ErkkilaDotOrg

Hope page is still messed up, I know! Working on getting weather information into the banner. I’ll post a link to the project when i finish sometime in 2011. Behaps these snazy humidity graphs will help pass the time.

First impression of Gracenote service with the new Sony 400 disk blu-ray changer… “How the FUCK could you not have the new “Last Starfighter 25th Anniversary Edition” blu-ray in your database =/.

And finally, my impression of 37 …. it was a lot like 36.

Our new plasma showed up early! The Stereo Shop said it would take a week, but the guy left me an email on Wednesday afternoon so of course we had to go get it. We settled on the Panasonic TH-50PZ850U…decided against the Pioneers since they’re selling off their plasma business to Panasonic, and decided that the tv having ethernet is pretty cool (for firmware updates and such), even if we don’t use the youtube and picasa features. We were a little bit torn about the Pioneers since they support DLNA, but oh well, maybe it’ll be more established next time we upgrade. Since we are switching up to blu-ray and needed everything to be 1080p, that meant a new receiver as well (so that we can switch HDMI)…this time we went up a level to the Denon 4308ci (our last was a 3803). We were going to wait for Black Friday on the blu-ray, but the Stereo Shop offered us their black friday price on the Sony BDP-S350, which we were going to get anyway, for $199 (I think we could’ve gotten it for $179 from Sears or K-Mart on Friday, but figured why not). He tried to sell us Monster HDMI cables too but we came to our senses, there. The TV had to be unboxed to fit in the Subaru and it was like Tetris trying to fit the receiver and blu ray boxes in there too.

OK, I ALMOST came to my senses about HDMI. We had ordered HDMI cables online for like $5 each but they are being shipped ground from California. This was fine when we thought the TV wouldn’t be here until next week. But the sight of a blu-ray player sitting there on the shelf was bugging the hell out of me. In the interests of marital harmony, Paul suggested we go buy 2 cables from Wal-Mart…the minimum we’d need to hook it into the receiver and hook the receiver to the TV. $60 for impatient geekdom. But man, Wall*E and Nightmare Before Christmas looked and sounded great…when we finally figured out how to get the blu ray player to pass through the audio as bitstream (had something to do with the bd live or additional content audio setting; we had it on ‘Mix’ and we needed ‘Direct’).

The other thing was, the TV came with a stand but not bolts for other mounts (we have a low A/V shelf with pole mount)…had to go to Lowe’s to get them.

So now we’re just waiting for HDMI cables so I can eliminate component/optical for the cable box and one DVD jukebox, which frees up enough component connectors on the Denon that I can finally eliminate the manual switchboxes…yay. Next up, new motherboard and/or video card for Mooby so we can hook that up HDMI as well.

This is the first time we bought A/V equipment where everything had an ethernet jack. First thing we did with all three was get firmware updates. Can’t wait to see how the Sony blu-ray jukebox will turn out–will we finally get a complete disc title listing without having to type them all in?