Unrelated to my computer process that has gone quite swimmingly, I’ve been attempting to re-watch the fifth season of LOST in preparation for the final season that starts at the beginning of February. I have all five seasons of LOST on Blu-Ray discs. This is my first purchase of a TV show on Blu-Ray. Except for that re-buy of ‘Firefly’, but that’s a different story. These LOST discs are supposed to have this cool function called ‘Season Play’ that will keep track of wherever you are in the series, episode-wise, and will restart you wherever you left off even if you had removed the Blu-Ray disc and watched something else along the way. That’s what it’s supposed to do, but mine never has worked right. But the discs will play the episodes just fine and all my other Blu-Ray discs have worked just fine as well.

While was organizing files on my computer and waiting for drives to copy and such, I decided to search and see if there was a solution to the problem I was having with the LOST discs. It appears that people with Samsung Blu-Ray players (which I have) can have problems depending on what model and what firmware they have going. Of course, I can’t for the life of me find my manual for my player so I can look at what model I have. (And I’m not going out to my storage closet to look at the empty box in this weather… at least not yet.) But I am reading how some people are having really bad problems with their players, to the point where they won’t play any Blu-Ray discs at all anymore. I use mine much more for regular DVD’s and the built-in Netflix Streaming functionality, which I’ve had no problems with. But a player not playing the discs it was made for seemed way odd.

I decided I would investigate this more tomorrow and for now, after watching Ohio State pull out a victory for the Big Ten in the Rose Bowl, would just watch some more LOST. Apparently my player has been watching what I read online (it is network-enabled) and now won’t play the exact same disc of LOST I was watching earlier, nor will it play any of my Blu-Ray discs. Awesome.

So now I have to figure out what model it is and where my info is about it and see what I can finagle to try and fix it. BLEH.

Update: Figured out that I have a Samsung BD-2550 player and was able to reset the player (held down the >>| key for 5 seconds) and it is now reading the LOST disc again. As for fixing the ‘Season Play’ issue, that’s for tomorrow, or another day.

I ran a disk recover software all night to see if it could find anything. There is a glimmer of hope, but I think the structure and organization and months of work into my extensive iTunes library is gone. As well as my back up of my entire iPhoto library. Thankfully I did put a lot of my photos on flickr as a backup, but man. All the organization. It makes me sick.

Backup your backups people.

This time I’m going to be moving it to WordPress, so I may break every link on here and things might be all wonky for a few days… but I will return!

Something for the Firefox/Verizon user subset of readers. I went over my minutes last month, something that I hadn’t done in a very long time. Hopefully this will help. I know, I know #646, but I always forget to do that, and I spend a lot more time looking at my web browser than at my cell phone.

For those Firefox users out there (and that should really be all of you, unless you’re rockin’ Safari) who like to tweak their settings a bit. I found this really useful as I’m always trying to see as much of a web page without having to scroll. I didn’t condense quite as much as the author because I use the web developer toolbar, but going from four toolbars to three was satisfying for me on this Wednesday morning.

Most Played Songs (since my last system reboot)

Highest Rated/Favorite Songs

The highlight of MeeVee.com for me so far is that you can schedule a show for the whole season, anytime there is a new episode, it will show up in your planner. That’s so perfect.

Its still in beta and there are some improvments that I could think of, so I filled out their online survey and a handy feedback form and we’ll see what happens down the road.

Thanks to Lisa for pointing this site out to me.

The 20 minutes or so I spent on here this morning, have been my most productive so far. I’m very scattered about everything else right now, both work and personally. I’m going to run home for lunch and try to refocus my brain.

We go to lunch in 10 minutes and we’ll probably play cards. Great. Since I already played 6 hands of solitare this morning. If its not fixed after lunch, I’ll be back to catch up on some more of the books I’ve read lately.

It felt like I was in prison this afternoon at work. Our network ended up with some stupid virus that cause all the Windows machines to shut themselves down and restart every few minutes. We ended up having to turn our computers off completely and just wait for tech support to fix it. Of course, no timeframe for this fix was given. Some people figured out that if you unplugged your machine from the network, you could work on local files. Not that I really have any local files since most things I work on are out on our web servers and that requires a connection, but I thought I could backup some things or do something, but no, the ethernet cable on the back of my machine was totally jammed in and I could not get it out. So I gave up and spent nearly two hours really doing nothing at all. I had already cleaned my cube last week. There was nothing left to label or organize. I played some solitare and amazingly won after only the third game. I bounced my red rubber stress ball for awhile. David and I even played catch for a few minutes. It was ridiculously boring. And the fact that we had to just stay there all afternoon with nothing to do was so annoying. Towards the end of the day several of us were standing around discussing tv shows on dvd. The tech support chick showed up at my cube to apply some patch five minutes before my work day ended. When I left, she was under my desk trying to figure out how to get the network cable loose. I hope she didn’t rip my network card out or screw up my machine.

What is the lesson in all of this? While most of the company frittered away an entire afternoon of work, all our web designers and entire publications department kept working away, no problems at all. Why was this?

Because they all use Macs.