called in sick...

The first time I actually promise something in terms of a post - I fail!

Thursday night I came down with something that I can only describe as a 48-hour sinus infection, which prevented me from going into the madness on Black Friday. If you care, consumerist.com has pretty decent coverage of some madness, and you can find some hi jinx on youtube no doubt.

I did end up venturing out after I felt rested up well enough (appx 11:30am) and surprise surprise - every single awesome thing I wanted (I had compiled a list of several things at a few different stores), was GONE! So there really are advantages to getting up early in this town.

I did however find a wonderful external DVD burner at Office Max for $50.00 and an inexpensive pack of 50 blank DVDs. Now, I am a little behind on this technology and wasn't completely sure which format of discs to buy at first (DVD+R or DVD-R), Ben helped me, saying most modern players should be able to play both, but thats about as much as he knew for sure about it as well.



SO in case anyone else needs to know the difference, I did some research and here it is:
The difference between -R and +R are actually driven by the manufacturers of the players.

DVD+R is supported by Philips, Sony, HP, Dell, Yamaha (and others)
It allows writing to a disc a single time, it is permanent, and cannot be recorded onto again.

DVD-R is supported by Panasonic, Toshiba, Apple, Hitachi, NEC, Pioneer, Samsung, Sharp (and others)
It too allows writing to a disc a single time, permanent data, and cannot be recorded onto again.

If you add a 'W' to either (DVD-RW, DVD+RW) it will allow you to write over the data multiple times.

BOTH DVD+R and DVD-R should play properly in *most* commercial DVD players. (Ben was correct).

In short, there really doesn't seem to be a discernible difference between the two that I could find, other than who funded their development. On the packaging of my particular player however I notice it claims it can write to DVD+R twice as fast as DVD-R, 16x and 8x respectively. However, I know for a fact I am writing to my DVD-R discs at 16x, and they work great.