An Old Video

July 17, 2006

Okay, so a little over a year ago I used our digital video camera to record the events of a party on St Patrick's Day. This day also happens to be my good friend Jeff's birthday, so we usually celebrate pretty hard. On this particular night, we predominately played a drinking game called "asshole." After the fact I edited a video together and this is the result:




If you want to see a higher quality video, you can download it here: Higher Quality Video.
Or, send me an e-mail and an address and I may snail mail you the DVD.

New Box and Tube

July 17, 2006

The new mailbox and post I installed (Heather picked out the mailbox):
our new mailbox

And here's our new media setup in our living room:
our new media setup

The longer I wait to make a new post here the more pressure I feel to get something, anything up here and the more I want to put it off...
Well, I'm biting the bullet, so here we go:

I'm not going to try and cover everything that gone on between postings. That is what is stressing me out. So instead I'm going to just cover what comes to mind. If you want more info, then you can actually make a comment on this post and I'll answer any questions asked. Since no one has made a comment since I've required registration I'm not expecting too many questions ;-)

We finally purchased a new television. If you are interested, this is the one we got: click here. It is a standard “tube-style” television (but still HDTV), and the clarity on it is awesome. There is a PBS channel that broadcasts in 1080i and it's so gorgeous that Heather and I will find ourselves watching it not because we are interested in what's showing, but because we are so impressed by how great the picture looks. I have connected our DVD player's progressive output to the new TV, and even though the maximum resolution is 480p, you can definitely tell a difference versus a standard television. Digital films look the best. We were floored by how crisp Shrek looked, and I'm assuming that anything else filmed digitally would look just as good. I haven't tried the new Star Wars films yet, but I believe they were filmed using digital cameras so that would be a good way to test this theory. Other movies do look better than before, but there is still a graininess to them. My thoughts behind this is that you are taking an analog format (film) and converting it to a digital format (DVD) and the analog quality can only be so good. When the film is digital from beginning to end, you are going to get the best quality, with the least amount of opportunity for degradation.

A couple weeks ago when Heather and I were leaving for work when we opened our garage door we were greeted by a mailbox and post lying in our driveway. Our mailbox post has been damaged since we moved into our house, but it wasn't to the point of just falling over. Also, it has survived some pretty violent wind storms and it wasn't the least windy the night prior to this discovery. My conclusion is that someone decided to take some anger out on our mailbox, and our mailbox obviously lost. So, last weekend I put up a new mailbox and post. We went with a cedar post and an inexpensive mailbox, but I think it looks okay. I may post some pictures of the new mailbox later (sooner if anyone expresses interest in seeing it..)

That's all I'm going to post for today. I think that if I just post a little a day I can catch everyone up on our news without overwhelming myself again. We'll see how it goes...