Candleblog

I was totally thrashed by the flu last week. I taught class a week ago Monday, despite feeling under the weather (mistake) and then for the next five days I couldn’t stand up for more than a few minutes at a time and had a very bad chest/head situation. There was no high fever, which [...]

One of the things that amuses me about all of the end-of-the-decade reflections and lists going on around the web is that after ten years of living in this decade, we as a culture have utterly failed at agreeing on what to call it. I’ve seen aughts, oughts, oughties, naughts, naughties, 2000s, ’00s, double-0s, zips, [...]

We take Thanksgiving fairly seriously at the Stoneking/Simmon household. We take it so seriously in fact, that when I just tweeted about how I’d gotten a 13 lb. pre-turkey for making stock that I’m going to brine and roast on Saturday, I got a direct message from a friend who said, “You really don’t mess [...]

Last night I finally hooked up the 50″ Panasonic G10 plasma display and got to see some results. We watched the Star Trek Blu-ray (released yesterday) and it looked pretty sweet. The TiVo and the Mac look great too, and the SD shows don’t even look too bad. Emily is a bit freaked out by [...]

Okay. Here’s a sketch of what’s occurred in the last 36 hours. If you want to skip the nitty gritty, just jump down to the “conclusions” portion at the bottom. A Comcast technician came to my house yesterday morning to install the a multi-stream CableCARD. He spent a good 30 minutes on the phone with [...]

Today was pretty major in the A/V upgrade plan. The Panasonic G10 arrived — a day and a few hours late, but it was unharmed and ready to rock. The TiVo HD XL came last night and I set it up and got it going today — the appointment to get the CableCARD(s) installed is [...]

I’m expecting the the new plasma screen sometime tomorrow and the TiVo HD XL a day later. I’ll try and keep updating the blog with progress reports. The saga will involve dealings with Comcast, which always carries with it the chance of extraordinary frustration, but I’ll keep an open mind and if my dealings with [...]

Warning: what follows are ruminations on my home A/V set-up. This post will really only interest the A/V gearheads among you. We here in the Stoneking/Simmon household have had an HDTV for a little over three years, when my brother got us a 32″ Samsung 720p (16:9) CRT (cathode ray tube) as a wedding present, [...]

… but barely. Here are some links I need to clear away from FF… First up, my new Spacetime Report is up at The Contrarian. And I’m blogging at the VIFF blog this week. Can sci-fi movies still be cool? First 8 minutes of V are online. The Kings of Convenience play at Spin (I [...]

Hi there, Internet! First off, I just filed a new Spacetime Report over at The Contrarian. Check it out. Also, I’ll be blogging over at the VIFF blog a bit for the next couple of weeks. The film festival starts Friday and runs for ten days, so I’ll be pretty swamped between my job, teaching [...]