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The End Of An Era
The End Of An Era
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=8487#post8487
Well, it's finally happened. I fought it as long and as hard as I could, but I finally had to admit defeat.
As of April 25th, my days of listening to cassette tapes in my car are over.
Back in late February, the tape player that was in my car (a 2001 Chevy Lumina) gave out on me, and it didn't take me long to find out that, A. There's nobody who repairs them anymore, and, B. Nobody makes new ones anymore, therefore, C. There was no way to replace it.
So, with no other options left, I decided to replace the tape player with the cheapest quality CD player I could find, plus some new rear speakers, since the original ones had given out about a week before the tape player did. So I took it to a place in Oliver Springs, and they put in a new Sony Xplod CD player and new rear speakers, back on the first week of April.
Now my thinking, all along, was that, once I got the CD player, I could simply get an auxiliary cord and hook my Walkman up to it, and go ahead and listen to tapes that way, when I wanted to. So, for that reason, I made sure to get a CD player that had an auxiliary port on the front of it. I even managed to convince my Mom to pay for the auxiliary cord, so that I wouldn't have to use my own money.
So, on the 23rd of April, I made it a point to leave a little early. I was going to see the movie, OBLIVION, at a local theater, but I knew that, if I left about ten minutes early, I would have plenty of time to pick up the cord at Radio Shack before the movie started. I brought the Walkman with me, to show them the size of the hole, but, all this time, I was still confused about which hole the damn thing plugged into. I had called the place, earlier, trying to explain what it was I needed, calling the thing a "DC adapter" to begin with, but the guy I talked to corrected me, calling it an "auxiliary cord". I had been assuming, though, the whole time, that the hole marked "DC in" was the one it plugged into, being a much smaller hole than the green one with the picture of the headphones by it. Had I been thinking, I would've realized it was the other one, since what I wanted was SOUND, and since the sound normally came through the headphones, once I unplugged them, the whole point would've been to plug the cord from that hole to the auxiliary port on the CD player, so that the sound would come through the car's speakers.
But, aside from just my brain not working right, it was a cute little gal with red hair and glasses who waited on me, and she had such kind, gentle eyes, that I just melted. I wanted to snuggle at her feet like a big, 400-pound puppy.
So, although I told her, very clearly, that what I wanted was an auxiliary cord, I pointed to the "DC in" port in the back, rather than the headphone port. She tried to ask me whether I wanted an auxiliary cord or a DC input, so I said "DC input", assuming that this chick knew what she was talking about, and the dude I had talked to on the phone didn't. Now, grant it, if she had said "power cord" instead of "DC input", then I would've said "auxiliary cord" instead. My heart was crying out to her for mercy, but those two words would've snapped me out of my reverie pretty damn quick. I knew I didn't need a power cord. I didn't want to plug the damn thing into the wall. I wanted to plug into my car stereo. But "DC input" sounded too much like what I thought I wanted.
But, anyway, she got me the damn "DC input", which turned out to be nothing but a fucking power cord, and, when I had gotten home with it, and looked at it, I knew it was the wrong thing. I didn't even have to open the box. I knew by the picture on the side of it that it was a power cord. It had cost me almost all of the $20 my Mom gave me to cover the cost of it, so I knew that, once exchanged for what I actually needed, she would be getting some money back. So I managed to convince my Mom to go ahead and take it back and exchange it for me a day and a half later. She brought me back the auxiliary cord, and sure enough, she had a lot of change coming back. When I looked at the receipt, the auxiliary cord only cost $7.98, so she got about $12 back, which she kept for her trouble.
So, that night, I tried the cord out. It worked fine. But the Walkman didn't. When I first hit "Play" it worked for about five seconds, and then the daisywheels stopped turning. So I took the tape out, put it back in again, and tried a second time. Still didn't work. Then, remembering how a Walkman will sometimes act when it's going bad, I pushed down hard on the "Play" button, and squeezed the damn thing from the back. That worked. The tape had TENNESSEE, USA! on one side and part of a bootleg CD-R of THE HOBBIT, ---basically the entire soundtrack of the 1978 Rankin-Bass cartoon version. dialogue and all---on the other side. By the time the first song, "My Tennessee", had finished, I had managed to fix it so that I was controlling the volume on the CD player instead of the Walkman, and had it at the level that I wanted. But the moment I pulled out of the driveway, the damn thing stopped working again!!! When I stopped at the end of the road I live on, to get ready to turn, I went through the whole routine again, but nothing worked. The damn thing was fucked.
