It's a little strange, I suppose, even though I have this fancy home theater projector and sound set up in a room allocated just for that purpose, that my living room TV would a 12-or-so-year-old RCA rear projection set. The old RCA is a reliable, still-going strong, 53" wood cabinet model. But it has a glossy screen and reflects light like a mirror. It's hard to watch anything when it's light outside, for sure. the place where the TV lives provides the perfect angle for reflecting the view out the french doors.

This weekend, Fry's electronics has a great sale on a 42" LG 1080P LCD HDTV (model 42LB5D) on sale for $997.00 (also available online for that price as of the time of this writing, with very reasonable shipping), which is a steal no matter how you look at it. Best Buy's price is around $1599, and you can find it online for around $1200 if you look hard enough. But the Fry's advertised price this weekend was something else entirely.

After a day of thinking about it, I decided it was a good enough deal to take advantage of, and that it would be nice to reclaim some space in my living room. At Best Buy they were willing to match the Fry's price for me last night (frankly, I'd prefer to purchase at Best Buy, but I was open to the alternative if they could not match), and so I drove into town and picked up my new living room TV for $600 less than the floor price and took it home. Score!

It was 11pm by the time we got back home and I was tired, but that's never really stopped me. We set it up and turned it on. In short, as I expected, it's an amazing difference. The LG set is very, very bright and has a great picture, and with 3 HDMI inputs and a variety of others, I'm set. We hooked up a HDMI up-converting DVD player and watched American Psycho (wow, what a film, heh). Color me impressed.

This morning I was able to watch anything I wanted with the blinds pulled open and the sun shining in the windows. I'm a happy camper.

Looks like Vista SP1 for the 64-bit version of the OS is now available publicly on Windows Update. No sign of the 32-bit version yet, but I'm glad to get it for this particular computer.

Knowledge Base article KB936330 is available, as is the release-notes publication at TechNet.

Last night I got Chinese food from the local place and took it home.

After the meal I broke open my fortune cookie. I handed the paper to a friend of mine to read since I didn't have my glasses on and for all I knew I was trying to read it upside down (turns out I was).

I thought my friend was messing with me when he read it out loud.

Anyone have any suggestions at this point? Tin foil hats or garlic or something?

I'm saving this one.

Recently my Outlook 2007 connection to my Google Apps mail account became increasingly slow and sluggish, to the point of extreme frustration. Slow syncs and a general sense of bloat were ruining my experience and making it close to unusable. During email syncs my system would practically hang as Outlook churned away.

Not acceptable. I either needed a solution or I needed to replace my email, contacts and calendaring solution. It was that bad. Now, I really have no desire to leave Outlook. It works great for me. What I needed was a fix, which was preferable to a wholesale replacement. I know Thunderbird works well, but at least for now it's just not an Outlook equal replacement.

So, I searched today for a solution and - what do you know - quickly found an article on Digital Inspiration that helped me clean up my server configuration and improve performance substantially. With the huge onslaught of spam over the past couple months, my GMail spam folder had grown to be HUGE, so removing that from the sync was probably a big deal. Also, I set up the inbox to grab headers only (different than the article suggests). In addition, I disabled a couple unused but active Outlook add-in's as described in this article.

The results? A speedy Outlook and no more hung apps. The sync with the Google IMAP servers is much faster. I actually can't believe I put up with the bad performance as long as I did. All resolved now.

Favor Day is coming on March 12th, and it's being organized on Facebook. Nothing quite like doing something simple and kind for someone else to make the world a better place. You should be a part - spread the word!

Here's how you celebrate Favorday -- on Favorday, March 12th, 2008, you do planned favors for people, just like you would plan on giving a gift to somebody for the holidays. Any kind of favor can suffice, whether its "I'm going to rub my girlfriend's feet" or "I'm going to clean my neighbor's garage" Favorday is for celebrating each other.

You can help by inviting your friends to celebrate Favorday with you!

By the way, I am on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=584484571

It's official: The format war is over.

I'm not one bit ashamed to say I've been a HD-DVD guy ever since I made the shift to watching movies in the amazing world of hi-def last June. I've enjoyed the red label discs, I appreciate the combo-format packages, and it was HD-DVD that pushed me into doing a lot of research into 1080p projectors and then purchasing one that I have been very happy with.

I also bought a HD-DVD player for my dad and his significant other's new home the day after thanksgiving, and another one for my mom and step dad over the Christmas holiday. If nothing else, they play regular DVDs on their hi-def (1080p) sets beautifully. Too bad the HD-DVD format looks like it's officially out. Glad I got good prices and minimized the "damage." I suppose I'll probably be buying replacement hardware soon eh?

At any rate, with Netflix, Wal Mart, an ever-expanding list of film studios, Best Buy and others making announcements about either going exclusive Blu-ray or favoring the format... Well anyhow I have a question. :)

Which Blu-ray players should I be seriously looking at? Is there a no-brainer, best-bang-for-the-buck option out there? I'm not really interested in PS3 games, so swaying me in that direction might be tough. I'm looking for full 1080p coverage via HDMI. I can (and do) hope that a Blu-ray player for the Xbox 360 is in the works, but until that happens I have to see what else is out there, and it's not something I've paid full attention to.

Suggestions?