Quarter Life Crisis

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Hmmm¶

533 words

• Gave my stereo away for repair. The dealer thought it’s nothing grave either, as the machine still makes music but just operating it doesn’t work reliably anymore. Yet, the problem was nothing he understood, had seen before or could fix. Hope this won’t be too expensive, but as things go people can’t promise anything beforehand.
• While being at the hifi guy’s, I let him show me the new mulit-channel stuff he’s selling. And with the good speakers he has, which are carefully set up, listening to a classical concert in surround sound was quite good (nothing like the surround stuff I heard on the typical cheap surround systems before). It really filled the room in a new way without it being clear that ‘ugh, that noise is coming from the speaker back there’ all the time. For comparison, we listened to the normal stereo track afterwards. And while that didn’t ‘fill’ the room as well, it sounded clearer to me. 
• Then he demonstrated the video with sound by watching the famous plane scene in North by Northwest. They seem to have remastered the film quite carefully for the DVD and that was quite cool. Altogether not cool enough for me to ‘need’ such a toy, though.
• What was really crappy was the DVD stuff, though. Why exactly do DVDs need extra menus featuring their different sounds settings and then the players and amps have similar settings? It looked like those things can auto adjust, but there also seemed to be ugly manual options. And even worse for the visuals. With those modern flat and wide screen displays offering some 16:9 or so aspect ratio and DVDs possibly offering another aspect ratios, there seem to be a number of options to scale the film to fill the display best. But why exactly do you actually have to press buttons to get the right ones. And why can you press the buttons in a way that gives you distorted images? Shouldn’t all that ‘just work’? I mean it did for VHS…
• Later on me and my dad bought a suit so I look well dressed enough at some upcoming weddings. Uh-huh, fun. Not really my type of fun, though. But at least we were reasonably quick, which is remarkable with someone like me who hates everything involved.
• Then I did some Google Earth surfing with my mum. The good old Pismo’s graphics chip really is a bit too slow for the application, but it still works and we saw loads of different places where we lived and have been. Google Earth also shows that a 1Mbit DSL connection can be a bit too slow.
• I quite like the route finding in Google Earth and how you can ‘drive’ along the route. I keep thinking it’d make a fun background to project on a wall during a party, going all the way through the country. Any ideas how a more complicated route can be made in Google Earth. Or how it can be made on the fly by turning left or right every now and then?
• And then I cooked dinner for my parents. The sort-of Japanese beef salad thing I discovered a while ago. 

July 30, 2006, 1:52