I had simply forgotten how fucked up the Walkman was, it had been so long since I'd used it last, back in 2001. What happens to them, when they go bad, is it's like the batteries don't make good contact with the metal that they're supposed to be touching. And they don't make THEM anymore, either. So I'm fucked.
Not only that, but I think the cassette deck that I've got hooked up to my Kenwood stereo system has about shot its wad as well. It's a Sony dual-cassette deck that my grandpa got me back in 2000, to replace the original Kenwood unit when it gave out.
Back in mid-April, my Dad found a big, white bag full of about a hundred cassette tapes up in my grandpa's barn, that had been setting there for at least 20 years or so. I tried to play a number of themover on the side that records, but they all sounded warpy, including some of the newer-looking ones that shouldn't have. So I tried one of them on the play-only deck, and it sounded alright. You see, what I would do, a lot of times, is, when I was playing a tape, I would pause it, and leave it paused for not only hours, or days, but weeks at a time. In other words, I treated the "Pause" button on the cassette deck pretty much like the "Stop/Resume" function on a CD player. No doubt it fucked up the motor. But, at first, it seemed like the play-only deck was working alright, but, after pausing a tape for a mere few hours, it started sounding warpy, too. So now I'm starting to think that it's gone bad, too. No idea whether they're still making them or not. I'll have to look into it.
But the bottom line is this: I'm an analog guy stuck in a digital world. And IT JUST FUCKING SUCKS. Used to be, when you wanted to make a mix tape, all you had to do was find the track on the record or CD and record it. You'd buy the record or CD, play it, then tape your favorite tracks. And, yes, you had to pay for the cassette tapes, but you only had to pay for the MUSIC once. Nowadays, unless you have the technical know-how to find and download the tracks for free, without getting ZOG on your ass, you end up having to pay just to listen to the damn tracks.
For instance, I've got this song, "Beulahland", on a CD by Billy Ray Reynolds, and I'd like to include it in the mix of songs that I want played at my memorial service, when I die. But how would I go about doing it? Well, first of all, I'd have to load the CD into my computer and, somehow, create an MP3 file of the song. But I'd have to do the same thing with all the other songs, from the various CDs that I put on the original tape, back in early 2009, and I'd have to put them all in the proper order that I wanted them to be played in. Then I'd have to either burn it all to a CD, so that it could be played on a CD boombox, when the time came, or, otherwise, I'd have to get an MP3 player, and, somehow, transfer my file from the computer onto that. Complicated as hell. Just a copper-plated bitch. Things were a LOT easier the old way.
It's just a bunch of bullshit. Even in a record store, you can usually listen to the CD for free before you decide whether you want to buy it or not. But ZOG expects us to pay money just to find out whether we like some band or artist or not. If we do, well, we can go ahead and burn a CD for ourselves, but, if not, WE'RE FUCKED. We just paid money for a stupid fucking MP3 file that doesn't even exist in a physical form, and we can't even trade it to somebody else for something we might like better unless we go ahead and burn the CD. It's a fucking joke.
But, at any rate, since I've been living down here, (20 years, as of June 25) every car I've had has had a tape player in it. The Oldsmobile Calais. The Buick Skyhawk. The Pontiac Grand Prix. Even the Chevy Lumina I've got now initially had one. The last car I had with a CD player in it was the 1979 Camaro that I wrecked on April 23, 1993. And even it hadn't come with one it. Not sure what kind of sound system the previous owner had had in it, but, whatever it was, he took it out before I got it, and all the speakers with it, the prick. We had to take it to a place in Oak Ridge to get them to put in the CD player I had had in my Dad's old Monte Carlo, which I had wrecked in September of '91, and we had to buy some speakers from them to put in it, too. (I sold that CD player to a friend of mine, years later.) So, if I had just waited a couple of weeks to have the guys in Oliver Springs put the new CD player into the Lumina, it would've been EXACTLY 20 years that I'd gone without having a car with a CD player in it. So, like I say, it's the end of an era.
