The Gentle News

I’m bringing my dad a late Father’s Day gift this weekend: a 15 DVD-R set of the entire Star Trek: The Next Generation series. He has an old Creative DVD drive (along with the decoder/NTSC-out card that came with it). I’m afraid that his drive won’t read these discs, so I’m also going to give him my 16x Pioneer DVD-115 drive. However, with that, he’ll be stuck watching them on his 17″ monitor rather than his bigass projection TV. Both of our gaming machines here have video cards with S-Video/RCA outputs, which we rarely use. I considered buying a new card for one of them and giving him the “old” one, but I just can’t justify spening money on a new video card right now. Does anyone have any old NTSC video output card lying around that I might buy from you sometime this week before I leave?

I was up burning DVDs all night, after a futile, 3-hour battle to come up with a more effecient process than ripping to ISO with the burner and then burning to a blank. My Pioneer 16x just doesn’t want to play nice with the big bad new burner.

(See, baby, I could never leave you for such a bully.)

Anyway, I knew that my dad was working nights, so I figured I’d call him at work and ask him about his DVD reader to see if bringing this one might be better. I ended up shooting the shit with him for about an hour and a half. It’s 5am and I just got off the phone with him. We talked about digital cameras, both the $10 kind and the $1200 kind. We ridiculed the City of Beaumont’s crappy Internet content filter that keeps him from reading my site if I write “shit” or “damn” or “Scientology.” We talked about sleep and not sleeping, work and not working, reading and nerding. More than once he asked if I was ok, but I really was just calling to talk to my dad, and he said he was glad I did.

I love my dad.