There comes a time when a smart person admits defeat. When the evidence is so overwhelming that no sane person could reasonably continue down an obviously mistaken path. Fortunately for me, that time is a long way off. You see, I wanted to build my own Media Centre PC. I understand the technology and I knew what I needed. At least I thought I knew what I needed. What I actually needed was DW onboard and enthused and that will likely happen shortly after my knighthood. It is not that she is opposed to technology. She simply doesn't appreciate my enthusiasm for it. She doesn't like technology for technology's sake, while I have a very good job based primarily on that premise.

I do like technology. There are lots of people who use technology for very specific and useful purposes and I am not one of them. I like technology and it likes me. We get along. We understand one another. Unless DW is watching or has a vested interest. Then technology decides to screw me. Which brings me back to the Media Centre. This is not the first time technology has made me look like a git, only the most recent. Luckily I don't mind looking lilke a git. Its probably all the practice. Anyway, our video recorder died. My daughter reported to me that it might have a bug in it, which, coming from a then two year old, showed surprising insight. It turns out the insight came from actually inserting a little wooden lady bug inside the device. While the toy was retrieved, the player never worked again. DW wanted to get it fixed but I insisted that it would cost more than it was worth and I could build a Media Center, taking us into the future.

DW is the frugal one of our partnership and I don't begrudge her that. She keeps me from sinking the boat, so that is a good thing. So when I explained what I would need to build the Media Centre and how much it would cost, she said she would get it for me as a reward for being knighted. I needed an interim plan, which I always have ready. I could make do with what I have, which was almost nothing. My desperately aging PC (DW can't understand how a three year old computer can be considered a museum piece) would technically meet the lower end of the specs required to pull it off. I would need only one extra device, the digital TV tuner capture card and that would cost less than repairing the video recorder, and much less than buying a cheap dvd recorder. At least, that was true when I started.

As my services to the Kingdom have not yet received formal recognition, I continued unabated to produce my own working Media Centre, Microsoft be damned. I turned to freeware and found out from a friend (actually the husband of one of DW's friends) that there are some very impressive applications available to do just what I wanted. His wife was even on board, or so he told me. According to DW, she was being held captive and had wished they had just bought a DVD recorder. Anyway, I put it all together and would you believe it, it worked. Well, sort of. Bits of it did, sometimes. Othertimes, other bits worked and the bits that had worked stopped working. One bit may have caught fire (I now have a smoke detector in the study). But these small teething problems didn't overcome the single biggest problem of all. It was a little complicated.

I decided to explain to DW how to do a simple task such as recording a show she likes. I used "The Glass House" as an example. I went through everything in careful detail, balancing the quantity of information against the quality and trying not to give any misleading or unnecessary detail. It took me about ten minutes and she responded by saying she heard me say "Glass House" twice and the rest was just "blah, blah, blah". I decided that it would be better to be more generic only without me citing a specific program, now it was all "blah, blah, blah". I asked her which part she didn't understand and she gave me a look that made me reword the question and ask which part had I made confusing and she said quite simply, none of it made sense. I was talking gibberish and while it might mean something to other people like me, it was still gibberish. We had been at this for about forty five minutes now so when I offered to explain it again using simple but respectful words and in no way insulting to her intelligence, she said no. So I offered to show her how simple it was. Unfortunately the computer crashed. In fact, it did something I had never seen it do before and I said so, which actually didn't appease DW as much as I thought. I finally got it going again and this time everything worked up to the point of actually recording. Then it crashed again. She left.

I spent another five or so hours trying to get it going. I did manage to work out most of the problems but it still manages to foil me. It does record programs now but that caused a whole bunch of other problems. The commonwealth games were on and I recorded some of the bits DW liked, only to find that I missed every single event by an hour. It turns out that the TV schedule feed I was using had the times wrong. I tried to record something manually and I got the wrong channel. I managed to get things working pretty well until DW asked me to burn the movie onto DVD and I had capture in the wrong aspect ratio and bitrate and the conversion looked horrible.

DW is actaully pretty good about the whole thing and has now forgiven me for stuffing up the Games recording. She has acknowledged that the Media Centre does seem to be the way forward but would probably prefer not to be quite so close to the bleeding edge. I explained that I was able to get all the bits working at least to some degree and that the crap results were because of crap components, good components could be expected to produce good results and great components... Dw listened patiently and then wished me all the best on my quest for knighthood.

Sir Bern. I like that.

Ciao!

My motto was "Don't give up". Now my motto is "Don't be stupid".