Wednesday 03/06/2024
Today was laundry day so I did that.
Last night Kass was to run the Tuesday night movie, a DVD. In the afternoon yesterday I went down and walked her through the process. The DVD should have played, it had a few very light scratches and I cleaned it of all finger prints. We ran the first five minutes and all looked fine.
This morning I got an email from Kass describing the disaster. Ten minutes into the movie, the Tascam player stopped, and restarted itself from the beginning. And then did that again. Ian was in the audience so he stepped in, and tried to run the DVD with different hardware: a laptop that we keep in a cupboard with an Apple external DVD player. But he couldn’t make that work. So the movie was canceled and the audience went away.
This is not the first time the Tascam player has barfed on an older DVD. Maybe the third? Anyway something has to be done. I remembered that I have a Blu-Ray player that I took from the 11th floor when I replaced it a few months ago. It’s sitting in my closet. So let’s use that for older DVDs. I took it down to the auditorium where I found Ian just reproducing the setup that failed for him last night, and of course today it worked. But the old Blu-Ray also worked. It’s easy to set that on the AV desk and patch it into the projector with an HDMI cable. So we put that in the AV cabinet backstage and Ian will use it on Saturday when he is due to play an opera DVD. Those opera DVDs are all from the private collection of our opera enthusiast and are not in great shape, so that will be a good test.
Other than that I practiced guitar a lot today. I am trying to learn “If I Had a Hammer” which turns out to have a fairly tricky chord sequence. I went through four YouTube tutorials before finding one that looks learnable. Lots of practice time to come.
Codgerville 