A Hopefully Sucessful Day

At last! Something has transformed me today that has enabled me to retain information. Whilst I don't want to peak too soon and now have to concentrate on learning all of the other stuff, I am somewhat impressed that I have achieved what I initially thought to be impossible. Now all I have to do is keep that information tucked up inside my head - somewhere readily accessible - whilst cramming a little bit more in without dislodging what is already there. In fact before I even get the chance to do that, I have to get through the night without forgetting it all. Sometimes I swear the information in my brain that there is not enough room for gets shoved out of my ear and absorbed by my pillow - like some sort of really bad archiving system whereby anything archived can never be retrieved.

Perhaps if I follow the events of today again tomorrow, I will have a similar amount of success? Seeing as today consisted of taking a short walk to the shops, spending yet more money on food, watching a film, a little bit of work, some procrastination, some more work, and eating, I think I can probably manage that again tomorrow. In case you were interested, my film of choice was Star Trek XI and I have now realised that watching it on the small screen is so very different to watching it at the cinema. I suppose it has the slight disadvantage that this was a film I saw at the IMAX and so even seeing it at a cinema would have been an inferior experience but it really highlighted the need to see these sorts of films at the cinema because they simply don't translate to the small screen very well. I suppose the alternative is to buy a whopping great screen and surround sound speakers to go with it but I have neither the money nor the room to buy either of those so for now, this will have to do.

The frustrating thing about watching this film was two-fold, the first came when the DVD player refused to respond to the remote control. I went to use it to watch last weeks episode of Heroes on it but without the remote control, you cannot operate the USB input on it. After lots of scrabbling around and pointlessly searching my room for the aforementioned remote control, I came to the conclusion that it had been left in Birmingham. To be honest, I'm surprised that was the only thing I forgot but thankfully my mum came and saved the day by posting it.

This was the first time I had used it since it's trip through the Royal Mail network and so my initial thoughts (after checking the batteries) was that it had been damaged in transit. It isn't as if it an easily replaceable remote either, universal remotes rarely have a USB button and that's if they even had the brand of the player in the code book in the first place - also unlikely. After playing about with it for a bit, it suddenly decided to start working again - with the original batteries - and after a bit of loading, commenced playing... with no sound. There are a limited number of codecs that the device supports and whilst it seems to be alright with the video, the sound can be a bit hit and miss. This time was a definite miss which meant re-encoding the whole film before I could play it - a task that took half an hour! Still it worked after that so all is now well. Next time I might remember to check the codec before I plan to watch anything. Who am I kidding, that'll never happen!