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2002-02-08 Entry: "PC Story"

After another three hours of fiddling around last night, my PC was at a point where the quote from Frankenstein would have been appropriate - "It's alive!" All cards worked, all drives were recognized. It even managed to successfully play a DVD (and it is looking a little smoother - big test will be one of the DTS tracks).

However, the video encoding is being very flakey. It'll encode higher resolution at a higher bit rate without dropping any frames, but the sound is very screwy. On turning the speakers way up, I've also found the PC emitting strange beeps, clicks and whirs, vaguely reminiscent of R2-D2. I've turned off all the obvious sound options, but they're still occurring. I'm going to have to have a hunt for these I guess. I don't really need it to click every time I click on something, or rustle when I scroll. And for some unknown reason, I have no privelidges to modify the sound driver settings - even though I'm the one who installed the driver... very odd!

So that'll presumably be this weekend's job - get the video encoding up to speed so that I can get a decent amount on a disk and edit the adverts out without it looking too fuzzy. Well, that and collecting this mysterious parcel. I have a vague incling what it might be, but we'll see tomorrow morning, so no speculation until then.

In TV related news, I'm convinced I spotted a large sub-plot cut in Angel last night. It may be that I'm remembering the wrong episode, or it was in the shooting script but never made it to screen, but I'm sure there was a daughter related subplot in there...

Meanwhile, Scrubs has improved. The first episode was terrible. They were then advertising it as "half as long as ER, but twice as funny." So, I summarized that ER has one joke in an hour, Scrubs would have two in an hour, but it's only a half hour show, so there's only one joke (or, in the case of the pilot, both jokes were presumably in the second half). But last night's episode (about the fifth) was actually quite amusing in places. The psychotic janitor is probably the best bit, but there were a few other laughs. As it dovetails nicely after Buffy and Angel, I may continue watching it... time will tell.

I've now missed two episodes of Now And Again due to football. I'm destined not to find out how this series ends... or at least reaches the cliffhanger that the first and only series terminated on.

Oh, and seeing as it's back on television (Channel 4, wee hours of the morning) at the moment, I've padded the Code Name: Eternity coverage in the Graveyard a little. It needs a little more polish (and for me to get around to finishing another transcript), but the overall shape is there.