So now that I’ve got my laptop hooked up to the tv, I can actually watch movies and enjoy them. I grabbed media portal and installed it on my laptop. So far it looks pretty damn good. I customized it a little with a few plugins and a new skin (need to change the background, it’s a bit risque right now).

After awhile though I got tired of walking to the laptop now that’s it is across the room instead of next to the bed. I bought a Media center remote off someone for 20 bucks and hooked it up so it’s easier to control. Unfortunately my laptop sucks and I can’t do the super cool power it on with the remote, only power it off. That’s pretty much it for now. I’m going to start building my actual media center sometime this month (still waiting for Intel to release the motherboard). I was originally planning on going with linux. The big deciding factor will be whether or not I can output video over hdmi to the tv. If I can’t, I’m going to scrap it and go with windows and load mediaportal on there. I’m really hoping I can use linux since I want a remote shell so I can move all the services I run on my desktop over to it.

I also finally got a usenet account. Downloading via torrents works, but the speed varies too much. Plus I’m on a 6Mb connection that limits the amount of seeding I can do. I grabbed a 4GB file last night and it took about 1.5Hours, as opposed to a couple days. It’s only $12/month, so it is definently worth it. I’m looking into a seed account on a website someone told me about, I’m doing a trial right now to see if I like it, and right now it’s pretty sweet. The biggest downside I can see is I have to wait for the download to finish, then when it’s down I download it again to my computer, fortunately it’s at full speed.

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So I finally splurged on some stuff the weekend before last. I got a $25 gift card from work for being awesome with an issue that had been harassing the IT department as a whole, and I got a 10% off coupon for Best Buy. Armed with these, me and Helen headed down to southcenter on Friday to check out TV’s. After browsing through their display TV’s, I settled on the Toshiba 32AV500U. I went home and did some research on it to make sure it was a good buy, which it sounded like it was.

Armed with this knowledge, I came back on Sunday to get it. The first rep who came up asked if we wanted anything, I pointed to the Toshiba and said “I want that one”. I’m guessing he wasn’t expected someone to be so decisive, so he said he’d be right back after pausing for a second. Unfortunately, we he came back, he told me they were out of stock

But! Instead, he gave me the Samsung LN32A330, which was ten bucks more, for the same price. I was really antsy about getting something else on the spot, since I haven’t gotten an LCD TV before and wasn’t sure what the big differences were. I decided to go with it since I could just bring it back, and Helens parents had a Samsung and it was damn sexy.  After we picked it out, we went up to the front with the guy, and they rang us up. I got the 4 year service plan (I get the extended one with expensive things), so it was 679+199, a total of $878, take off 10% to make it $790.2, and then another 25 off that, $765.20. Which was a damn good deal.

We took it home and set it up, I put it on the dresser so I didn’t connect the cable at the time. I hooked up my laptop and we watched Banlieue 13, in 720p. It looked so damn good

More later, as it’s dinner time.

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