Eureka!

That night, having returned home after failing to get the equipment properly hooked up, I had a brainstorm. Of course the darned connection didn't work! When I was watching the cable TV channel, piped in directly from the wall hookup, I realized that the tuner in the TV had been tuned to the station he had been watching. And then I sheepishly remembered that to watch ANY external source (VCR, DVD, auxillary input), the TV would need to be tuned to Channel 3! DUH!!!! I felt so stupid.

During the afternoon of May 4th, I kept thinking about how dumb I had been not to think of this the day before. Since I was having an unproductive afternoon with work (I think I was coming down with something - I was feeling very warm and could barely keep my eyes open), I decided to visit my father and test out my theory.

Sure enough, as soon as I switched the TV to channel 3, I got a perfect signal from the DVD player.

Dad has been resisting all of our attempts to get a computer, a newer TV, or anything technological in nature. At his age, he keeps insisting that such a purchase would not be worth the investment. Mind you, he's been putting this argument forward for more than 10 years. Just imagine how much fun he could have been having if he had relented all those years ago. Regardless, when I got the DVD working, and inserted a picture disk with hundreds of digital photos (both direct camera shots, as well as old, scanned pictures), his eyes lit up. And he said something I would have never believed possible. He thanked me for doing this, against his wishes, and admitted that the idea was wonderful.

I had made a variety of test disks to take to his house, to see what formats the DVD player would be able to read. Of the three disks I cut, two (CD-Rs) were readable. The CD-RW was not readable, because it was actually produced on a Mt. Ranier compatible CD-RW drive, so the format was actually CD-MRW, which could not be read by the player.

Over the next few days, I'm going to cut a proper CD-R disk with thousands of family pictures, and give them all to him. Once he learns how to use the player, I'm sure it will be one of his favourite past-times.