Friday night we had and over for movie night. Had some pizzas and beers, watched a couple movies. It was a nice relaxing evening.

Saturday I spent the morning taking apart hour. I’d finally finished with my extra 80 gig drive, so I wanted to remove it, and while I was at it I figured I could install the DVD drive. I have never been much of a hardware person, not sure why I was always so afraid of it, too many bad grounding stories perhaps. But I wanted this done, and didn’t want to be all girly and bugging Michael to do it. Besides, it’s just removing a drive and putting in a new one, right?

Well it wasn’t that easy. I had to change the whole drive configuration because the IDE cable wouldn’t go from the cdrom all the way down to the harddrive. I never liked this Dell case much (always afraid I’ll break it if I pull something too hard), but it’s all around bad design. So I ended up hooking up the drive to it’s own IDE cable, then hooking the DVDROM and CDRW on one. I wasn’t sure which IDE plug in place on the motherboard was 0 and 1, so I pulled out the Dell Manual. Big mistake. Not only did it tell me to put the jumpers on “Input Select” rather that master and slave, it labelled the IDE ports as “Harddrive” and “CDROM” … wtf kind of manual is this? It manages to tell you to remove the green sliders from the sides of the drive (duh) but skips small, important things you should be aware of when installing things.

Finally it’s 10:30, I’m on my 5th or 6th attempt to get things running properly when Michael wakes up and asks what I’m up to. I mope and say it’s not working properly as the boot hangs. And then it loads grub and boots into Debian! There are still errors though, so I try and investigate and really can’t figure it out. Then Michael comes over and clears the BIOS – something I had no clue about. It’s all working nicely now, and I have a DVD-ROM!

After this fun, I spent some time talking to and decided to drive down to her place. I have to take 422 to get to where her and live, and it wasn’t until I was getting on it that I realized it’d been a very long time since I’d driven on an expressway. Expressways are my favorite! Merging, passing, being passed, driving fast! I’d drive an expressway over a normal road any day, but my route to work doesn’t give me that opportunity and I really didn’t drive much before we had 2 cars.

I spent the afternoon eating and shopping with and . Was able to finally pick up a sewing set. I realized I needed one last week when Michael asked me if I had any sewing stuff.

“No, but you do.”
“I do?”
“Yeah, it’s in your desk.”
“Oh, right.”

He just has some needles and bits of thread, and I figured it was time to stop being such a shameful girl and get some sewing stuff. We found a Jo-Ann Fabrics that was going out of business and I was able to pick up a nice little sewing set for 40% off, yay!

So I was able to fix one of the pillows that ripped when the tag was removed.

When I got home yesterday evening Bob was over hanging out with Michael getting ready for his radio show. So we all had a few beers, ordered a pizza (more pizza!). I went to bed around 10:30.

Last night and this morning I spent some time working on getting DVD stuff going on hour. I’d just been through it all last week with R2Q5, so I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult. But Ubuntu has more non-free stuff in it’s repository than Debian does, so it was tricky. I went right for xine-ui. I spent over 2 hours trying to get it installed. Even changed my sources to unstable (xine-ui isn’t in testing) to see how many packages it wanted me to upgrade to get i
t going – too many. I finally got annoyed and apt-get installed totem-xine (which is in testing). It worked. This morning I played Toy Story the whole way through and was so happy that totem played it properly. Then it crashed when I was exploring special features. Dumb thing. When I tried to start it again it segfaulted. I went through all the local files it generated, deleted them all to make sure nothing strange had been set when it crashed the first time – no luck, still segfaulted. I reinstalled libdvdcss2, reinstalled totem, even rebooted. No luck. WTF? Google was no help, I don’t understand why/how it could quit working in such a strange way, I even tried a different DVD.

I installed mplayer this morning, so just went ahead and played a DVD with that (sans menus *sigh*), I figured I could get used to that as long as I got really good at reading the man page and turning things on like subtitles and the correct audio track. Then about 30 minutes into Toy Story 2 the sound went insane and it got all choppy and exploded. I was able to restart mplayer and fast-forward to that part again, but I don’t know what’s up with it, or if it will start doing such nonsense again. I’ll have to mess with it more later.

Now I am gonna go pay bills.

EDIT: Well I ran totem –debug and found that it couldn’t find the plugins because it was looking in the wrong place, I fixed it by soft linking one of the places it looks to the proper place:

ln -s /usr/lib/xine/plugins/1.0.1 .xine/plugins

Now to fix dvd playback, it claims that /mnt/dvd is not in the fstab, when it certainly is *grr*

EDIT 2: OK, just mounted it manually before launching totem and it’s ok. I still don’t understand why it worked before and I had to do all this tweaking to make it work again. *kicks it* Now lets hope it doesn’t break again %)