Quick catch up, then I’ll no doubt be disappearing again. Will be a very busy month for me.

My wife won tickets to yet another concert, this time it was Paramore and Jimmy Eat World. We stayed past the no name opening band and watched Paramore, but got rather hungry and Jimmy took way too long to get setup… so we left. Paramore was awesome though. Well worth dealing with all the emo kids.

We’ve recently made some serious updates to the home theater system. We are now watching our movies on a nice 46″ 1080p Sony TV. Blu Ray is awesome, but don’t be fooled into thinking every Blu Ray movie looks good… My standard movie for testing anything (5th Element) actually looked so bad that I had to stop watching after just a few minutes. Anyone that knows me knows that this is no small feat, getting me to turn off that movie. But sadly, the copy I have was just transfer from some of the original film… so it was disturbingly laden with scratches and pockmarks. When we were watching in on a 480p screen, they were visible but not too bad, on 1080p they were just a huge distraction. Also, for some reason there was what appeared to be a layer of static over all the background, things that were holding still had colors jittering all over them… Overall, quite the disappointment. We then watched House of Flying Daggers, and that was quite a bit more impressive even though it had it’s technical issues as well. The third movie, Golden Compass, looked flawless. So it seems some of the conversions to Blu Ray from older movies aren’t going to be that great, which makes me sad. I have seen that there is what appears to be a “remastered” copy of 5th Element out there, so I’ll likely be buying the movie again (I think this will be the 6th time at least that I’ve bought it) and see what happens with that.

As far as being busy, this month my office is moving to a new building, and I’ll be working crazy hours to get our lab taken care of. Hooray for overtime.