What can you do? Just add it to my long list of reasons to hate ZOG, I guess. GODDAMN JEWS!!! THEY TOOK MY CASSETTE TAPES AWAY FROM ME!!! GRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!
************************************************** ********
Well, in a related note, thought I ought to mention that, while the keyboard I'm typing these words on is still the same one that I've had since November of 2003, it is now hooked up to a different computer.
What happened was, on April 22, my old computer just basically quit working. It started turning up 404 errors, no matter what I did, so I called Comcast the next day, to try and see if they could track it down, if the problem was on their end, but I was pretty sure what had happened. I had stupidly gotten rid of my antivirus firewall last summer, and somebody had made me their little cyber-bitch. Sure enough, the Comcast people said that it wasn't anything on their end, and I knew the modem had been working OK, so it wasn't that.
So, I unplugged the computer, and, two days later, my Mom took it to this guy in Oak Ridge who works on them. It was so dirty on the inside that the fan had stopped turning, and there were a lot of viruses on it, too. But, even after he fixed all that, he found that it was still running slow. So he had some extra memory that he tried to put into it, and, when he did, it fried the motherboard. Guess it was so old it just couldn't take it. :-/
So he went ahead and replaced my old computer with a newer one he had laying around that his nephew had been using to play video games on. He transferred all my files to it.
Then, when I got it home, and tried to plug it back up, most of the stuff was the same as the other, so I didn't have much trouble. But the cord to the printer was stretched so far, the only way I could make it hook up was if I went ahead and set it down on the desk and scooted it back a couple of inches. Fair enough. But, then, the shadows in that damn corner made it too hard to see where to plug in the last few remaining cords. So, I got my Mom to come down, thinking, since she's only 5'5" and skinny as a rail, she would be able to maneuver a lot better in that dark little corner than I ever could, and I could go ahead and hold the flashlight for her. Turned out, though, a couple of the cords didn't even have any ports that fit them, so we just didn't bother with them.
So, we went ahead and turned it on, to test it, and, although it took forever to start up, it did seem to be working alright, although the graphics were all fucked up. Everything was five times as big as normal. So, once we got things started, Mom just went ahead and went home, so I ended up having to call the guy and get him to walk me through it. Thankfully, he was home, and was a good sport about things. Between the two of us, we got the graphics straightened out, changed my default page to Comcast, (his nephew had set it to Cartoon Network) and figured out that the printer driver software had installed successfully.
I've been using it ever since, and haven't had any trouble. Runs a LOT faster than the old one.
************************************************** ********
Bad news on the VHS to DVD machine front, though.
A week ago, yesterday, I did about a three-and-a-half hour-long video rant, which I thought had recorded. But, when I tried to hit "Stop" on the remote, at the end of it, it just basically ignored me. It took like twelve times before anything showed up on my TV screen.
By then, I knew something was up, so I got up to check it out. When I tried to bring up the main menu screen by pushing the "Direct Navigator" button, the damn thing wouldn't budge, no matter how many times I pushed it. Then, when I tried to turn the unit off, manually, it wouldn't let me do that, either. The damn thing had frozen up on me. :-/
Now, I had had somewhat similar experiences with the machine before. From time to time, it would just act weird like that. I'd be playing a movie, and the damn thing would just freeze up. The only thing you could do was unplug it, wait a few seconds, and plug it back in, then, after it re-started it would do alright.
So, I did that, and, sure enough, it started back up, but here's what got me: I knew I had been ranting for AT LEAST THREE HOURS, and, probably, more like three-and-a-half. Now, when I started the rant, the time remaining on the disc was "3:08": three hours and eight minutes. That's what it said on the unit. Now it said "3:07"!!! Instead of recording for three hours and eight minutes, it had only recorded for ONE MINUTE. :-/ It was like it had gotten the first twenty or thirty seconds of me talking, right at the beginning, and then the last few seconds from when I started pushing "Stop", right at the end. Damnedest thing. I didn't know whether to blame the batteries in the remote or what.
