August 3, 2002

A lot of driving to do today. Dominica and I are heading on down to Topsail Island, North Carolina to vacation with her family. We are estimating about 6 hours or more of drive time before we get there since the island is almost in South Carolina.

My last Marantz MA-500 monoblock is due in from Korea middle of this week. The big news in our home theatre saga is Loopy’s purchase, over the weekend, of a Sony $16,000 Triple CRT front projection unit. Capable of a 300″, 1500×1200 image (right in line with absolute top of the line HDTVs) the Sony will blow away anything that we have used before. We haven’t come up with a good way to set it up yet. But we will think of something. There are some serious cabling issues involed. And location of the equipment issues. Who knows where we are going to be able to put that massive projector. We are pretty excited though. We should have it is a week or two. Fun, fun, fun. The neighbor girls will be disappointed – the whole time they lived next door we had a wussie two channel stereo system and 27″ TV. Then in their last couple weeks we upgraded the whole system, added 150% more channels of sound, went to DTS and added a 32″ TV. Then, as soon as they leave we add a massive high end front projector! It is going to be like a drive in right in the house. In fact, Nate had the idea of hooking up the projector in the garage… then we could pull two cars in there and it would be just like a drive in. How funny would that be?

I bought my first SACD last night, Patricia Barber’s “Modern Cool”. SACD is the new format from Sony and Philips that is supposed to be much better than regular CD. You have to have a special player to play it but they are as cheap as $180. The nice thing about the SACDs is that many of them are called Hybrids and play as a regular CD in a regular CD player and as an SACD in an SACD player. Making them really nice for transitioning to the new system. So I bought this hybrid disc and it didn’t play in the only CD player I have to try it in. In fact, it won’t even recognize that it is a disc. So I am skeptical. And the disc cost me $33 at Tower Records. So it had better work. I hope to get 20-30 of these Hybrid SACD discs before going out and getting an SACD player (A Marantz, I hope) to play them on. So, I am not rushing out and getting one anytime soon. Most of the discs were in the $18-$22 range though. Just the one that I got was really expensive.

I am actually taking a camera along on this vacation. It has been forever since I really used a camera. In fact, I am taking two cameras with me to Topsail. I am taking my awesome Nikon 5005 35mm SLR and my Olympus digital (actually, the company’s.) Hopefully I will have some pictures for you soon (but we know how it is.) Speaking of pictures, Loopy found a can of used 35mm film in his pocket last week that has been in there since who knows when. He will get it developed and then we will see what the heck it is. We don’t even know who the film belongs to. We know that it isn’t Loopy’s. Hmmm… Quite the mystery.

Since Nate and I talked the other night about correct HTML and XHTML I decided to go through SGL and start removing the rest of the deprecated tags like bold and italics. I have already done this page and will be changing all of the other pages soon. One at a time as I do other work on them. Eventually I will also need to remove the horizontal rule tags but that will be a much larger project so I am saving that. I think that they are the last depricated tag in use on the site.

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