Saturday, December 29, 2007

Lazy Recuperation Saturday & The Quest for HD

Today Sharkey and I were supposed to head up to North New Jersey to have a belated Christmas time with my brother his family and my Mom. Unfortunately, Sharkey and I came down with the tummy flu so we did not make the trip. So we had a restful, quiet and recuperative Saturday. We took a cue from the Maggie dog:

MagsCrash

We are both feeling a lot better and we pretty much were vegetables all day.

As you know, I began my quest for High Definition a few weeks ago with the purchase of an HD LCD TV. So after I realized my existing DirecTV was not cutting it, I setup Verizon to come in the first part of January to install HD FIOS. So last week I was watching DVD's and was thinking that my DVD player is 7 years old. I've had it as long as Sharkey and I have been married. So then that led me start researching HD DVD players. So I was looking around and was thinking of spending some Christmas gift card money on a new player. But I found the deal of deals on Amazon.com. They are selling a Toshiba HD DVD player for $179 with free shipping and you get 10 HD DVD's with it. So being that HD DVD's retail for about $25, they are actually paying me to buy this player. Well sort of....

toshiba a3

hddvd_a3

But wait it does not end there. So when the new TV came I quickly found out my old universal remote was not able to control it along with everything else. So I had to go find another universal remote. So I looked around and found the Logitech Harmony 880. It's pretty sweet. You hook it to your computer with a USB cable, then you go through this interface and just type in your component models and it does the rest. It even creates "Activities" like "Watch TiVo" or "Watch DVD." So with the activities, you just hit the appropriate activity button and the remote will turn on the correct device(s), switch TV modes, and turn on the correct audio modes. It makes using all the audio/visual equipment way, way easy. Sharkey was nice enough to be my hand model:

harmony880

But I "think" that's it, and it's what I told Sharkey too. With this last upgrade I believe I have everything I need for some HD enjoyment.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can I get that last statement in writing, please? Oh wait--I guess I just did.

Anonymous said...

Wow, your remote is insane!

Character Builder said...

You boys and your gadgets. Crazy.

Kranki said...

Happy New Year! Woo!

Anonymous said...

I've had my HDTV for over a year now. My brother-in-law came during vacation and pressed a few buttons so now I get the HD channels. Just think about all I was missing for a year!

JP said...

sharkey I am done for now Honey, honest!!

lola The remote is wicked awesome!!

cb gadgets, they build a body good!

kranki Ditto Yoshi's Mom!!!

certainabsurdity Thanks for stopping by and making the transition from lurker to "commentor" =) It's amazing when you find out what you have when you didn't know what you had!! Er, yeah...