But, by this time, a thing was flashing on the screen, saying that it might've damaged the disc, and to click "OK" on the remote and it would re-start and check. That's the same thing that the unit I had had before, that LG piece of shit, that I got rid of in late May of 2011, said when it started fucking up. That pissed me off no earthly, needless to say, because I knew that if it had damaged the thing, it was the unit's fault, and none of mine. Not exactly like I could've seen it coming. But, I went ahead and pressed "OK", and the damn thing turned itself off and re-started. So that proved there was nothing wrong with the remote. It checked the disc, and, thankfully, there hadn't been any damage.
I went ahead and took the thing out, held it up in the light, and looked at it, just to make sure it wasn't badly scratched or anything like that, and saw that it was absolutely pristine. Damn sure wasn't the disc's fault, either.
So, I put it back in, pressed "Direct Navigator", and it brought up the main menu. That's when I played the track, and saw what it had done. For the first 25 to 30 seconds, you could see the sunlight streaming through the sheet that I use for a curtain, up above my air conditioner, as it had been sunny earlier that morning, when I began the rant. But, for the rest of it, which was just dead silence and me pushing the "Stop' button on the remote, it was darker, as it had clouded up and began to rain by the end of the rant.
I was pissed as hell. I rant for three-and-a-half hours and it only records for one minute. WHAT THE FUCK?!!?
I still don't have a clue what caused it to act like that. Could be over-heating, I suppose, but you'd think if it was that, it would probably happen more often. I was able to redo the rant a couple of days later, and I filled up the rest of the disc without any problem, even recorded an hour's worth on another disc. Still, I'm forced to come to the conclusion that the unit is going bad, and is likely to get worse.
I guess me and technology just don't get along very well. ;-( ;-)
http://whitenationalist.org/forum/sh...=8487#post8487
Well, it's finally happened. I fought it as long and as hard as I could, but I finally had to admit defeat.
As of April 25th, my days of listening to cassette tapes in my car are over.
Back in late February, the tape player that was in my car (a 2001 Chevy Lumina) gave out on me, and it didn't take me long to find out that, A. There's nobody who repairs them anymore, and, B. Nobody makes new ones anymore, therefore, C. There was no way to replace it.
So, with no other options left, I decided to replace the tape player with the cheapest quality CD player I could find, plus some new rear speakers, since the original ones had given out about a week before the tape player did. So I took it to a place in Oliver Springs, and they put in a new Sony Xplod CD player and new rear speakers, back on the first week of April.
Now my thinking, all along, was that, once I got the CD player, I could simply get an auxiliary cord and hook my Walkman up to it, and go ahead and listen to tapes that way, when I wanted to. So, for that reason, I made sure to get a CD player that had an auxiliary port on the front of it. I even managed to convince my Mom to pay for the auxiliary cord, so that I wouldn't have to use my own money.
So, on the 23rd of April, I made it a point to leave a little early. I was going to see the movie, OBLIVION, at a local theater, but I knew that, if I left about ten minutes early, I would have plenty of time to pick up the cord at Radio Shack before the movie started. I brought the Walkman with me, to show them the size of the hole, but, all this time, I was still confused about which hole the damn thing plugged into. I had called the place, earlier, trying to explain what it was I needed, calling the thing a "DC adapter" to begin with, but the guy I talked to corrected me, calling it an "auxiliary cord". I had been assuming, though, the whole time, that the hole marked "DC in" was the one it plugged into, being a much smaller hole than the green one with the picture of the headphones by it. Had I been thinking, I would've realized it was the other one, since what I wanted was SOUND, and since the sound normally came through the headphones, once I unplugged them, the whole point would've been to plug the cord from that hole to the auxiliary port on the CD player, so that the sound would come through the car's speakers.
