Bring on the American Movies!

Thursday night I decided to invest some time into figuring out how to unlock the DVD player so that it would play American DVDs. I did a Google search, which turned up a number of solutions, most including additional infared devices like Palm PCs and laptops, plus a DOS code. Anything that involves DOS is way out of my league, but I tried a few others that I thought might work with the regular remote.

Dave wasn't particularly interested in my quest and only put his book down for a few minutes to help me execute one of the "secret" codes. He popped in one of his favorite movies, we fiddled with it for a good 15 minutes, and gave up. He went back to his book, I went back to grumpily surfing the internet.

Well the potential to see Barton Fink must have piqued his interest, because by Friday night he declared that he was determined to crack the code and watch his movie. He said, "I'm an electrical engineer, and I'm going to figure this out, dammit".

I was more than happy to turn over the challenge and went about reading my own book while he sat hunched over the desktop computer and my laptop, cursing at the code he'd downloaded. He ate dinner distractedly, then went straight back to the laptop, muttering about command prompts and ports.

A few hours later, I was getting ready for bed and heard the opening music of Barton Fink. After four hours, he'd finally done it. He stayed up until 2 a.m. watching his movie, victorious.