When I Meet Him, I'm Gonna Kick His Ass:
I refer, of course, to the gremlin plaguing my life of late.

The good news is that after all my worrying about returning the HTIB and such to Best Buy, I went in and the customer service could not have been better. Everyone was very nice and helpful, one guy spent a fair amount of time in the home theatre section showing me the various DVD players, another helped me locate Rogue's Gallery, the new album of sea shanty covers (weird, I know, but it sounded interesting) and I walked out of there with a new, one-disc player from Sony that should have been easy to hook up and worked perfectly with Katy's controller.

Caught the should have, did you?

After the luck I've been having with electronics lately, I don't know why I was surprised. It took me all of five minutes to get the DVD player hooked up, and I was so happy... except that I noticed a loud buzzing sound whenever there wasn't other sound on the screen to cover it. When people were talking, or music was playing, etc., I could hear the occasional pop of static or an underlying buzz, but when it was supposed to be silent, there was a loud sound of interference. After doing some experimenting, I came to the conclusion that I had picked a defective player. The jacks worked with everything else (PS/2, TV, VCR), whether I used the switcher or not made no difference, it was obviously the DVD player. Somehow, I had magically picked the broken one.

Suzanne took pity on me and said she'd go exchange it tomorrow. Hopefully she'll have better luck.

Of course, she's been suffering today with a remarkably spotty Internet connection, and I ran into that when I got home as well. It would literally be up one minute and down the next, making Internet use extremely frustrating. It seems to be working better now, but I'm starting to feel like I really do have a gremlin messing with my stuff.