Monday, January 15, 2007
Backfilled data for January 12. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Today's a university holiday. Errands and shopping with Patrick in Union Square. Snack: Blondie's pizza on Powell using free pizza and soda coupons from MacTank. We had never known that Blondie's had downstairs seating which is not very comfortable but at least the pizza is good. Stopped at the Visitor Information Center. Macy's (mens, the cellar, boys), H&M mens, The Gap, Office Depot, the video store, Safeway. Dinner at home with Patrick: grilled chicken boobs, steamed spinach with boiled egg, mediterranean curry couscous, bread and butter. We again tried watching The Da Vinci Code on DVD and again encountered errors. Like last time, the rental DVD failed to play properly in both OS X and Windows. In VLC (OS X), the disc froze again a few minutes into the film. DVD Player (OS X) played the film but with the volume jumping up and down arbitrarily at repeatable points in the film—we've experience this in the past and I have been unable to find a solution for it. PowerDVD (Windows XP) had the same freezing problem that VLC did. I ran a disc scan in Nero's CD-DVD Speed utility and it found many errors on the second line of scanning. I ran a complete disc quality scan at maximum speed and it gave a quality rating of zero—the lowest level. Only then did I think to use Nero's DriveSpeed utility to bring the drive speed down from 12X to 5X. A quick scan of disc quality at 5X found no errors, so on a hunch I ran the film again—by now it must have been 30 or 40 minutes after we had originally restarted the film this evening, but this resolved the problem—hooray! The film is mostly like the book, and I enjoyed it. Is the background behind the story fact or fiction? It really does not matter to me either way.