And OH MY GOD what a difference

I have a Sharp 52″ LCD, with incredible contrast. I have a Tivo series 3 now, with its sexy dual tuners and digital picture and audio out (goodbye cable box as well). I was even watching Blu-Ray movies. It’s one thing to see HD in the store, quite another to see it where your SD used to be. My wife and I just sat in awe and watched golf…golf of all things!…and stared at the beauty of it all.

From now on, I’m apparently spending all of my time up in the digital channels that start at the 700s. My friends who went HD long ago are probably laughing a bit. Yes, I’m late to the HD game by early adopter standards, but oh so happy to have finally joined.

Quite a bit more on YouTube. Cheers to you 15-year-old Kevin:

Check it out

Here’s where the confessional part of the post comes in – I had never before used BitTorrent.  Certainly I knew how the technology worked, but I’d never taken the time to make use of it myself.  So, I grab the BitTorrent-brand BitTorrent client and set about searching for South Park torrents.  Find the one I wanted and fire it up.  This probably means I owe someone somewhere the entire cost of creating every South Park ever in existence, so I’m not sure why I’m writing this.  Anyhow, once I have the finished package all pieced together, I pop it open.  Not a video in site, only .rar files.  Not only had the original been broken into torrent pieces, the original original was broken into a multi-volume RAR archive.  So now I’m off to try to find some shareware to combine these.  WinRAR does the trick and has a free trial period (if I use it ever again, I’ll buy it – fine).  Okey doke, now we’re off and running.  Files are combined and I get a single .wmv out the other end.  But it won’t run – I get sound but no video in Media Player.  Back to the original torrent site, and I’m warned that most of the files here are probably encoded with DivX, but then again maybe another codec is used.  They suggest playing all the files with VLC media player to be sure I have all the codecs needed.  OK, so I download that.  Now it’s working great – on my PC.  But I want to play it in the family room from my Mac Mini (here’s where a Slingbox would come in handy, eh?).  I take a look at the stream info through VLC and, sure enough, I need DivX.  I bring the .wmv over to the Mac Mini (good thing I already have Flip4Mac installed there, which allows QuickTime to play .wmv files), and I grab the DivX codec off their site.  Then – success!  It works!!

I play the episode for Jenni and she laughs until she cries, too.  And I feel like a master of the fractured, incredibly non-user-friendly world of torrents.

Partly to get the AFF logo off the top of my blog, and partly because there was a time when I did a wicked Rick Astley.  And now you have that damned song in your head, don’t you?

So, my wife and I rented 9 Songs the other week.  For those of you unfamiliar with the film, it’s an art film that skirts the line of being arthouse porn.  The sex scenes are explicit and unsimulated, and the acting is so/so.  Got to thinking afterward about the thoughts the director must have had.

(sound of bong hit being taken) Hmmm.  Let’s see.  I’m a decently reputable director, what should I do next?  What do I like?  Well, I like sex.  Rather a bit, actually.  Wonder if I could make a film about sex.  It would have to be intimate rather than porn-like, that way I could be explicit while being real.  Yeah.  Another thing I like?  Music.  What if I could get into some really great shows for free because they’re part of my sex film?  I’ll cut between the music and the sex.  Great idea.  Free concerts for me while I make my film.  What else? (another hit is taken) Perhaps I can wrap the whole thing up by working in a trip to Antarctica.  Sex, live concerts, and the Antarctic.  This will rule!

And, that about sums it up.

If you have not yet seen the Family Guy parody of Star Wars, run, do not walk, to the nearest download location of your choice and get it.  I have watching this thing at least 5 times all the way through (I obsess – it’s what I do) and it keeps getting funnier.  Trust me, you really, really need to see this if you are a Star Wars fan.

Moonlight?  Vampire TV show?  This would seem to be right up my alley, but it’s just not good at all.  The Vampire’s name is Mick St. James?  Really?  That in and of itself should have told someone somewhere that this was going to be lame.

Good stuff abounds, though.  Dirty Sexy Money is magnificent.  Chuck is funny.  Pushing Daisies is OK, a little too cute.  Private Practice shows great promise.  So, I’m going to begin the weeding process soon, still too much to watch.

Thank God I still have the Family Guy.