Mooo Again

You may have thought she'd gone out to pasture.  The COW*, that is. Well, she's alive and well and her usual cranky self.

The DVD player has died. It is perhaps eight or ten years old and surely doesn't owe us anything. We use it to watch our Netflix. Which is pretty much all we watch since the rest of television is so abominable.

Polly had reported that Netflix was going to change to a new format, where the disks no longer go back and forth in the mail, but the movies are "streamed" directly from their site into our television. There is some new device needed for this, she said.

So the other night, after looking around for a 13-year-old boy who might give me the full scoop on this, I settled for a guy about ten years younger than I am, who said he'd been in electronics and sound systems for ever. He did some clicking and pondering on a miniature device with a screen that he just happened to have in his pocket and within a minute or two had the brand name and model number of what we need.

Off we went to Best Buy where we found something remarkably similar and decided to grab it. Wisely, I asked the 16-year-old behind the counter if this was all I needed.  It wasn't. There is a "LAN adapter" required to do the "streaming." And, no, they didn't have any.  "Actually," he saidt  "They are kind of hard to get right now." He checked his computer and reported, "They won't even let me order one for you." So we left the device at the store and snarled our way home.

Why -- in the name of everything bovine -- would a company manufacture a device that requires an additional part to be useful and then not include said additional part in the package with the device?  Holy Cow!

Trolling the internet showed me that Target has the device in their stores and on-line, and at least on-line has the "LAN adapter."  So I suppose that is the way to go.  Meanwhile, the two disks from Netflix sit tantalizing us from the mail table.

Mooooo!



*Cranky Old Woman