I just started getting a large number of messages from various email servers, telling me that messages I never sent had been rejected. Upon closer inspection, it’s clear that some spammer has decided to steal my good name (my good domain name, anyway) to try to sneak by spam filters.
I didn’t send the spam. I don’t like spam. And I certainly can’t do anything about the shitheads sending the spam. So hold the hate mail, please.
I bought Straight Outta Lynwood today. Like a number of other recent releases, it’s only available as a DualDisc within the US. Of course, the first thing I did was try to load it into my Powerbook so I could view the bonus DVD content; when I tried, I got a nasty surprise: the disc will not fit into the drive.
The packaging says absolutely nothing about this being an issue. Some other manufacturers have included warnings regarding slot-loading CD drives, but Sony did not. All they included was a vacuous warning about the disc not conforming to the Red Book standard, which would have nothing to do with this problem as it claims to be perfectly compatible with the DVD standard and the drive is a DVD drive.
While this by itself would be annoying, the problems don’t stop there. When I tried the disc in my Wintendo (which has a tray-loading DVD drive), the audio suffered from skips and noise, but this could be explained by scratches on the disc. However, the scratches weren’t that bad; I’ve had DVDs that had taken much more abuse and still played flawlessly. The subtitles don’t work, either: it’s supposed to have a “karaoke” mode, where the lyrics are displayed on screen, but the subtitle track is completely blank. Flipping the disc to the CD side doesn’t work either; the drive refuses to acknowledge that a disc is loaded. (To be honest, this is something included as a warning on the package.)
First thing I’m going to do is try to return the disc to Wal-Mart; hopefully the DVD issues are limited to this particular disc. If Wal-Mart refuses to take it back, or if the replacement disc fails, I’m going to contact Sony/BMG directly and attempt to get a refund. (Wal-Mart will not give refunds for opened CDs or DVDs.)
Click to rate me.
Update (2006-09-19 19:30): Apparently I’m an ugly sonofabitch. My rating is a 3.2, broken down as follows: four 1s, three 2s, one 3, two 4s, three 5s, one 6, and one 7. Not exactly the kind of rating I had hoped for.
As you may have noticed, I’ve made some changes to this site; specifically, I’ve switched to a new theme. This theme is an almost-unmodified K2, with a new header image.
There are quite a few things I have left to fix, but they’ll come in time. For instance, I’m still working on getting the Firefox referral button back in place, along with the recent comments plugin I was using.
If you notice anything weird or broken, or you have a suggestion, feel free to let me know.