A long time ago I made a promise to myself that I would never resort to “what I did this weekend” for column topics. The line of demarcation, I figured, was whether the column could accurately be started with the phrase “Dear Diary ... .”

Nine days into 2008, my New Year’s resolution of writing twice a week is bringing me dangerously close to picking which of the two promises to break.

Anyway, I hooked up a new DVD player this weekend. I got it as a birthday present, received about a month late, from my former roommate. In order to fully appreciate this technological accomplishment, I have to recount the illogical story of the need for it to be bought in the first place.

When we lived together, my roommate had a DVD player. She hooked it up, saving me the hour-long frustration of unhooking cords knotted together behind our behemoth entertainment center.

But apparently it’s successful playing of movies and CDs wasn’t good enough for the fellow she was dating at the time. The sound should go through the stereo speakers, he said. And so one day he set about making our living room look like Radio Shack barfed. Cords everywhere. Owners manuals. Four remote controls with a sum total of about 700 different buttons to be pushed in a perfect sequence — all to make movies a little louder. The TV is plenty loud, I though, but if he was going to the trouble, the least I could do is find an excuse to get out of the way and leave.

When I returned from an afternoon’s exile, the scene wasn’t pleasant. He was gone, the DVD player was broken and a fight was brewing. Seems as though in the course of reconfiguring our configuration, he dropped the DVD player on its face. My roommate, stealing a page from my book, wasn’t in the room to help at the time, but heard the crash. She didn’t say anything at the time, but after he left (without having created magical stereo sound) she tried it out and the thing wasn’t working.

So she called him up and politely noted that it wasn’t working after he’d dropped it.

He didn’t drop it, he said. It was like that before.

Of course it wasn’t. The whole thing descended into a break-up-inducing fight.

So when she moved out, she left this largely useless piece of electronic equipment behind. In the intervening months, it came around a bit. CDs could be played. As for movies, it would only play the ones we’d owned prior to the accident. I’m not sure if it was punishing us or it just wasn’t up to making new friends, but rentals were summarily rejected every time.

And they say machines can’t think.

So, with apologies for an extended (if hopefully humorous) pretext, that brings us to Sunday afternoon. With the Sabres mired in a five-game losing streak and well on their way to a sixth, I decided it was time to shut off the game and wade into techno-craziness. At least a hockey losing streak is good for something — the motivation to work on projects slightly less infuriating.

I’m not sure how many people Magnavox employs in China to make DVD players, but I’m sure it’s enough to justify one English-speaking individual to write the manual. I’ll never understand color-coded plugs drawn on a black-and-white schematic. And vague labels like “video-audio in/out” make me question the need for other wires. Isn’t that really all I need? Why two more plugs?

After trying three or four combinations of wires and plugs between the DVD player and my digital cable box, I started getting annoyed.

I plugged the cords into the slot marked “AUX” figuring that must correspond to the “AUX” button on my remote. Far too logical — no dice.

I wound up resorting to a scribbled out flow chart of my cable feed: Wall --> cable box, cable box --> TV, TV --> Sega Genesis (yes, I still have one of those), Sega --> DVD player. Or something like that.

It wasn’t until I made a sensible self-styled diagram of my A/V equipment that I finally understood what needed to go where. I managed to do that, but things still weren’t working.

Silly me, I’d overlooked button No. 77 on my remote control, hidden at the bottom left corner next to the button that lights the whole thing up in neon red. “Alt Source” was the ticket. I punched that and the DVD player spun to life!

After all that, I started feeling bad for the poor dolt who dropped the first one.

At least until I realized this whole thing was his fault.

Managing Editor Eric DuVall’s column appears every Wednesday and Sunday. Contact him at 693-1000, ext. 112 or by e-mail to duvalle@gnnewspaper.com.