My wife is having to record a new Christmas greeting for her radio station listeners. She’s used this old one for years, and I’m going to miss it. On a related front, she also got this photo of her beloved Christmas electrical bear onto her station’s website.
Hokum
A collection of ephemera.
Archive for November, 2006
Beautiful television
Over the weekend, my wife and I bought our big Christmas present, a Samsung DLP HD TV. My goal had been to score a LCD TV in the 36-inch range, but after striking out at a Black Friday sale (getting there at 5 a.m. just wasn’t early enough), I came across this beauty on Circuit City’s website.
My wife’s position has been “get the big TV,” but given our small house and tight viewing space, I was highly skeptical that a 42-inch set like this would work out well. I wasn’t cheered by the initial picture when I got home, either — there were lots of MPEG artifacts in the SD picture supplied by the cable company.
Then I got the HD box from the cable company — just in time for “Monday Night Football.” Ohhhh, baby. Even at a distance of seven feet to the screen, this TV was great — and the component video cables led to a significant improvement in all pictures, not just the HD ones. I ordered a HDMI cable today from Parts Express (my favorite electronic parts supplier) and once I get that bad boy in place, I suspect we’ll see another big video quality jump.
This might be the best electronics purchase I’ve ever made.
New posts Randy 28 Nov 2006 No Comments
Finally
Caught a gig for a private party on Dec. 7. That’ll be my first gig in two months — the longest dry spell I’ve had in at least a decade. About time.
New posts Randy 19 Nov 2006 No Comments
The next wave
Computers really haven’t been selling that well for a few years now, I think and there are several reasons for this: Computing tasks are being pushed down into all sorts of smaller piece of equipment, making it less urgent to update the home PC; current computers are fast enough to do the tasks to which they are assigned right now; people are moving away from desktops and toward more expensive laptops, and more expense means less of an urge to upgrade; and I suspect there is more than a little upgrade fatigue out there.
But hardware builders have been putting together the pieces that will push people to upgrade. The biggest development, I think, is multi-core processors. If your machine has ever been held hostage by a long task — say, ripping a DVD — you can immediately see the advantage of having a processor that can run that task and others without a performance hit. The best (and really, probably only) way to do that is with multiple processing cores. And imagine what a video game might do with multiple processors performing all the hard work
My home Frankenputer has a dual-core AMD processor (I’ve used AMDs for years) that I love; a dual-core and a bunch of memory cure a lot of ills. Now, Intel has rolled out a quad-core processor and AMD appears poised to follow suit. It’s going to be a while before the software exists to take advantage of this hardware, but when it does, the idea of a “home utility” PC that runs games, browses the Web and performs office work all at once is not far-fetched at all.
New posts Randy 15 Nov 2006 No Comments