This holiday weekend has basically thrown HD television onto my person.

First – Johnson2 gets a line on a 43 inch rear projection TV. 43 inch HD television. Apparently this person was selling it on the cheap to get a LCD. “How much?” was the obvious next step… “$350 – and an HD tuner for $50 if you want that.”

Yes and Yes.

Is rear projection my first choice? no. Is having a built in HD tuner better than a set top box? sure it is. But this was a chance to leap into big-screen HD television for $400 dollars. The in-laws teamed up with William Clay Ford and helped us move the TV that evening.

After hooking up the television, rearranging the entire living room, watching Neo vs. Smith, and generally basking in all that is man; I began weighing my options for high definition content.

I’ve been a Comcast subscriber for some time now, and through the entirety of that business/customer relationship I have loved and hated this company. I hate comcast when I get the bill. Paying over 100 dollars a month for high speed internet and basic cable is pretty much a deplorable scenario. But, then I do a speakeasy speed test and my download speeds consistently reach upwards of 25 – 30 mbps. This results in near euphoria. Regardless though, the thought of paying even more to these buttholes was really not a pleasant thought.

Enter the “Antenna”.

Apparently when I was sold the HD tuner, it had come with a basic and generic indoor antenna. Not really thinking anything of it at the time; I decided to try hooking it up and see what would happen. The new TV had a cable and antenna input, so I tried that first… Nothing special: 5 or 6 fuzzy local channels. Then I tried hooking that antenna up to my HD tuner. To my exorbitant surprise; I suddenly had several fully high def 1080i channels over the air by way of this ‘useless’ antenna – for free!?

Having never heard of this functionality before – I was sure I had stumbled onto something completely unknown to the rest of the world. I hit google up a little bit and landed at a few different sites talking about how over-the-air HD is actually better than cable or satellite because it is uncompressed. And people just go crazy to get HD this way… People buy and/or build huge outdoor powered antennas in order to pick up HD signals from miles away.

I finally ended up at www.antennaweb.org which allows you to put in your location and then lists all over-the-air HD channels in your area; including how far away, what channel, and even what direction to point your antenna. I punched through the wizard and came back with all sorts of HD channels that were available within 30 miles of my home.

I immediately went out and invested in a nicer indoor antenna (amplified, directional, adjustable gain, etc.). After re-discovering all the channels with my new antenna, I have 15 HD channels including the big ones like Wood TV, WZZM, and FOX.

Basically this is one of the coolest things ever. 25+ year old technology being used to view High Definition televion… Not to mention that I have 15 free HD channels forever just by spending 27 dollars on a decent indoor antenna.

Finally… one of my favorite applications has been ported over to “teh” linux. (Now we just need iTunes, Counter Strike, and some (by ‘some’ i mean ANY) video editing applcation). Digress: Google released Google desktop for Linux. I’ve used Google Desktop for awhile – both at home and at work. Let me tell you something – if you haven’t used desktop search in some capacity yet in your life, then you are seriously missing out. Instead of trying to remember which folder under “My Documents” you might have put your resume; or where that video of “3rd Strike – No light” is currently residing; just pop open the desktop search and type “eric vanbergen resume” (obviously inserting your own name); “3rd strike”; or whateve else you want to find on your computer.

Without failure, the result is exactly what you are looking for. I have used a couple different search tools (including Beagle). They all do a pretty good job… Hell, even Micrsoft’s Desktop Search is phenominal, but… I do like Google’s better. In my opinion, its the best desktop search tool out there. It indexes files, word docs, pdf’s, media files (id3, even.. i think), your email, your gmail, your web history… etc.

The linux version is Beta – and with Google’s track record it will probably be Beta till about the year 2047. I’m not complaining though, Google’s beta software is better than 99% of other software in the world today. Hopefully they decide to add the sidebar with the next linux version though. I don’t see it in this initial release, and that is one killer part of the Google Desktop.

At any rate: Check out some screenies of Google Destkop running in Linux

Of other note – We now have two pets. 1 gato named “Kitt” that has been with us for 3 years, and now we’ve added “Kali” (prn: calley) the Scottish Terrier. So far, all is well. She’s a good dog and seems to get along with our cat very well. A few screenshots of “teh” dog are available as well.

About a year ago, i purchased www.thesciontc.com. Originally I had fully intended to make that into a Scion enthusiasts website and online community. I made a weak attempt, and really just didn’t have the time or energy to put into it. So, my motivation and the site began to lack and eventually just sat static. Fast forward to last week. I was approached by somebody interested in purchasing the domain. My initial thought was ‘nope’ – thats too good of a domain name to let go. I even put some time back into the site and upgraded the forums. But, after a couple days the idea of selling seemed to get better and better. We settled on a good price, and my paypal account balance confirmed that the sale was for real.

I was kind of intimidated to tell the truth… I had never sold a website before and really didn’t know how to do it. Turns out it’s really not that hard. The buyer initiates a change of registrar, and you give the buyer the site’s authorization code and unlock the domain from your own registrar. A couple clicks and that was the end of it. BRB thesciontc.com. I hope your new owner treats you better than I did.

To go along with selling things in and around the online arena, I’ve finally decided to sell some things on eBay… I’ve been a member of eBay since the year 2000, but I’ve never bought anything or sold anything on ebay. In fact, i have no idea why i am a member – Or, why I can still remember a password that i created 7 years ago and haven’t used since. Regardless, the task of listing an item for auction is another new venture for me. It was easy enough to do – and I had two bids within a half hour on my first auction. Thus, I decided to post another auction.

So far, I am just lightening up on video games by selling all of my final fantasy games:
Auction 1 – Final Fantasy Playstation Lot
Auction 2 – Final Fantasy GBA/DS Lot

Both of those “Lots” are pretty impressive collections of Final fantasy games – And i’ve already played through the vast majority of them and as such will never do so again. Also it turns out a couple of those titles are pretty rare, so I have pretty high hopes for these two auctions of mine.

I’m feeling “entrepreneurial” from an online perspective and brainstorming a bunch of online ideas. We’ll see what happens in the long run here.