But, aside from just my brain not working right, it was a cute little gal with red hair and glasses who waited on me, and she had such kind, gentle eyes, that I just melted. I wanted to snuggle at her feet like a big, 400-pound puppy.
So, although I told her, very clearly, that what I wanted was an auxiliary cord, I pointed to the "DC in" port in the back, rather than the headphone port. She tried to ask me whether I wanted an auxiliary cord or a DC input, so I said "DC input", assuming that this chick knew what she was talking about, and the dude I had talked to on the phone didn't. Now, grant it, if she had said "power cord" instead of "DC input", then I would've said "auxiliary cord" instead. My heart was crying out to her for mercy, but those two words would've snapped me out of my reverie pretty damn quick. I knew I didn't need a power cord. I didn't want to plug the damn thing into the wall. I wanted to plug into my car stereo. But "DC input" sounded too much like what I thought I wanted. But, anyway, she got me the damn "DC input", which turned out to be nothing but a fucking power cord, and, when I had gotten home with it, and looked at it, I knew it was the wrong thing. I didn't even have to open the box. I knew by the picture on the side of it that it was a power cord. It had cost me almost all of the $20 my Mom gave me to cover the cost of it, so I knew that, once exchanged for what I actually needed, she would be getting some money back. So I managed to convince my Mom to go ahead and take it back and exchange it for me a day and a half later. She brought me back the auxiliary cord, and sure enough, she had a lot of change coming back. When I looked at the receipt, the auxiliary cord only cost $7.98, so she got about $12 back, which she kept for her trouble.
So, that night, I tried the cord out. It worked fine. But the Walkman didn't.
When I first hit "Play" it worked for about five seconds, and then the daisywheels stopped turning. So I took the tape out, put it back in again, and tried a second time. Still didn't work. Then, remembering how a Walkman will sometimes act when it's going bad, I pushed down hard on the "Play" button, and squeezed the damn thing from the back. That worked. The tape had TENNESSEE, USA! on one side and part of a bootleg CD-R of THE HOBBIT, ---basically the entire soundtrack of the 1978 Rankin-Bass cartoon version. dialogue and all---on the other side. By the time the first song, "My Tennessee", had finished, I had managed to fix it so that I was controlling the volume on the CD player instead of the Walkman, and had it at the level that I wanted. But the moment I pulled out of the driveway, the damn thing stopped working again!!! When I stopped at the end of the road I live on, to get ready to turn, I went through the whole routine again, but nothing worked. The damn thing was fucked. I had simply forgotten how fucked up the Walkman was, it had been so long since I'd used it last, back in 2001. What happens to them, when they go bad, is it's like the batteries don't make good contact with the metal that they're supposed to be touching. And they don't make THEM anymore, either. So I'm fucked.
Not only that, but I think the cassette deck that I've got hooked up to my Kenwood stereo system has about shot its wad as well. It's a Sony dual-cassette deck that my grandpa got me back in 2000, to replace the original Kenwood unit when it gave out.
Back in mid-April, my Dad found a big, white bag full of about a hundred cassette tapes up in my grandpa's barn, that had been setting there for at least 20 years or so. I tried to play a number of themover on the side that records, but they all sounded warpy, including some of the newer-looking ones that shouldn't have. So I tried one of them on the play-only deck, and it sounded alright. You see, what I would do, a lot of times, is, when I was playing a tape, I would pause it, and leave it paused for not only hours, or days, but weeks at a time. In other words, I treated the "Pause" button on the cassette deck pretty much like the "Stop/Resume" function on a CD player. No doubt it fucked up the motor. But, at first, it seemed like the play-only deck was working alright, but, after pausing a tape for a mere few hours, it started sounding warpy, too. So now I'm starting to think that it's gone bad, too. No idea whether they're still making them or not. I'll have to look into it.
But the bottom line is this: I'm an analog guy stuck in a digital world. And IT JUST FUCKING SUCKS. Used to be, when you wanted to make a mix tape, all you had to do was find the track on the record or CD and record it. You'd buy the record or CD, play it, then tape your favorite tracks. And, yes, you had to pay for the cassette tapes, but you only had to pay for the MUSIC once. Nowadays, unless you have the technical know-how to find and download the tracks for free, without getting ZOG on your ass, you end up having to pay just to listen to the damn tracks.
