OK, I'm officially a "Yuppie" now.

That there is my new TV. It's pretty freakin' huge. Note that the green area in the image below represents the entirety of the space occupied by my former television, which was not really that small - a 27-inch CRT TV.



So, yeah. This one is a 50-inch (diagonal) Samsung DLP projector unit. The screen is actually a bit more than 44 inches wide horizontally. As you can see, it's absolutely the biggest TV I could fit into the space in my entertainment center. I was a little afraid that it would be too big, but it turns out that from the couch, from which I took this picture, it's pretty much perfect.

And man, does the picture look great. I'm very happy with this purchase... of course I did about a month worth of homework and shopping before I bought. I upgraded my cable service to HD, of course, and the (unfortunately few) HD channels just look... mindblowing. The best and most consistent one is the Discovery HD Theater channel, with all programs shown in HD 1080i resolution, the highest currently available via cable or satellite, and everything on it is just spectactular. I mean, really, until you see it you have no idea. Think about the best hi-res images you've ever seen on a good computer monitor, and blow that up to 44" wide in your mind. Yeah.

The other HD channels are less consistent in picture quality, but still look light-years better than regular TV. I watched the various football games that were on yesterday; 3 of them were in HD, while the fourth (Chargers/Browns) was in plain ol' TV, and the difference is just ridiculous. The HD picture is so good, you can clearly tell the difference between the live picture and the taped instant replay picture in both HD and regular. That's not something I've ever seen before.

One of TGF's friends came over with a copy of Mirrormask, and that looked fabulous, just wonderful. I now have to buy it because it's just visually so amazing. And now of course I have to watch all my DVDs again on the huge screen. Man, I bet The Incredibles is going to look... yeah, you know. I hear all the Star Wars DVDs look spectacular too. No more letterboxing, woo!

Anyway, so I'm happy with it. I haven't played any games on it yet, tho I did wire them all up. Because of the way the HD video signal has to work, I wound up rewiring my whole setup, and buying a new Samsung DVD/VCR combo - for only $120!! - that has an HDMI output like my cable box, for the best picture quality. So now, in addition to the old TV, I now have Sony DVD player and VCR for sale, cheap! E-mail me if you wanna buy 'em...

And good riddance to the Sony stuff. You may recall my complete disgust with Sony about their stupid rootkit spyware on their music CDs... I wasn't kidding, I'm not buying any more of their stuff, period, except maybe for some films on DVD (Mirromask is a Sony film... sigh). I'm not even going to buy their game hardware unless I'm forced to. No PSP, and definitely no PS3. Sorry, I'm not blowing $700 on a game box. I switched to consoles because buying PCs for gaming along with Macs for work costs too damn much. I'm groaning a bit because the Xbox360 costs close to $400, but $700 is out of control. I can buy a full-function PC for that... or half a MacBook. Screw you, Sony, you're a big mess and your hardware quality has gone downhill pretty badly. I did look at Sony TVs for comparison while I was shopping for my new one, and they all had lousy pictures in comparison and were way overpriced. Thanks, Samsung, for being the new Sony!

OK enough gushing about the damn TV already.

I've had really bad insomnia for the last 3 nights. I've had maybe 9 or 10 hours total sleep since I woke up Friday morning. I have no idea why, though maybe it's something in the Chinese food I had delivered Friday evening and was eating all weekend? This is not good, very not good. Not sleeping is brutal on me these days. I feel extra crispy around the edges. I really hope I can get some real solid sleep tonight...

Back to work...