A couple weeks ago I finally decided to go ahead and get a HDTV for my apartment.  I’d been looking for quite a while, shopping around online and at stores, and decided finally to just get a Best Buy store brand, a 27″ Insignia.  The price was decent..  got it home, hooked it up…  stuck pixel.

For those who don’t know what this is, it’s when one of the thousands of small colored lights (called pixels) that make up a tv screen gets stuck either on a single color, or stuck in the off position.  So I pretty much had a constant dot in one section.  Now, from a distance, this is hardly visible.  Unless you know it’s there.. in which case you can’t stop looking at it.  On top of that, I found that the Insignia just didn’t have the dark black levels that I wanted.  Black on that tv looked more like… dark gray.
I took that guy back to Best Buy the next day, but they didn’t have any others so I just got my money back.

That was HDTV #1.

I took my refunded money, went across the street to Walmart, and found a Sanyo tv that was a similar price.   Brought it home and hooked it up and… sonofabitch, there was a stuck pixel.  A constant blue dot.
That was HDTV #2.

Frustrated, I packed it up and took it back to Walmart, who exchanged it for the same model, which finally has no apparent issues (knock on wood).

So I finally had the TV.  The HD Receiver was another matter.  I had gotten one the morning after I first bought the TV, hooked it up and it worked fine for a couple hours, until all of the guide information was broken, and half my cable channels were missing.  Comcast tech support sent some refresh commands to it but by the next morning it was still broken, so I returned it.

The next night I put in HD receiver #2, and found it had the opposite problem of the first one… now I got ALL the channels, even all the pay channels, which I shouldn’t have been getting.  This only lasted a couple hours until I was back to missing most of the programming.  Seriously, I was not having good luck.

I made an appointment to have a tech come out to the apartment, but that day he called me after having done some work outside and things seem to have worked fine since then.

Finally.  It only took like a week.
So my impressions of HD, now that I have it set up finally, are that it is superb..  it makes me really not like watching standard definition (SD) programming.  The problem is, Comcast only has about 10 HD channels at the moment, but I find that the TV is more often on one of those 10 than anything else.  Sports is fantastic in HD, as are nature programming on Discovery.  It’s only a matter of time until everything is shown this way, and I can’t wait.

I found this photo album of children’s letters to God. It is adorable to see a snapshot of such innocence at such a young age. I think it is telling to see what voice children use when speaking to God, and how different the interaction of prayer is as someone grows older.

It seems to me that Sony has been in the news a heck of a lot lately, and it hasn’t been anything positive. The PS3 will be released in a month and a half, and yet the amount of negative press is dwarfing the sense of anticipation and buzz that you’d expect. Just today it was reported that a poor showing at the Tokyo Game Show had caused speculation that the PS3 will have heat issues.. and several analysts have already shown fears that Sony’s game division is going to bring them down. Add this to Sony’s battery woes which they estimate will cost them $170 to $254 million USD, and you have a company that is up against the ropes. (more…)

For as long as I’ve had a blog I’ve fought against the dreaded enemy: Comment Spam.

Luckily WordPress has come along and now ships standard with a plugin called Akismet (auto kismet), which claims it will eliminate comment spam. The setup process was easy enough; you just need an API key from wordpress.com, enable the plugin and give them the key. From then on, spam comments should be autoflagged, and hopefully eliminated from your posts.

This post will be a testbed for it. If spam DOES get through, the system allows you to flag it, so it can learn what should be considered spam. Hopefully it makes for a more competant and useful blog system… without the hassle of manually going through each and every comment.

If this turns out to be less effective than I’d like, I have looked into implementing further captcha methods.  One such method, a simple plugin for wordpress, forces all comment posters to solve a simple math equation prior to posting their comment.  While this is easily identified and solved by a human, it is far less simple for an automated script to identify the problem and form a solution that is compatible with the comment interface.

An alternate, more prohibitive method is to require all posters to register.  For one thing, as a blog reader, I know that most people will not go through the hassle of registering for everybody’s blog.   And sometimes the most insightful comments will come from those ‘anonymous cowards’ who for whatever reason wish to hide their identity.  So a system that rules out anonymous comments entirely simply is not ideal.

So we shall see how this works.

i’m not really one for these first posts and all, i have no idea what to put at the moment, i just know i don’t want the default wordpress crap in here so i’ve gotta edit it.