For instance, I've got this song, "Beulahland", on a CD by Billy Ray Reynolds, and I'd like to include it in the mix of songs that I want played at my memorial service, when I die. But how would I go about doing it? Well, first of all, I'd have to load the CD into my computer and, somehow, create an MP3 file of the song. But I'd have to do the same thing with all the other songs, from the various CDs that I put on the original tape, back in early 2009, and I'd have to put them all in the proper order that I wanted them to be played in. Then I'd have to either burn it all to a CD, so that it could be played on a CD boombox, when the time came, or, otherwise, I'd have to get an MP3 player, and, somehow, transfer my file from the computer onto that. Complicated as hell. Just a copper-plated bitch. Things were a LOT easier the old way.
It's just a bunch of bullshit. Even in a record store, you can usually listen to the CD for free before you decide whether you want to buy it or not. But ZOG expects us to pay money just to find out whether we like some band or artist or not. If we do, well, we can go ahead and burn a CD for ourselves, but, if not, WE'RE FUCKED. We just paid money for a stupid fucking MP3 file that doesn't even exist in a physical form, and we can't even trade it to somebody else for something we might like better unless we go ahead and burn the CD. It's a fucking joke.
But, at any rate, since I've been living down here, (20 years, as of June 25) every car I've had has had a tape player in it. The Oldsmobile Calais. The Buick Skyhawk. The Pontiac Grand Prix. Even the Chevy Lumina I've got now initially had one. The last car I had with a CD player in it was the 1979 Camaro that I wrecked on April 23, 1993. And even it hadn't come with one it. Not sure what kind of sound system the previous owner had had in it, but, whatever it was, he took it out before I got it, and all the speakers with it, the prick. We had to take it to a place in Oak Ridge to get them to put in the CD player I had had in my Dad's old Monte Carlo, which I had wrecked in September of '91, and we had to buy some speakers from them to put in it, too. (I sold that CD player to a friend of mine, years later.) So, if I had just waited a couple of weeks to have the guys in Oliver Springs put the new CD player into the Lumina, it would've been EXACTLY 20 years that I'd gone without having a car with a CD player in it. So, like I say, it's the end of an era.
What can you do? Just add it to my long list of reasons to hate ZOG, I guess. GODDAMN JEWS!!! THEY TOOK MY CASSETTE TAPES AWAY FROM ME!!! GRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!
************************************************** ********
Well, in a related note, thought I ought to mention that, while the keyboard I'm typing these words on is still the same one that I've had since November of 2003, it is now hooked up to a different computer.
What happened was, on April 22, my old computer just basically quit working. It started turning up 404 errors, no matter what I did, so I called Comcast the next day, to try and see if they could track it down, if the problem was on their end, but I was pretty sure what had happened. I had stupidly gotten rid of my antivirus firewall last summer, and somebody had made me their little cyber-bitch. Sure enough, the Comcast people said that it wasn't anything on their end, and I knew the modem had been working OK, so it wasn't that.
So, I unplugged the computer, and, two days later, my Mom took it to this guy in Oak Ridge who works on them. It was so dirty on the inside that the fan had stopped turning, and there were a lot of viruses on it, too. But, even after he fixed all that, he found that it was still running slow. So he had some extra memory that he tried to put into it, and, when he did, it fried the motherboard. Guess it was so old it just couldn't take it. :-/
So he went ahead and replaced my old computer with a newer one he had laying around that his nephew had been using to play video games on. He transferred all my files to it.
Then, when I got it home, and tried to plug it back up, most of the stuff was the same as the other, so I didn't have much trouble. But the cord to the printer was stretched so far, the only way I could make it hook up was if I went ahead and set it down on the desk and scooted it back a couple of inches. Fair enough. But, then, the shadows in that damn corner made it too hard to see where to plug in the last few remaining cords. So, I got my Mom to come down, thinking, since she's only 5'5" and skinny as a rail, she would be able to maneuver a lot better in that dark little corner than I ever could, and I could go ahead and hold the flashlight for her. Turned out, though, a couple of the cords didn't even have any ports that fit them, so we just didn't bother with them.
