Zibblog

For anyone reading this blog that doesn’t have one of the Panasonic commercial plasmas (for my blog readership, it is a surprisingly high percentage), those plasmas are built to accept either 2 or 3 (2 for TVs under 42 inches, 3 in TVs 42 inches and above) input modules that essentially convert from your display input of choice to something internal to the plasma. They come with modules for composite/s-video input and component input, giving you 2 independent inputs along with a 3rd vga input. For anyone interested, here’s an interesting article I found the other day explaining component video. Component is necessary if you want to receive HD signals from a cable box, computer, or satellite system. After being on backorder for over a month, I got my HDMI input box and installed it in my tv. Now, I can have my TiVo, cable box (for HD and on demand programming), and dvd player all hooked up at once.

For those wondering about HDMI, you might find the following interesting. At some point, DVI came along for digital video input (I feel like it was adopted for computers first, but I could be wrong), so you’ll find some dvd players, cable boxes, etc along with many computers that have DVI. However, it looks like the current push for home audio/video is HDMI, Home Digital Multimedia Interface. The nice thing about HDMI is that it is one cable for both audio and video, so I now have one wire running from my dvd player to my tv. The standard also talks about being able to send status information both ways along the cable. As I was looking into HDMI stuff the other day, I found a lot of HDMI to DVI converters (and the other way around), which made me wonder what the difference was. It turns out, HDMI is really just DVI video with some added features like the audio and status information. For any of you wondering whether or not HDMI/DVI is any better than component video, here is an interesting article, and for any of you wanting to wire up your entertainment center with DVI or HDMI, I recommend reading this.

While I was at work waiting for code to compile and deploy, I decided to play around with some domain registration. zellerfurniture.com is working and displaying a site coming soon message that dreamhost puts up. In preparation for a move of the zibblog to a “real” hosted solution where I can put up photos and other web pages, I registered zibblog.com and pointed it at the current zibblog. Scott swears by WordPress while other people that I know (like Rus and Dave) currently use Movable Type, so I’ll probably end up needing to do some research before I finally take a plunge. What was kind of funny was that I looked to see the current state of zibbler.com and found that it is currently registered to Tucows and they have some sort of coming soon site up. I’m currently trying to come up with some domain that really screams at me for a more permanent url.

I figured I’d post a couple of pics of the business card that Rus was kind enough to work on. The one to the right was one of the examples that he put together to get a read on what I was looking for. I have the other couple of cards somewhere, but didn’t feel like looking for them because I liked this one much more. Anyway, I threw at him some of the original text listed here with the idea that my dad’s name should feature somewhat prominently in the design to differentiate it from anything involving my extended family members. I showed this to my parents and got some comments from a couple of friends, which brings us to what ended up being the final design for the front.

We played around with the image until we got to the card pictured here. In the end, I think this one has a more balanced look and Rus played around with the filters until he got a look that was a little brighter and not as white as the other one. I also thought that it would look nice if we used the back for contact information, which gave us the last image. All in all, I’m pretty happy with the end result. Now, I just have to find a place to print it at.

The other item of note is that I finally got a hosted account with DreamHost in order to host zellerfurniture.com and to possibly be the future home of the zibblog. Currently, there is nothing on the site, but hopefully, I’ll get something up in the next couple of weeks. They had a pretty good hosting deal if you signed up for 2 years, so I figured why not and went ahead and did the signup for 2 years.

Just when I start to think that my life is simply devoted to bug fixing, some stuff starts to work itself out. I sat down with Rus last night and after a couple of hours of playing with Illustrator and Photoshop, we tweaked Rus’s original design for business cards for my dad until we were happy with it. Mostly, it was Rus trying out some stuff and me saying “more of that” and “maybe less of that”. I’m really happy with them, and I’m hoping to get them printed up by the time my parents go back home to Nebraska at the end of Sept. (they get here at the end of next week). We worked up a version of the cards with my contact info as well so that if people see items like my soon to be built entertainment center and are interested, they can have a bay area point of contact.

In addition, I got a tracking number for the last backordered piece of my plasma tv. I was waiting for a module that plugs into the tv to allow it to accept HDMI signals. When it’s in place, I can give the DVD player its own tv input, and I’ll only have to switch cables between the xbox and digital cable box. It’s funny how just a couple of random things coming together can make the whole week go much more smoothly, even when it’s just bug fixing … all day long.

I was looking through my Amazon wishlist the other day trying to decide if I wanted to supplement an order I was putting together. As I was looking through it, I saw some random DVD movie collections like Star Wars in widescreen and the complete Matrix collection that I realized would probably be out on some form of next generation disc storage sometime. At this point, that is HD-DVD or Blu-ray in the kind of cage battle that consumers haven’t seen since VHS vs Betamax.

On a side note, every time I think about the whole VHS/Betamax thing, I remember the story that Ronel Elul always used to bring up in econ class about how Betamax was the superior technology. As I was putting together this blog post (is it odd that I do research for my blog posts?), I found an interesting article about the truth about “Why VHS was better than Betamax” that mostly comes down to the fact that the Betamax technology wasn’t really that superior and VHS ended up having a superior consumer implementation.

In the end, I found an interesting article that lists some of the titles that are supposed to be released in time for xmas for HD-DVD, and a lot of the titles that I would like to own, like the Matrix set, are on the list. It will be interesting to see which format survives because I’m certain that my bank account will probably be able to support at most one next generation disc format.