Fuck Region Codes
I also had 7 DVDs from the library for my lonely Easter weekend. I have just had a beautiful fish dinner after a day of painting and thought I'd lean back and watch one of them. Oh no - not possible. "Your computer's dvd drive is not set to this region code". I forgot the mother of all consumer highway robbery - if you have a life that is spent in different countries or a partner from a different "region", you have to buy a dvd player / computer in each of those countries or you have to buy your dvds twice. (The irony is, we now do own 2 computers. This one I'm writing from, which was bought in England but has now got it's "region code" forever set to Australia and Pete's new notebook, which - you guessed it - was bought in Australia. So we're still buggered.) As we have dvds from Germany, England and Australia, we have in the last 4 years we owned this laptop used up all the 'free region changes' and our laptop is now set to Australia, because that's where the last dvd we watched was from last year. Obviously they tell you that there is a limit on region changes AFTER you've done the last one.

Now I sit here with my lovely pile of carefully selected films from the local library I felt so smug about yesterday, as they were free hence just within this month's budget. My german dvd player and all our dvds (some of which being from the appropriate flipping region) are in some box in some corner of my parents' house. The shared flat I live in doesn't have a telly. And I was really, really looking forward to watching a movie tonight.
Argh! I find this unbelievable, still - even though Pete and me have already complained our heads off about this at lenght! I buy a product. I pay tax for it when I buy it. Then I can't use it, because I'm in the wrong place. (ok, ok, I didn't actually pay for THESE dvds. But someone did!) I mean, laptops are MEANT to travel, right? How can this be? How can this POSSIBLY be in this world we live in? Oh globalisation! Hail you!
*wanders off ranting some more*