Elections

Last Sunday was more work on home theater. We’re not talking the $200K renovation that some of my colleagues have done. This is way modest and it’s more of a re-think of how to use components that we’ve had for a while.

The DVR has been the centerpiece for seven years. All TV watching starts there and I’m afraid to admit how many hours are spent in front of the tube. I’ve concluded that making one out of an existing PC will be practical on the day that manufacturers start selling CableCard based tuner cards to the public but not until then. In the mean time the choices are slim if one wants to watch and record HDTV via digital cable. In light of this realization we’ve dumped Windows MCE and have started using the Comcast DVR.

We’ve had components that produce and accept digital signals (S/PDIF & DVI) for 2 years and haven’t used the digital connections. I thought there would be better fidelity using digital but didn’t know how much. K and I are really impressed. The clarity and crispness of both speech and music is noticeably better. The transitions from soft to loud are instantaneous. The video is really striking with deep colors and great contrast. The only changes made were the cables. Everything else stayed the same. S/PDIF good, analog audio cables bad. DVI good, component video bad.

K went to a GVS fund raiser on Sunday and won the raffle, a spa package.

K and C spent Mon and Tue in Millville. C has a week off school and K wanted to run Millville errands. The car went to the mechanic to diagnose brake warning lights and some calls were made for glass and fence repair but the last quarter of every year is always crunch time for K’s work. This was no vacation for her.

I voted the straight Democratic ticket on Tuesday and am very gratified by the outcome. If Dems can end domestic wiretapping and give science precedence over politics in stem cell research and global warming it will not be too soon. I do think that a quick exit from Iraq signals the bad guys that their tactics work but to win this war would take a commitment of dollars and troops for which there is no political will. It is so tragic that we went there in the first place and that international alliances were trampled in the process.

Today was more home theater work. Making it all work together is a job for the Harmony remote control. This thing does an amazing job, not just in ease of control but ease of programming. To program it you connect it to your computer and then walk through some very intuitive browser based screens to create “activities” that integrate components to do a task like “listen to music” or “watch TV.” The Harmony 680 is a great front-end that makes the back-end engineering work. I have no interest in home theater unless there are only 1 or 2 buttons that make it work. Anything more is inconvenient enough to relegate it to seldom/never used status kinda like Roomba.