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.

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.

I first met Rahm Emanuel in 1991 or 1992, probably the latter. He was one of the Clinton campaign’s boy wonders, along with guys like George Stephanopoulos and Bruce Reed — young political comers who would go on to have an enormous role in the nation’s policies for nearly a decade. Emanuel was beloved in the campaign for a simple reason: He was a cash-raising machine.

Clinton already had Bob Farmer, who was Michael Dukakis’ campaign finance director in 1988, in his corner — in fact, Farmer’s decision to join the campaign in 1991 was an early sign that Clinton was a player. But it was Emanuel who really raked in the bucks — by some estimates, he brought in $70 million, an unheard-of amount at the time.

Now he’s done it again. The Chicago Tribune has a great takeout on the job Emanuel did as the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, helping to lead the Democratic takeover of the House (unless you believe this carping from Sheldon Drobny, whoever he is). It’s a compelling piece about a guy who I suspect still has some bigger aspirations.