Kris and I were frustrated yesterday trying to deal with various aspects of our VCR.

First, I wanted to rent several films, including The English Patient and A Passage to India. Canby used to have a fine locally-owned video store, Canby Video. However, Blockbuster and Hollywood Video came to town and the idiots who live here stopped going to Canby Video and now it's gone. I refuse to go to Hollywood Video because it is located on a recently developed piece of land that I am boycotting (still going strong after eighteen months).

(The businesses on this property, most of them national chains, have been responsible for the death of a half-dozen locally-owned businesses already. Capitalism in action? Survival of the fittest? Consequence of our noble economic system? Bullshit. Destruction of the small-town way of life. And largely due to our misguided city government, especially former mayor Scott Taylor. But that's another rant.)

I do, however, go to Blockbuster from time-to-time. I went yesterday. They had one copy of The English Patient, a film which won nine Academy Awards, including best picture. They had no copies of A Passage to India, a film that was nominated for eleven Academy Awards. They have multiple copies of the widely-panned Robin Williams drama Patch Adams though. sigh

Fine.

We decided that maybe we could buy copies of these films, and The Usual Suspects (which Kris wants to own) at Fry's, an electronics store that we were going to for other reasons later in the day. No such luck. Fry's had seven titles on video tape. The rest of their selection was DVD only. This just pissed us off more. Why do consumers allow themselves to be part of the planned obsolescence of the technology industry? Only with computers do I consciously buy into the "upgrade or die" philosophy, and that's reluctantly. I do it because I love to play computer games. If it were not for that, we'd still be running a decade old Mac, and we'd be happy! Now DVD (and I understand that the format has certain advantages) is squeezing out VHS and there are going to be millions of useless VCRs. We're not going to give up VHS, though. We record dozens of programs a month, mostly old movies and sporting events. This is not an option with DVD unless you pay thousands of dollars. Yes, we could try Tivo or some such, but Tivo doesn't allow you to save the programs you record. Kris has a huge collection of Bette Davis movies. She couldn't have that with Tivo.

One problem we have, though, is that we've recently lost the remote control to our six-year old VCR. Sony's abominable web-site (who designed this mess?) doesn't list our model. Or does it? It's hard to tell in that nightmarish site. Fry's only provides universal remote controls. There are several that would work with our VCR, but they wouldn't allow us to perform any actions with the on-screen menus. That's the functionality that we need! We need to be able to program the VCR. Also, the remotes we saw didn't offer features to deal with tracking. That's another feature we need.

What are we to do? Apparently there is an outfit that sells only remote controls, and I'll try to call them next week. However, it is likely that the remote control for our unit will be incredibly expensive.

We don't know what to do to solve our video woes. For the short term, we drove to Woodburn and rented movies from Wallace Video, a locally-owned video store that had all of the titles we were looking for, along with friendly people that knew what they were talking about (compared with the teenage idiots at Blockbuster). I'm researching VCR/DVD combinations. We need a VCR that we can program. If we can't find a remote control for our current unit, we'll have to upgrade. But if we upgrade, we're going to be forced to get DVD, too, or we're not going to be able to watch movies in the future. VHS is dying.

Book club this morning, followed by bridge with Mac and Pam. Bike riding with Paul and Autumn tomorrow. Should be fun!

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — Why I Love My Digital SLR   I bought a Nikon d70 in March. It hasn't made me a better photographer, but it has made it easier for me to capture shots like this.

2004 — Fading Memories   Two problems I face: (incipient) insomnia and (chronic) memory loss!

2003 — Long Weekend   A wonderful, relaxing holiday weekend has left me with little to write.