Blu-Ray Shmu-Ray

So, I finally got a shiny copy of Iron Man in the post a couple of days ago. I never got to see it at the cinema because of exams and stuff, and I didn’t want to download a crappy videocamera version of it. In the end, by the time it was finally released on DVD, I had a job, and a laptop that can play Blu-rays, so I thought why not buy the extra-special Blu-Ray edition of Iron Man.

Now this would be great, except for some reason my laptop can’t even handle playing Blu-rays. It plays, sure, but it it stutters as much as…a thing that stutters. One of these days I might think of some good metaphors. While the audio generally plays smoothly, the video is far from smooth. It plays along jerkily, and “seconds per frame” would be a more accurate measurement of the speed than “frames per second”

I’ve tried so many different things now that I’m sick of the sight of the opening Paramount logo, and AC-DC’s “Back in Black”, which plays through the first scene in Iron Man, is probably going to be circulating through my head all night.  Every time accompanied by a slow video that often grinds to a halt after 2 minutes. I did manage to get it to play at an almost acceptable speed one time, but when I realised I needed to check my emails, it slowed down back to it’s previous unwatchable speed.

I don’t know why this is. I see no reason why my computer couldn’t run a blu-ray. Sure, it’s the height of movie technology, but at the end of the day it’s just a video. A very high quality video, yeah, but that’s why it’s on a 50gb disk, I don’t see why it should take massive amounts of processing power to run. It does though, eating up over half of my CPU and memory power.

I’m wondering if this is just because the bundled software I have on my computer for playing blu-rays sucks. It doesn’t seem too great, but it’s hard to compare. Apparently the Blu-ray Disk Association, the smart people who designed the blu-ray technology, have decided that it’s a good idea to not actually tell many people how to make programs that play blu-rays. None of the standard freeware media players will play it. Not Windows Media Player, not VLC Player (which can play ANYTHING), nothing. If you want to play blu-rays you have to pay a higher price

I tried downloading a trial version of PowerDVD, one of the few programs which does support it. But no, the trial version won’t let you play blu-rays, you need to just buy the full version before you can so much as see the opening credits. The prices for the program aren’t BAD, £30 for software is certainly better than paying £300 for a blu-ray player of a PS3, but I already paid £600 for my laptop. And even though I do have a job now, I’m not willing to just drop £30 on some program that MAY or MAY NOT fix my problem. I don’t ask for much from the trial version, but why can’t it at least let you play 10 minutes of a blu-ray just to see if it will do what you need it to do?

For all I know it could just be that my computer sucks. I’ve had varied results from killing various windows processes (Vista seems to eat up a lot more CPU power than XP, no surprise. And McAfee just WON’T DIE, like some sort of digital medusa, as soon as I kill one process, 2 more pop up in it’s place. I tried downloading driver updates for my drive, but that doesn’t recognise the drive correctly and it just kills it until I restart. The disk drive manufacturers site tells me I need specific drivers from my laptop manufacturer, but they don’t have any mention of blu ray or disk drives in their driver section.

So now I’m back to the trusty old method of downloading the software off of bittorrent. While I do try to avoid pirating software these days when it usually isn’t necessary, there are some things I take exception to. Massive price tags, and software that provides no alternatives. Things like Photoshop fit into the first category, while programs like Microsoft Office do in fact offer suitable alternatives, like a student version for £40. Of course for things like that there’s always something like OpenOffice which will pretty much do the same thing for free.

But if they refuse to provide me with working blu-ray software for free, then… I’ll just get it for free anyway.

I just want to watch Iron Man. Is that too much to ask?

I’m not annoying enough to make money from it

So, I lost my job after only 2 shifts. I’m usually pretty good with jobs, my bosses have always been happy with me, and one even went out of their way to find another job for me even when they didn’t need me any more. So it was a bit of a shock to be told not to come back again after only 2 shifts.

To be honest, I was thinking that I’d start looking for something else already after just half an hour today. I knew I wouldn’t be able to put up with the job for long, but I figured I could at least bear it for a while until I found something else. But, yesterday was not my day.

I won’t miss the job, that’s for sure. I am pretty worried now about finding another. I spent most of last year looking for a job near college, I couldn’t find much. I had 2 interviews, which I thought went well until they asked about my availability, and I told them that I wouldn’t be around in the holidays. In hindsight, I should have just lied then quit when it came to the holidays.

This job as one of those jobs I swore I’d never do though. Telemarketing, outbound calls, being an annoying person who no one wants to talk to. Getting paid for being annoying doesn’t sound too bad, until you realise you have to be good at it. I, unfortunately (or fortunately maybe) am not.

A quick outline of what I had to do. I’d go through a big list of phone numbers, calling people and trying to ask them a few questions. Usually it’d go like this -

“Good evening, is this Mr/Mrs ___? Hi, I’m calling from Midas, we’re carrying out a brief holiday survey”
“Not interested”
“I’m not trying to sell anything”
*Hang up*

Of course, the bit about not trying to sell anything was a bit of a lie. In these surveys, when you eventually got someone willing to answer them, we’d ask them a bit about how often they take holidays and where they like to go, while quickly moving onto some totally unrelated and somewhat too personal questions about their marital status and income. This was just so a precursor for a second call though. If they were married, earned enough money, and liked taking holidays, someone would call them back a week later and try to sell them a holiday.

I did alright on my first day. The people who were good at it would get 20 or so successful answers out of their lists in a shift. I managed 7, which wasn’t too bad considering I spent the first hour training and filling out forms, and I was new too it.

I’m not too sure what went wrong yesterday though. It might have been bad luck with the numbers I had, not many people answered, and most of those who did were too old (one of the requirements was that they be between 25 and 65). But still, when people did answer I rarely got them to actually answer the questions. I tried various ways of wording it, and it just didn’t work out.

My boss, team leader, or whatever they called themselves, spent most of the evening listening in on new people’s phone calls and giving them some advice. For me though, they were just condescending and insulting, telling me that my results so far were pathetic but offering me little advice on how I should improve. All she did say was that I needed to sound more cheerful and like I “wanted to be there”. Well, I didn’t want to be there. Ironically, I was actually pretty cheerful at the start of the shift, since I’d been having a pretty good week up until that point. But then it was a downward spiral from there, unsuccessful calls and an insulting boss did not do much to cheer me up.

Honestly, I have no idea how the people who work there can keep up their cheerful fascades for 4 hours. There was one girl who’s calls I listened in on during training last week. I actually had to hold the phone away from my ear, her voice was so annoying. I can imagine that the people on the other end of the line just wanted to answer the questions just to get her to stop talking. Some people just have a knack for stopping them from hanging up, and manage to persuade half the people to stay on the line. I’m too nice to them though. I just go “Oh ok, sorry for wasting your time, good bye”

So in the end yesterday, I got 4 successful calls compared to the target of 20. I tried to ask for one more chance in the hope I’d be a bit better after some more sleep, but that didn’t work. They just said it’d be a waste of their time if I came back.

I really do need the money though. There’s the website stuff I’m going to do too, but I don’t know if that’s enough to save up for stuff I want. Well, back to looking for jobs I guess.