astridv | (no subject)

Computer is still at the shop, doing that thing where he's all "What, me, I'm totally fine, nothing's wrong!" Buying Trusty Notebook appears like a more brilliant idea with each passing day.

Although Trusty Notebook refuses to play region 2 DVDs. The other day I had to download an SGA ep even though I own the bloody DVD. (And that ep played a crucial part in my plans to suck at least one of the roommates into SGA.) Really, if the movie industry want people to buy DVDs instead of downloading illegally, they should try to make the whole DVD-watching process less of a pain in the ass. It's bad enough that every time I start my Atlantis season two disks, I have to sit through that whole annoyingly long "Video Piracy Is Bad Mmkay?" clip, plus two, shorter clips. For every single episode. It makes me want to commit unspeakable acts of piracy just to spite them.

Speaking of online downloads, Joe Mallozzi has a post [edit: okay, this is the right link] regarding changes in the outdated ratings system. I make a point ignoring the ratings of shows I watch but I thought it was interesting that they're finally starting to acknowledge the changing viewing habits.

Also, Mallozzi mentions fanfic *g*. I take it he hasn't actually *read* any yet...

Fic recs:
MVP by

cesperanza
McKay/Sheppard, NC-17 (guessing); 74K; for the SGA_Flashfic "Post Secret" challenge

He surfed over to Elizabeth's personnel file, which was full of expansive and fulsome testimony to her stellar character and immense diplomatic talents by superiors, colleagues, and even former adversaries. Rodney skimmed a few letters, then got bored with all the good will and flipped over to Colonel Sheppard's personnel record—and if Elizabeth's file was bubbling with praise and esteem, Sheppard's was a different story entirely.

When sneaking around the personnel files McKay sees something in Sheppard's psych profile that causes him to freak. Sheppard notices, but misinterprets completely...
This fic strikes just the right balance between lighthearted and dramatic.

Five Impossible Things Rodney McKay Did Before Breakfast by

laceymcbain
McKay/Sheppard; PG-13; Season 1, sometime after "The Storm."; ~4700 words
Summary: Rodney hates that this is the day he’s going to disappoint everyone, and it’s little consolation he probably won’t be around to deal with the fall-out.

“Yeah, well, the good of the many ...”

“This isn’t Star Trek, Rodney! I’m not playing that scene with you—”

An overloading grounding station, a race against time. Excellent action fic.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Is your notebook a mac or a PC? If the latter, I may be able to help you out *cough, cough*

Oh? Oh. Yes, PC.

Crappity crap. I tried to send you something, but my email accounts won't let me send .exe files. I don't seem to be able to upload them to my website either. Any ideas?

Hm. My only idea would be to turn it into a zip file. (But I've actually never done that, so no idea how to go about it).

Bum, that didn't work either.

This is what we use on our PCs because we have both Region 1 and 4 discs: http://www.slysoft.com/en/download.html The one you want is AnyDVD. There's a 21 day free trial you could sign up for - maybe that'll tide you over until your compy is fixed?

Cool, thanks. 21 days should be more than enough. I hope I'll have the thing back by next week... a lot of my recent artwork is on there and I'll need that. :/

AWESOME! It works, at least for the one that didn't run yesterday. So hopefully tonight's Dinner-With-Buffy is a go.

YAY!

I'm so glad you have Trusty Laptop! Sucks about the region two thing, though. How unutterably stupid.

The laptop is super-useful, and I got shown a way around the DVD restrictions too. The only bummer is that it has only three USB ports.

The weird thing is... the laptop seems to be significantly faster than my regular compy. I can actually run a DVD and another program at the same time without hiccups, stuff like that. It'd probably be a good idea to do a clean-install on the other one just as soon as I've saved my data. If it wasn't so tricky to get the video-in to work, I'd have done that already.