So, we went ahead and turned it on, to test it, and, although it took forever to start up, it did seem to be working alright, although the graphics were all fucked up. Everything was five times as big as normal. So, once we got things started, Mom just went ahead and went home, so I ended up having to call the guy and get him to walk me through it. Thankfully, he was home, and was a good sport about things. Between the two of us, we got the graphics straightened out, changed my default page to Comcast, (his nephew had set it to Cartoon Network) and figured out that the printer driver software had installed successfully.
I've been using it ever since, and haven't had any trouble. Runs a LOT faster than the old one.
************************************************** ********
Bad news on the VHS to DVD machine front, though.
A week ago, yesterday, I did about a three-and-a-half hour-long video rant, which I thought had recorded. But, when I tried to hit "Stop" on the remote, at the end of it, it just basically ignored me. It took like twelve times before anything showed up on my TV screen.
By then, I knew something was up, so I got up to check it out. When I tried to bring up the main menu screen by pushing the "Direct Navigator" button, the damn thing wouldn't budge, no matter how many times I pushed it. Then, when I tried to turn the unit off, manually, it wouldn't let me do that, either. The damn thing had frozen up on me. :-/
Now, I had had somewhat similar experiences with the machine before. From time to time, it would just act weird like that. I'd be playing a movie, and the damn thing would just freeze up. The only thing you could do was unplug it, wait a few seconds, and plug it back in, then, after it re-started it would do alright.
So, I did that, and, sure enough, it started back up, but here's what got me: I knew I had been ranting for AT LEAST THREE HOURS, and, probably, more like three-and-a-half. Now, when I started the rant, the time remaining on the disc was "3:08": three hours and eight minutes. That's what it said on the unit. Now it said "3:07"!!! Instead of recording for three hours and eight minutes, it had only recorded for ONE MINUTE. :-/ It was like it had gotten the first twenty or thirty seconds of me talking, right at the beginning, and then the last few seconds from when I started pushing "Stop", right at the end. Damnedest thing. I didn't know whether to blame the batteries in the remote or what.
But, by this time, a thing was flashing on the screen, saying that it might've damaged the disc, and to click "OK" on the remote and it would re-start and check. That's the same thing that the unit I had had before, that LG piece of shit, that I got rid of in late May of 2011, said when it started fucking up. That pissed me off no earthly, needless to say, because I knew that if it had damaged the thing, it was the unit's fault, and none of mine. Not exactly like I could've seen it coming. But, I went ahead and pressed "OK", and the damn thing turned itself off and re-started. So that proved there was nothing wrong with the remote. It checked the disc, and, thankfully, there hadn't been any damage.
I went ahead and took the thing out, held it up in the light, and looked at it, just to make sure it wasn't badly scratched or anything like that, and saw that it was absolutely pristine. Damn sure wasn't the disc's fault, either.
So, I put it back in, pressed "Direct Navigator", and it brought up the main menu. That's when I played the track, and saw what it had done. For the first 25 to 30 seconds, you could see the sunlight streaming through the sheet that I use for a curtain, up above my air conditioner, as it had been sunny earlier that morning, when I began the rant. But, for the rest of it, which was just dead silence and me pushing the "Stop' button on the remote, it was darker, as it had clouded up and began to rain by the end of the rant.
I was pissed as hell. I rant for three-and-a-half hours and it only records for one minute. WHAT THE FUCK?!!?
I still don't have a clue what caused it to act like that. Could be over-heating, I suppose, but you'd think if it was that, it would probably happen more often. I was able to redo the rant a couple of days later, and I filled up the rest of the disc without any problem, even recorded an hour's worth on another disc. Still, I'm forced to come to the conclusion that the unit is going bad, and is likely to get worse.
I guess me and technology just don't get along very well. ;-( ;-)
---CGO. 1/20/'09.