New toys and Google-fu

So... I'd been not-even-hinting for a while to the wife about wanting a new TV. Yes, even though I don't watch much of it... I hate most network programming. But for movies. And eventually hoping to get decent cable again (I HATE that it is all-or-nothing packages - it should be a freaking buffet line, choose what you want & pay X per channel, but that's a separate rant). She has generally tolerated it, putting me off with very reasonable sense til it was a good time. Well, recently she told me it was something to look at with the upcoming holidays. We discussed our respective wants & needs, she set some very fair limits to keep me from being stupid & we've been kind of comparison shopping since then.

Screen size honestly was the least of the issues. I wanted a little bigger than she did (gratuitous size joke at your leisure here), but neither of us had a desire for a wall-filling TV that would dominate the room. After looking in the stores and standing back from things we settled on the 40-46" range as being good for our wants and needs. Definitely bigger than the 9 year old 27" we have now, but not overwhelming.

We did the whole LCD/Plasma debate - looking online, sharing thoughts & finally looking at stuff in the stores side-by-side (and yes, we settled on plasma, as her artist's eye definitely notices the color improvement, and I just thought they looked better for some reason).

Same thing for the 1080/720 discussion - though this one was harder to solve. She honestly didn't see a difference between them. At first I was holding firm on wanting 1080, in order to be ready for advances to come down the road (and because I have horrible geek urges to buy the better of the two toys). Unfortunately, this desire was putting the sets out of our price range. So we planned to see what the big holiday sales looked like & work from there.

Well, this morning Kyleigh and I did a bit of holiday shopping after her nap. At the tail end of the trip I went by one of the electronics giants, knowing they had a variety to look at and wanting to compare again. Plus, I knew they were doing the whole "pre-black-Friday" thing & wanted to see what popped up. I had pretty much settled in my mind that if we had good deals on a 720 pixel resolution TV that we would jump on it, just to resolve the issue and keep me from whining more! Plus, with the upcoming surgery, it would give me a recovery toy of sorts...

So I look around and compare some sets and find a good solution that is well within our price range. I find a sales drone that isn't overly pushy and seems knowledgable, and I start questioning him on some of the stuff between the 720 resolution and the 1080 same brand series right next to it. I'm still pretty much ready to go out the door with the lesser one, when he points out that there IS an unadvertised sale price on the 1080 - $300 off - and that the 1080 version comes with a free Blueray player as well... So - for basically $100 more, but still in the original budget plan, I get the 1080 AND a Blueray player that I wasn't even planning on.

Believe it or not, I did still debate for several minutes. But, realistically it was too good of a deal to pass up, so I put the order in - none were in stock, but they should be here by Friday. All going well, next weekend we will have the chance to see if the HD difference is as good at home as it looked there (I have a feeling it will be even better away from the massive wall-of-video), and then we can start figuring out what movies are worth getting on Blueray for us and what stays as it is. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that our regular DVD's will look better as well due to the technology, which means we don't have to look as deeply. Mostly it will be the old VHS tapes we have & a few of the perenial classics that we both know will be watched plenty more.

So.... given the convolutions of my brain... this is how we get to the Google-fu.

See, we started discussing the "movies to copy to DVD/Blueray" discussion... which led me to think about some of what was still on VHS. Which led me to think "Hey, there was a song off of one movie that I liked, but I don't think I ever got it off the old cassette tape I had made back in Spain ten years ago." Which led to the cabinet to look through the vids. Upon finding it and the title, I did the old Google-action & found the movie... then at least the one song title I wanted. Which then led to a Youtube find of it, and a download and conversion to mp3 for the iPod... all in the space of a few minutes. This technology stuff is neat!

(oh and the movie was "Blood and Concrete" and the song was "One Girl in a Million" by Jennifer Beals for those who care. I found it catchy.)

Let's see, other than that. Got to spend time doing fun stuff with each of my kids. Angel Food came in today, and we used some of the choices to make a nice simple dinner for the evening. Then my wife and I spent time together watching Ronin and enjoying some quiet Saturday evening togetherness with no madness. So all-in-all no complaints about how today went here.