Brickbats
Oh what the hell, it’s been over a week. Brickbats to all those questions people ask on mailing lists that never get answered. About half my technical problem Google searches find endless questions that match my problem and have zero replies. (Of the rest, a quarter have no relevant matches and the rest have answers. God bless that 25%, it’s what keeps people’s snide "http://www.google.com/" answers in business.)
I’m trying to play a particular DVD at the moment, a DVD of Andrew’s and my first scuba dive which we bought for some appropriately ludicrous price. It’s, unfortunately, not a known good DVD because we haven’t had access to a known good player to test it on. A DVD that doesn’t work under Linux can hardly be called ‘known bad’. At present attempting to read it (or even insert it, thanks to the automounters) causes all associated processes to block on a minute long read timeout. This is not a problem I have with other DVDs, but I think all my other DVDs are region 4. Region locking is currently a bit beyond my ken but it’s the only reason I can think of aside from the DVD being bad.
We do actually have a DVD player authorised by The Man, but sometime during the three months we were away the drawer got jammed. (And my BIOS lost the primary IDE channel, and Andrew’s video card started failing to respond on most boots. Technology gets lonely.)
Job hunting
I haven’t started (I’ve only been back for two days) and I need to. Why I am always cursed with a December unemployment?