I wanted to write last night, well… not really. I seemed to do a bunch of other things, but I did finish up the third story fragment and almost started another short story. At home, I decided that I would try to get my brand new television working. There is a good way of describing this.
There was a house husband that one day looked up from his living room couch and realized that the drapes were dirty. Sighing, mainly because it was a tedious job and he’d rather fulfill his life as a stripper/detective/surgeon, he got up and took them down and cleaned them properly. He probably even used soap. Finally, he put up his bright and sparkling drapes and stood back. He admired his work, wondering if it would fit in his virtual detective office when he realized that the couch was just as nasty. He never really noticed it before, but next to his shining drapes, it was nasty. So, he stripped off the cushions and grunted and groaned to clean the couch off. Hours later, he sat back, sweating as people who work hard do, and admired his brilliant drapes and cleaned couch. That is when he noticed the matching recliner looked really bad next to the couch.
Some hours later, when his wife came home, she found him painting the kitchen cabinets.
“What in the world!?”
Sheepishly, with a smear of white paint on his cheek in an almost adorable manner, if it wasn’t for the fresh paint smell, he sighed.
“Drapes were dirty.”
I wanted my new TV to work perfectly. I got the overly expensive HDMI cables the day before and all I needed was a sound system. So, I grabbed the speakers from work and brought them home. Wrong end. It would have worked, except that the back of the speakers wouldn’t accept the adapter I had from some years back. I checked my speakers on my computer. Nope. I even sneaked over to Fluffy’s office and checked those, just in case. Nope. I checked the portable stereo in the sun porch. Nope.
For a moment, I wanted to make really nasty noises. Then, I flipped a coin and decided to just go out a buy a stereo. I picked up a Pioneer VSX-917V-k from Best Buy because they said it had HDMI and did upscaling. So, everything was perfect? Right? Not in the slightest bit. I also grabbed speakers, remembering as I left that I already had a set from before. But, that was an opened box and one of those non-returnable setups. The upscaling works for component video, not HDMI. I found this out after close to three hours of trying to get the DVD player and the PS3 hooked up properly to the TV. I managed to get a jury-rigged component video working on the DVD player, but I was rather depressed to see that it looked like completely and utter shite.
But, it was working. The Gateway FPD2485W TFT LCD Monitor is beautiful, but damn is it sensitive. If it doesn’t like your signal, it just TURNS OFF! Yes, even if it has a good HDMI signal (through the DVI cable), the damn bastard just turns off and won’t even let you get to the menu to check out the inputs. Of course, it probably has something to do with the Pioneer HDMI output, because when I hook it up directly to the PS3, it is gorgeous.
So, the plan for the day after my migrane goes away… turn my system into a component video and hope that I can get 1080p/1080i out of the component video stuff. I have the gift certificate card so I’ll use that to buy the cables I need. Though, the stereo pumps out a fair amount of heat, so I might end up removing two shelves (that we were going to remove anyways) to put it in a proper stereo component which will require reorganizing my office (which needs to be done anyways).
So…
“My stereo is dirty.”
» My Father’s Bike: 0.242 (19,346 / 80,000 words)
» Wind, Bear, and Moon Edited: 0.500 (2 / 4 weeks until 2007-06-15)
» Muddy Reflections Query: 0.167 (10 / 12 weeks until 2007-08-10)
» Summer Biking: 0.162 (64.8 / 400 km)