in, obviously frantic. She had been trying to get the Wednesday afternoon movie started, and it refused to play. It played all the previews and other preliminary material, but when it got to the Play, Scene Select, etc., menu, it simply would not continue. The remote wasn't working, and apparently the controls on the player didn't work, either.

First I satisfied myself that all the connectors were still connecting, and the DVD was seated properly and not jammed, and didn't have any scratches. It's a brand new DVD, hardly been out yet except to staff, and we hold back any movies that are going to be shown at the Wednesday matinee for about 2 weeks beforehand, just to make sure we have it when the time comes. Everything looked okay. Why can't we get beyond the menu screen?

Next I tried playing it from our staff laptop. That should work, right? But it didn't. Windows Media Player complained about not having the rights to play it (? didn't write the error message down--no time--do it later) and threw the ball over to another DVD player application. That program complained, too, and exited. So I tried WMP again, which played after I acknowledged about half a dozen error messages as before.

Except there was no audio output. I think that something about the DVD was signaling Windows that maybe perhaps possibly the user was trying to copy this DVD, and a copy with a picture but no audio is pretty useless, so that's the defense against copying. Or maybe it was because I was using both the VGA output and the audio output on the computer? But I wasn't trying to copy it--I was just trying to play it. And there are a lot of people out there who are watching DVDs on their computers--either feeding the a/v out to a flat panel television, or just watching from the screen on the computer, with a couple of external speakers for better audio. I'm not quite there yet, but I moved in January and still haven't set up my little bookshelf stereo. I listen to radio via streaming audio--and am able to listen to stations that would be impossible to hear otherwise. And I listen to music CDs or download music from Amazon in the form of MP3 files. It's all converging, which is a story for another time.

By this time my co-worker who runs the Wednesday matinee had apologized, turned up the lights, and put the chairs back where they were. Most of the patrons had left. I took another look at the DVD--a closer look this time--and clearly saw a fingerprint on the outer edge. I took it over to the sink, moistened a paper towel, put a drop of dishwashing liquid on the towel, and carefully wiped the DVD from the center to the edge, all around, twice. Then I rinsed it off and blotted it dry with another paper towel, popped it into the DVD player, used the Play button on the player to advance it, and it went right into play mode. I ran upstairs and caught three of the matinee people who were still hanging around, and they were able to come back and enjoy the movie after all.

The remote control undoubtedly needs fresh batteries--I think it was sill running on the original batteries from when we got it, and it's been noticeably losing range the last few weeks. Unfortunately we didn't have any fresh AAAs handy--we will from now on. But I'm pretty sure that wasn't the only problem, because two other people before me had tried to operate the DVD player from the on-board controls. With two points of failure--the dying batteries and the dirty DVD--it took longer to isolate the real problem because there were more factors that had to be methodically eliminated. But, as Bill Landesberg, my boss at T-bar, used to say, "Science is once again vindicated!"

Google celebrates 20th anniversary of Hubble

Google celebrates the 20th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope this week.

I didn't work on the Hubble, but I did work on the mirrors for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, made at the same company under a different name. Hughes-Danbury Optical Systems, and other NASA contractors, surely learned a lot of lessons after the error in the Hubble mirror was discovered. In true engineering fashion, they tracked down the root causes of the error and put into place procedures that would eliminate such errors in future products. Chandra, known during development as AXAF, was the best, most rational engineering project I ever worked on, before or since. No dramas, no crises, no heroics, just calm, methodical engineering design, development, and testing. Lots of testing. And lots of documentation. And it paid off.

http://chandra.harvard.edu/about/top_ten.html

Health Insurance Reform Quiz

Here's a feature of the New York Times that I never knew about until today. I'm not sure what grade level it's aimed at, but I guess junior high or high school. Here's a 10-question true/false quiz to test yourself on how well you know some of the key points in the bill that was signed on Tuesday.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/learning/pdf/2010/20100323healthreformTFquiz.pdf

Here's a lesson plan on ‘The Reality of Reform’: Understanding the Health Care Law:

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/the-reality-of-reform-understanding-the-health-care-law/

Try the quiz first. When you're done, go back to the lesson plan, compare your answers with theirs, and look up the explanations.

First class in downloadable audiobooks

Well, there's nothing like trying to teach a subject to learn more about it yourself. Monday I had my first class in downloadable audiobooks, trying to squeeze a 4-hour class into an hour and a half. (Actually it ran over another half an hour.) One of the attendees brought an iPod, which she has had for a year, and on which she already had many hours of music that she doesn't want to lose. She has a Windows PC at home. Is it safe to assume that the iPod is formatted for Windows, since she has been syncing it with a Windows PC? How would I/she find out for sure?

I'm thinking that going forward, I will alert iPod users when they sign up for the class, that if their iPod isn't already Windows-formatted, and if they don't want to have to reload all their music, they would be better off buying a cheap MP3 player for their audiobooks. Inconvenient, I know, but not as inconvenient as having to reload all their music.

The other thing I learned is that it's essential to have the latest version of Windows Media Player installed. I used to know this, but forgot it when I was planning the class. None of the laptops I used for the attendees was up to date, and didn't recognize the players when they were plugged in. Lucky for me, the other two attendees were both staff members, and thus more forgiving than a member of the public might have been.

Here's yet another thing I used to sort of know and already forgot. My Sansa Fuze was not being recognized by my computer here at the library. Well, it was, sort of, but then I'd get an error message that it might not be usable. Didn't have any trouble with any of the Sansa Clips I've used here. I've been playing with a USB camera, but I don't know if that's related, or just a coincidence.

The Fuze has three USB modes: MTP (Media Transfer protocol), MSC (Mass Storage Class), and Auto (try MTP and fall back to MSC if it doesn't work). Here's the best description of the problem and the solution that I found, and it did work. Except that I've left the Fuze in MTP mode.

http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=sansafuse&thread.id=2623

We're trying to help. Honest!

But sometimes it seems we're just making things more complicated for them. I had a visitor from out of town come in today to try to pay her bill (due in 2 days). She'd been in town much longer than she anticipated (maybe because of last week's storm?) and she needed to go in person to a branch of HSBC Bank. She usually pays by phone (or online, it wasn't clear). Except that she left her PIN at home. In Buffalo. And there are no branches of HSBC in NH. Or MA. But their website doesn't tell you that--half an hour wasted trying to find one that way. There is a physical branch in Buffalo--three, in fact--so I gave her the phone numbers of all 3 and suggested that she try to get a real person and [re]establish banking by phone with them. It was like the dreaded "what's my email password?" question, but worse.

Fake AP Stylebook

http://twitter.com/FakeAPStyleBook

Can you view that even if you're not logged in to Twitter? I hope so.

Amazing Libraries

Two sets of photos of Amazing, Beautiful Libraries from Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/amazing-libraries