flirting with unbelievability

This week, TV series Fringe had a man lock himself inside an airplane's bathroom before a virus transformed him into a humanoid hedgehog, including the 6 nipples. Agent Dunham twice had to strip down to go in the isolation tank so that she could tap into her dead boyfriend's memories that are stuck inside her skull.

I love Fringe. Still, it strains my suspension of disbelief when they show an airplane with such a roomy bathroom.

my new/old laptop

Now that my wife has a new laptop, I have inherited her old one, to use as I see fit. Here it now sits to the right, in my home office, next to my employer-provided laptop.



Some of my plans involved turning it into a DVD player, one that'd play movies from any region, or in any format that's out there, and with a good-sized screen. To achieve one of those goals, I bought an external DVD drive and, on Tuesday night, changed its region to Europe. Much to my delight, it played the British DVD of Jeff Wayne's musical of "War of the Worlds" without any glitch. Next day, I returned that DVD drive back. Why? It turns out that I don't need it after all. You see, Susan de Guardiola, who lives within the USA, had made some DVDs for me, but they were in a format that I couldn't watch on any of our home's laptops - or even on the player hooked to our TV. She suggested that I upload this software on my laptop:

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

She had told me that it could handle a great variety of formats. It definitely can. When I installed the software, on Tuesday night, I had no problem watching her DVDs, or regular pre-recorded DVDs, on my laptop's internal drive. A thought then occurred to me. Could it play a European DVD?

Yes.

All this to say, my many thanks for your recommendation, Susan!