En Saga, En Pequeña Saga

   Last summer, I bought a 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro in Los Angeles, with the idea of watching DVDs at my desk.  While I was surprised that Mac no longer sported an internal CD/DVD drive and vaguely wondered why not, I took the advice of the experts and for not much money, added an external drive.  It worked, sort of, for a while; but not well and then gave out altogether.  It turned out to be defective and Miguel, who examined it, was worried that it might actually harm the discs it was playing.

   No big deal; I’ll replace it with another one.  In a mall not very far down on the Insurgentes was a store specializing in Macs, without being an official Mac store, so Ellie and I walked there to buy an appropriate drive. I had brought along my computer and a favorite Blu-ray, so I could learn how to work the new player.  The store’s rules however required that I first  buy it before the package could be opened and its celophane wrapping torn.  I made the purchase; let the demonstration begin.  The package was openedand my disc inserted.

   Nothing happened!  I had brought my all-time favorite Le Nozze di Figaro that I had watched successfully before I gave up on the original player.  Nothing happened, thanks to the late Steven Jobs.  My Blu-ray Figaro, was using a technique that Mr. Jobs had condemned as a “bag of hurt.” Mac would have no truck with it.   I don’t know whether that harsh verdict was a technical judgment or a commercial swipe at Sony; I hadn’t followed any part of this story.  But whichever, it seems to have been misguided: Blu-ray is flourishing.  I was mighty lucky to get my money back in spite of the torn wrapping, but I was back at Point Aleph.  

   I got some advice specifically what models of external drives to look for, with the names of half a dozen models.  I checked out some of them with the help of Google and found they mostly got good reviews.  Now to get a hold of one.  Ordering from Amazon, like anything involving the Mexican mail service, takes an unpredictably long stretch of time, is unsure, and, because import duty will be charged, expensive.  So I started drudging.  But even though I’m a pretty prodigious walker, I was mighty tired on the last of several days that I visited the five different outfits that might have sold me one or another version of what I sought.  No such luck.  Just a piece of advice: try La Plaza de la Computación en la ciudad de México.  It was located downtown, emphatically not within walking distance.

  I returned home; that errand was for another day.  Not so.  Ellie, it turned out, was downtown on other errands and had also been told about about that Plaza and phoned me from there.  One external player was to be had, the LaCie d2 Blu-ray XL.  It was bigger and more expensive than any of the others and was above all intended for people who wanted to burn their own discs (of which I was not one).  But it was a bird in the hand, with, so far, no bird to be heard twittering in the bush.

   It turned out to be easy to connect up—even by me!—by following Ikea-like diagrammatic instructions.  In little time I had tried it out with that Figaro Blu-ray, with an “old fashioned” DVD, and with a CD, a species soon to become extinct.  It passed all three tests with flying colors and singing sounds.  End of that Saga.