Interesting note: I’m not dead. I promise. Don’t get me wrong; sometimes I feel like I am at the end of the day, but I’m not.

Why, you ask?  I don’t think I’ve worked under a 55 hours in the past 2-3 months or so. At the end of the day, I pretty much want to come home and do…nothing. My general exit routine has been come home around 7-ish, either picking up food or cooking something quick at home, watch a DVR’d episode of Southpark (because for some reason, I’m on this big catch-up kick), play a game, read, talk to my lovely wife or something…and then go to bed.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Where did writing go? I’m not sure. I certainly could have squeezed it in there as one of my options, right? But I haven’t because I’ve realized that sometimes it’s in my personality to get really obsessed with doing something. And then, just as quickly as I am obsessed with it, I drop off. I’m the same way with reading. One minute I’ll be plowing through 1000+ page books, and the next minute flatline.

In this case, I think it has something more to do with the amount of working than anything. I just haven’t felt inspired to get on the computer and do more thinking. If I get on a computer after work, I generally just want to read mindlessly or feed my World of Warcraft addiction a little bit.

So what the heck have I been doing over the past four 3.5 months or so since I last posted?

Work
Work-wise, it has been pretty crazy as usual. There is a lot going on. I’ll spare the details.  But let’s just say that I’ve been working a lot. Did a little bit of a travel to New York and Costa Rica. During the week, I generally just want to come home and veg out.

Sometimes I think I’d love to have a job where the entire day isn’t spent thinking thinking thinking. Sometimes I think that it’d be awesome to own a Starbucks or something because, by the end of the day, you know that it is, indeed, the end. You’ve served your coffee, you’ve talked to a bunch of people, and you’ve gotten to come home to relax.

As it were, I don’t think I’ll ever own a Starbucks. Nor do I really think that’s a feasible option for me. I actually enjoy what I do very much, and will continue to do it for quite some time.

House
Being a homeowner is still great. We made a great move by buying a place that didn’t need a bunch of work. It has been nice only having to do small cosmetic upgrades. We bought all stainless appliances. We also got some really nice new leather furniture (couch, loveseat, and a coffee table/ottoman). Did a little bit of painting.  But that’s really about it. It’s great to walk into a place that is ‘yours’…your space that you have made your own. It makes it much easier to relax. I’ll have to post some pictures later.

Home Theater
Most importantly, the home theater setup is now complete, and that, friends, is freakin’ awesome. It’s nothing amazing, but it’s perfect for me/us. I believe in proportion rather than having something huge for the sake of having something huge. I measured out the wall and figured that a 40-42″ TV would be the ideal size without it becoming the centerpiece of the living room. So I went with w 40″ Samsung 550A and couldn’t be happier. It looks amazing.

My receiver isn’t awesome, but it’s good enough. It’s some model of Sony. It’s a 7.1 system,THX certified and gets the job done. I have a couple of larger Infinity front speakers, and then a Sony center, surround and sub set up. Again, nothing awesome, but it was made to be more ‘low profile’ and fit with an LCD setup which is kind of cool. At least it’s all digital which is what I was most interested in having. 

Of course, what good is having a nice TV without having a little HD action? So I used that as an excuse to buy a PS3 because it has a Bluray player. Which, by the way, if you’re going to buy a Bluray player, then you should just buy the PS3.

Of course, now since a video game system has been brought up, I feel obligated to talk about that…

PS3
At first, I was resistant to buying the PS3 because I thought it was far too expensive, the game library for it was (and still is, to some degree) poor and the Sony online network is nowhere near the beast that Xbox Live is. Now that I have the system, I have to say that I’m pretty damn impressed. Overall, I still think the Xbox is the better gaming system for the time being. But I can now see where they cut a few corners in order to get the thing out the door a year in advance of the PS3. 

To start, the PS3 is a FAR better built system than the Xbox. It feels like a very substantial piece of hardware. The first thing I noticed was when you are playing a game or watching a movie…it’s quiet. The fan on the Xbox is obnoxiously loud, but I guess I just got used to it. 

It has wireless capabilities out of the box. Xbox makes you buy a separate $100.00 USB device.

It has Bluetooth capabilities. Xbox doesn’t. That means you can hook up a keyboard and mouse.  Why would you do that? Well, there’s a built-in Web browser.  And should you decide to insall another OS (which I’ll talk about in a bit), you can take advantage there too. 

It has an accessible and non-proprietary A/V setup. On the Xbox, there’s a set of A/V cables you have to buy in order to use HDMI and get true surround processing. Sure, you can just buy a $20.00 HDMI cable and go from your Xbox to your TV. The problem here is that if you’re going to do true surround out to your stereo, that setup won’t do it. The system doesn’t pass through the full surround signal. So your only option is to run the optical out from the Xbox cable connection directly to your stereo and then run an HDMI cable to your TV…thereby separating out the two signals.  Seems easy…except for the fact that you can’t do that.

The regular Xbox cable connection actually overlaps the HDMI out on the Xbox so you can’t use it. The only conventional (note I say conventional; you could Macguyver your normal component…or analog…or whatever…cable connection to where it doesn’t overlap, but it requires you break the housing on it) way to do it is to buy a $50.00 HDMI Xbox setup. Kind of a rip-off.

You can stream media from a computer that is on the same network as your Playstation very easily.  I had it streaming music and video about 5 minutes after I got everything set up. It was like, “Oh…hey Andrew…looks like you have a laptop on your network with Windows Media 11 on it, and it looks like you have a bunch of music and video on it. Want to stream that here?” All I had to do was allow the connection in Windows Media 11 on the laptop. The Xbox wasn’t that difficult, but it definitely took a little more than what I just described.

You can, if you really want, install another OS on the PS3 in addition the PS3 OS.  Yellowdog Linux is apparently what has been optimized for it. And you don’t even have to hack it to get it to work; there’s simply an option in the PS3 menu interface that says “Install Another OS”.  Impressive.

And of course, the Bluray drive is what ultimately justifies the purchase. Considering that the least expensive decent quality Bluray player starts at $329, doesn’t it make more sense just to get a PS3?

Don’t get my wrong; if I were in the situation where I was buying a game system and my primary motive was getting it for the games, then I’d buy an Xbox…even if I had to buy the extra USB wireless dongle and the HDMI cables (which makes the highest model of Elite 360 more expensive than the PS3).  The reason why is because the overall Xbox Live service is excellent…far better than the Sony network…and there is a wider selection of better games. Sony will certainly catch up…but then that’s the problem, and ultimately the advantage that MS leveraged by releasing a year earlier. They may’ve sacrifced quality, but now they have a bigger install base.

The Post Conclusion
So my purpose was to just let everyone know that all is well and that I am not quite dead yet. Mission accomplished. More later.

.a.