ErkkilaDotOrg

So the other day I’m using my work phone to test something (ip phone with communicator–don’t ask, our company LURVES the microsoft)…I was using my directory to find Paul’s number so I could call his phone and not bug someone in the office. With this, you type in the letters of their name using the number pad (one press per letter; you don’t have to multi-press to get to the actual letter; it figures out possible combinations for you). So I type in E R K K and look at the number echo on the display. 3755, which is our house number on our street. How could we have lived here for 10 years and never noticed that?

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?

MG, it’s a CC.

heeeee

Those Invisible Pink Unicorns. They’re so hard to spot in the wild. That is, unless you happen to have a black light.

Under normal light. With any luck when the scarring heals, the part inside the ring will be nearly invisible, leaving a (slightly broken) pink circle visible.

Partially black-lit

Just black light

My friend Josh got me in with his artist, TeeJay, the owner of White Tiger Tattoo in Rochester. It was her first time with UV inks (Chameleon), but I’m thrilled with how it turned out (glad to be a guinea pig in this case). Thanks Josh and Michelle (and pee, too) for coming along, and to Teejay for working me into her busy schedule. :)

I did a fair amount of looking around at the UV ink before jumping in. I was nervous enough about a first tattoo, but I really wanted the UV ink due to the subject matter. This type of ink has been in use for over 10 years with very few problems–it’s fluorescent, not phosphorescent (EverGlo ink caused problems for many people in the 90’s), and it’s encased in little PMMA microcapsules (a plastic they use for medical uses and has a very low rejection rate). The ink part never actually comes into contact with your skin due to those. The ink itself is FDA approved for use in marking animals that are for human consumption, although not for tattoo use (no tattoo ink is). I feel pretty comfortable with it after having read articles by artists and people who have used this ink for years. And it really, really looks neat. :)

Why IPU? I’d been thinking of tattoos for a long time and although a life-long agnostic, in the past few months, after having listened to The Atheist Experience and The Non Prophets podcast and starting to read more Atheist blogs, I’ve realized I’m really an agnostic atheist. Of the various free thought symbols I’ve seen, the IPU seemed both the most humorous (I wanted something fun) and also aesthetically pleasing. By making the circle part the only visible part in normal light, I actually get two symbols with the same meaning in one (yeah, I know it’s supposed to be unbroken, but close enough :)

-epe

We lost our last silkie rooster, Sumo, on Wednesday. Just like the previous one, we’re not sure what finally did him in but he’d been a bit wobbly for awhile so maybe he was just old. This leaves two silkie hens in with Sr. Modelo…who’s happy not to have to sit on the perch to avoid Sumo anymore, but I hope he doesn’t start bothering those little hens.