Saturday, March 31, 2007

Boob tube

OK, the flat panel is installed and showing a loverly HD image. After much debate in the corners of my mind and searching for a good deal, I dropped the coin and drove off into the night with a reasonable Toshiba LCD. It's only 32" (I'm confident that the size will take care of the needs, much like something else...) and tunerless but the cable box will take care of that and since it has an HDMI input I can run the digital signal into it and let the DVD run on the component input and clean things up visually.

Now the fun begins with respect to getting stuff (movies, photos...) from the computer onto the screen. I had thought a while back about getting into the HTPC scene, but all of that seemed fraught with compromise and excessive tech-geekery, which is not necessarily beyond me but that I'm not all that interested in all that mess. So Apple has this Apple TV media extender just out and that may suit though it's limited in what video codecs can run though it, but the hacking is rapidly changing all that. But maybe it's still not what I want out of such a device so the HTPC concept hangs out in the back of my mind taunting me with possibilites and promises of better days ahead. Decisions, decisions...

Ah the things we think about to forestall the inevitable sloughing off of the motal coil...

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Kiss me I'm Irish mostly German...

...but kiss me anyway you fool.

Yeah so I have an Irish surname, but my grandfather was half Irish and half German (and served in WWI as a translator plus was gassed there by his kind), and his wife was totally German and my mother's family is German, Dutch and French. So while I have a bit of a the old Teutonic touch to me, I still have a romantic penchant for lazily idling my time away while knocking back some whiskey or a black and tan and dreaming of better days ahead.

Beware the Ides Of March...

Funny how the mind is sometimes. Walking from the cafeteria back to the office this morning it felt like it did 30 some years ago when I was a kid in Minneapolis. I don't know why maybe the foggy, overcast sky and the cooler temps mixed with the barren trees gave me that feeling of nature lying in wait, ready to blossom in the spring once the temperatures rose above 40 degrees and the snow and ice receded like a glacier. The feeling engulfs you like a blanket as the senses determine the location, then all in an instant as your conscience recognizes the flood of memories it's gone not to return no matter how hard you pause to reflect and recall them. So it goes, nice as it was...