New, New, New

Last year we bought a Panasonic DVD camcorder that turned out to be a POS. The problem is that if it's actually able to record a full disc's worth of footage and finalize it, we can't make copies of the DVD because of data errors. Sometimes everything we recorded was lost. It's really upsetting because the stuff we lost were some great moments with our son like him walking for the first time, eating his first birthday cake, him dancing, scooting, etc. I'd say that 3 out of every 8 discs we made are now coasters. I contacted Panasonic this summer about it, and they sort of brushed it off and said to use their DVDs, which we did. No change. My wife called them this week. They said it was still under warranty for parts but not labor - the cost to fix it: $200+. A bit of reading on a camcorder site revealed that this is a flaw with Panasonic design, so we could potentially still have issues after having it "repaired."

So, we bought a new Sony DVD205 camcorder from Best Buy and got their replacement warranty (which we should've done in the first place). That should be here this week in time for Halloween and to get footage of my son in his Tigger costume, which, by the way, was chosen without my input by my wife and her mother. Sorry kid, better you than me!

The subject of this blog is "New, New, New" because in the past month or so, we've gotten a new PC, new laptop, and now a new camcorder. This is getting expensive, and I'd rather prefer it if our shit just worked. Speaking of the laptop, I bent it to my will this weekend. I wiped everything off and started anew. Everything seems to work fine now. No bullshit is sitting around, although it still says 384 MB of RAM. :( Oh yeah, the wireless card also doesn't work. I read on several forums about problems with the Orinoco Gold card, so I might have to get another wireless card, too. Goddamnit. I tried everything I could think of to get it working and had it working fine for about a minute or so but it cut off. It did that a couple of times. Technology is starting to piss me off.

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I uploaded a new gameplay from last week. It's Drost, Royal, Mr White, and Bioslayer vs. Malice, Midnighter, MGK, and me in an oddball game on Midship. It's pretty big at almost 200 MB, but I've decided to start rendering at 2 Mbps instead of 1 Mbps because I just like the quality better. To improve things a bit and reduce time, I've sped up the footage, so that's why it might look weird. Enjoy.

Jared