The New Road

Dying on the warranty

Yesterday when I was watching Megan I wanted a little time to fix lunch. So I figured I would set her up with a movie. I went to the DVD player in the living room and tried DVD after DVD but it rejected them all. Clearly the machine was broken. Since DVD players are so cheap I decided to just get a new one instead of fixing this one. I looked at the Sony site, found what I wanted, called the Good Guys and they had it in stock so Megan and I drove over to get it.

When I got there parking was a disaster with all of the Holiday shopping. We finally got in and I immediately told the sales guy exactly what I wanted. As he rang us up he found that we had bought the previous DVD player there exactly two years and one day before. So the malfunctioning player had died the day after it's manufacturers warranty had expired.

Turns out we have extended coverage on that one. So I'll take it back, get it fixed and sell it on Craig's List.

The new DVD player is slightly better. It has a five disc changer so that we can put a bunch of Megan DVDs in there and just have them on call. I think the picture quality is a little better as well.

Speaking of DVDs, if you have a Mac and a DVD, CD or book collection you should have a look at Delicious Library. It's an well designed DVD catalog program that has one very compelling feature. If you have an iSight reader you can use it as a barcode scanner to read in the disc UPC codes. With the UPC code in hand it will get all of the data about the disc from Amazon, including the picture, and put it up on your virtual shelf. You can then specify that the book is loaned out, and even when the person you loaned it to should return it. I was able to do all of our DVDs in about three hours. It only failed lookup on about a dozen. Given the size of our collection that is very good. Manually punching in the dozen proved to me that doing it without the barcode scanner would have taken days.