March 2006 Archives

ARGH! After putting in a 17-hr day at work, I'm ready to go home. My stomach aches something fierce (poquito mas for dinner didn't set well) - I'm dead tired, feeling like I'm going to throw up. Tried to call someone to take me home, but that didn't work out very well. Drove home...only to find our block had been shut down by police. The officer told me to come back in 30 mins. Bloody hell, man, it's 12:10am! I'm so tired I can hardly see! So I take 210 thru Tujunga up to the 118, back down the 5, and into the office - the 40 min drive back to work (cruise set at 65 all the way). I get to my desk and call Pasadena Police.

Turns out some guy stole a car, then jumped out of it in the middle of OUR block! They were on a man hunt for him.

You know, thinking about it, when do the police mobilize such a huge effort for ONE guy who stole a car? Eh, who knows.

But the officer on duty at the Police Dept didn't have any ETA - so I guess I might as well just curl up on a sofa here at work & call it a night. It's now 19 hrs since I woke up. I hurt.

So tonight I'm "stuck" at work - I recommended we do an OS upgrade on our EMC NAS/SAN on a Friday nite. On St. Paddy's Day, even. So I'm sitting here into the late evening...just here to supervise the EMC engineers who come on-site to do the actual work. And on this social holiday, I swear it's like the entire Interweb has gone down. No one's around on IM hardly, no news being posted, nothing to do, no where to go.

But at least I have Poquito Mas as "comfort food" to tide me over. No beer, tho. Althought, HR keeps beer in their office, and I do have the master key...HMMM! :)

Where-ever you are, Happy St. Paddy's Day! Drink one in my honour. Have fun, be safe! Cheers!

For Christmas, I bought myself a Denon AVR-3806 home theatre receiver, to replace my old(er) Harmon-Kardan 520 unit. I wanted something newer (I'd had the HK for 5 yrs now) and wanted some overhead with 7.1 if/when I need it in the future. I got a good deal on the AVR - $999 on a retail $1300 unit, from a place out of Vegas (tho it took them like 3 weeks to fulfill).

One of the key things I wanted in the new receiver (which the 3806 does really well) is video switching - so you could input S-Video and it would covert to the component output to the TV, for example. Previously, you pretty much had to use the same inputs as you had output to the TV (or use multiple outputs to the TV - ugh). I'm a big fan of NOT having to switch TV inputs. So the 3806 does this really nicely. It also had 2 HDMI inputs, and one output. SWEET! While I'm not big on the potential abuse of customer rights with HDCP (eg. broadcast flag stuff), I like HDMI from the quality perspective! The HD TiVo/DTV unit has HDMI and I really wanted to exploit that.

So okay, making a short story longer, after the 3806 arrived, I went out & got some new cables, and also got a cheap Toshiba DVD player that had HDMI out. Fine. $99. Not hard to do. There was also a Sony, but it was like $60 more, and something else I didn't like about it. Anyway, $99 and I figured if it worked out, great, if not, it was only $99.

Well, I didn't overly like the Toshiba. If for NO OTHER REASON there was this really annoying blue light-bar across the dvd tray that glowed BRIGHT blue when there was a disk in the unit. When you turn off the lights, it's really distracting to have that thing on. Yes, you can turn it off. You can turn it off, and dim the display (so you can virtually not see it at all), or turn both off altogether. Key point to realize (that's not documented): it won't remember this. So you have to STOP the disc (all discs auto-play, btw), then go into the dvd player setup menu and turn the setting to DIM. Then when you switch discs, do it again. And again, and again... Okay, I realize I could have just opened up the unit and disabled (forcefully) the LED's feeding the light-pipe. But that aside, I wasn't horribly impressed with the quality from the player either.

So I said to myself, "Self... the Denon receiver's really working well, let's look at a Denon DVD Player." So after some research one night, I got myself a new Denon DVD-1920 off ebay. It arrived Monday nite. I spent a few hours (not cuz I had to, but cuz I could!) setting it up, testing, tweaking.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SUCH A DIFFERENCE a couple hundred bucks makes! Even Jason's sitting there watching this MUCH different video display on the TV asking me "that's cuz of the player?!?!" Yup!

So as massively busy as this week has been, I've been using spare time to watch movies over again, if at all possible. Actually I haven't been able to watch a full movie til last night, when we watched the new Harry Potter movie. Pretty well encoded, it was done well. But the hallmark benchmark, the opera scene from Fifth Element, was the first thing played Monday nite, and it was much better.

I'm sitting in MickyD's this morning making this post. I'm in San Diego, attending a meeting of the San Diego chapter of the HTCIA. My counterpart at Sony San Diego PD-IT is part of that group and asked me to come down & chat about the who/what/when/where/why/how of the networking and security, especially around what we do at DefCon.

Sad thing is I left the house at 0430hrs. Ugh. It's only 120 miles! I always think it's further for some bizarre reason. So I made it here at 0700. I was driving slow, too. I was praying for traffic to slow me down! Oh, to put this in the proper frame of reference, my talk doesn't start until 0930. Hence, I'm sitting in McD's (on their $1.50/hr WiFi) doing email, updating my blog, etc.