High Def - Big Screen

My birthday present to myself finally arrived.

I have a high def projector. Its set up with my DVD player. 8' diagonal in widescreen format. Slighly more in 4:3 format.

Now... to get high def cable and better speakers. Maybe a screen (although I've heard white sheets work pretty well).

Froogle's seller rating aggretator must be broken

I attempted to purchase a product from AlwaysLowest.com (yeah.. I learned my lesson. Next time its a name I recognize). Anyways, they had a 5.0 out of 5 rating from 8 reviews according to Froogle.

After my lousy experience with the seller, I looked at those ratings.

6 of the 8 had "no rating available", and 4 of those were very negative.
The other two had 5/5. Looking closer at those ratings, from pricegrabber.com, gave a past 3 months average of 1.67, past 6 months of 3.14, and alltime of 3.24.

In reality, I think it should have been a rating of around 2.5 out of 5.
4 @ 1, 2 @ 3.2, 2 @ 5 = 20.4/8

I guess its my own fault. I relied on the aggregator to do my research instead of doing it myself.

So... new order for my projector. I should get it by the 24th. Very reputable shipper. Still slower than I would like, but, at least this time I'll get it.

Starting to feel like a home

We made great progress recently with the house. We have enough shelving space for all of our books (at least those we've unpacked thus far). We finally got a table for the computer office. And the office is mostly set up. Two towers on a KVM switch with one keyboard, mouse, and monitor. Both CPUs completely patched WinXP. I do need to swap out the monitor for the larger one in the basement, but, that can happen later. There's also one spot left on the router for a 3rd computer, so, whatever laptop needs dedicated access can have it.

Instead of getting the Cat6 wire through the attic, as my last attempt was a disaster, I'm instead threading a sole Cat5 from the gigabit router to the office, where it plugs into an older router. I need to buy a gigabit switch there, as I think it should still connect at gigabit in spite of Cat5 wire.

The 5.1 speaker setup was put in the office for gaming. The 2.1 speaker setup was put in the living room for connecting to an iPod.

Still to do - put the linux server on the network (although I'm starting to think its old enough to start over... 4 years or so), buy a network storage device, and finish wiring the house. Plus get furniture for the rest of the house.

We also raked the yard, hauled yard waste and some boxes to the dump, put out lights on the small spruce trees in front, and debated getting a wreath. DH is redoing the book organization.

I figure this is a true sign you're a grownup. You look forward to Saturday because the dump is open.

I love this iPod idea

I saw this on the Wired feed: Peter Gabriel's iTunes plug-in.

I gotta say, I like the idea. I tend to only like semi-randomness in my music. Jumping from a Beethoven sonata to The Clash is a bit jarring. But this sounds like it would fix that.

Pretty cool.