SuperJason’s Personal Blog

I recently purchased a 51″ Sony KP51WS520 big screen TV, and I feel obligated to give you information about a technology you have probably heard of, HDTV. The TV that I bought is amazing. I can’t really imagine a better picture. The TV is really everything I expected, and I can’t really think of anything I would change. It’s great because it has 7 sets of inputs, and you can label them for when you switch between them. One of the inputs is a HDMI connector, which is basically a DVI connector, which is an all digital way of transferring video. 2 of the inputs support component video sources. The sound is also excellent. It probably wouldn’t hold water next to a good surround system, but it’s fine for my living room right now. When I build my home theater in the basement, it will be another story. So the bottom line is, this is about as good as any TV that you can buy, and it is very reasonably priced.

Now on to HDTV. Unless you have been living under a rock, you have an idea of what HDTV is. In a nutshell, your regular TV picture looks like crap. Even if you think it looks good, you’re wrong. Once you see an HDTV with a good high definition source, you will permanently be ruined. It’s kind of like being born rich and shopping at Aldi’s.

First things first. You know those black bars you complain about on all your widescreen DVD’s? Those are there because your crappy old TV is basically a square. It’s tough to film a movie in a sqaure. If you have more than one person in a scene, you already want to be able to have a wide picture. Most things are visually much wider than they are tall. A new HDTV is much more rectangular. In fact, it’s almost twice as wide as it is tall (16×9).

So you get your new HDTV home and hook it up, and take a look at the shows. You may realize that the picture is actually worse than many TV’s that are not high definition. Low definition TV’s are actually very “blurry”, which makes it look alright. The problem is that your TV is so good that the low definition signal just doesn’t cut it. Imagine a cheap radio. Since your ears are very good, it sounds very bad. But, if you cover your ears with pillows, the sound is muffled, and all radios sound equally as good. In the manual for my TV, it even says that regular broadcasts will not look as good. Luckily it has some features that try to help improve the image.

I had Time Warner cable come out, and upgrade my DVR box to an HDDVR box. Now I’m ready to rock with the hi def. So I start looking at the 6 channels that I now get in HD. They are ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, TNT, and Discovery HD. ABC looks like crap, CBS looks like crap, NBC looks like crap. I get to PBS, and it looks a lot better. TNT is a little better still. And finally I take a look at Discovery HD. Wow, definitely what I have been waiting for. A true high definition signal, with a perfect high definition source. I’m hooked, and will settle for nothing less.

So I keep checking the major networks waiting anxiouly for a high definition source. The whole night goes by with nothing. Finally I see that desparate housewives is going to be on. That show is huge, it has to be in high definition right? Wrong, same old crap. Now I’m really confused. Isn’t anything in high definition? After desparate housewives, there was another episode on. I wait for it, and when it comes on, BAM!, amazing picture.

Here’s my theory. Our local stations are too cheap to support HDTV well. That is shown by their unwillingness to show any commercials or news broadcasts in high definition. The only thing they can do is pass on the good signal straight from the network stations. Even with that being the case, only the top 10% of shows are really high definition. A station like TNT on the other hand, broadcasts 100% HD programming. No matter

Ryan slept over 9 and a half hours consecutively last night. After 8 hours, I went to check on him and he was fine. He’s getting better every day. Today he held on to his rattle and swung it around for a while. He also grabbed onto one of the hanging toys from his play set. He almost ripped it apart with his death grip.

It should be a little easier to submit comments now that I tweaked the settings on the CAPTCHA test. I turned up the amount of time that you have to submit a comment. It was set at 5 minutes, but for a large post, that might not be enough time. I bumped it up to 15 minutes. I also removed the requirement for the input to match the case of the letters in the image. There were probably a lot of people who didn’t know if it was case sensitive or not, now it doesn’t matter.

I still need to figure out how to make it not erase all the fields if you enter the text wrong. I’ll post and update once I fix that.

Yesterday was the adventure of getting my new Sony Projection TV. I headed off to Best Buy with my stack of coupons, certificates, gift cards, and credit cards. My friend Shawn from work also came along to help.

My first issue was finding someone in the home theater department that could help me pick out a DVD player, find all the cables, and get my TV from the warehouse. I found a girl that didn’t seem to know much, but she knew where things were located. She ended up passing on most of my questions to a guy there that had a really strange personality.

The guy she found to help her had an “interesting” personality. He started explaining the “protection plan” with the 90% markup to me, and tried to convince me that I would die without it. I told him that I always self-insure everything that I buy. He then asked me the strangest question. He asked “Do you align your guns?” My response, of course, was “I don’t have any guns!” He clarified that he meant the guns in the television. I didn’t know if I should have felt stupid, or if this guy was stupid.

He went on to explain that you need to realign the guns every year, and when he had it done in the first year, it cost him nearly $200 for his $12,000 TV. He must not have purchased the protection plan. I know a lot of people with projection televisions, and I’ve never heard of them needing regular maintenance at any time in the first 5 years.

After deciding about everything I had to purchase, I decided to use the checkout in the home theater department. The same girl that helped me originally offered to check out everything for me.

Meanwhile, the original weirdo that was helping me was using a computer hooked up to a large LCD television. He asked how I would like to use that as a monitor. I explained that the resolution was too low. He said that it displayed at 1024×768, which he apparently thought was sufficient. I explained that I usually use 1600×1200. Not to be outdone, he then explained that his $14,000 TV could display at 1900×1000. Yes, that’s right, his TV just cost him $2000 more than the last time he mentioned the price, it’s not a typo.

Ok, back to the girl checking everything out. I started handing her the coupon, the Best Buy gift cards, the American Express gift cards, and then the reward zone certificates. That’s when the trouble started. Apparently their system is so inflexible that the reward zone certificates MUST be entered first. A manager showed up and voided the transaction.

After voiding the transaction, they realized that it wouldn’t refund the value back to the American Express gift cards. They had to call American Express, which was basically closed because of the time of day. The store I was at had recently moved, so they were actually considered a new store, so they didn’t have the magic number that they needed to prove that they were not someone trying to get free money. It took then over an hour on the phone to find someone that not only could credit the money back, but also believed that they were in fact working for the store.

Since I had a lot of time to look around, I found another set of cables that were made by the same company (Monster), and were $10 cheaper. I asked “Mr. Changing TV Price” what the difference was between Monster1 and Monster2 cables. He said the difference was huge, and it would be crazy to buy the Monster1 cables. I asked him if there was a problem with buying both, and bringing the expensive cables back if I didn’t notice a difference. He said that was fine, but then something interesting happened. He started explaining that I might not notice a difference, but he definitely c

I’ve implemented a control that should almost completely eliminate the comment spam that I’ve been getting. I’ve had to deal with about 50 extra comments a day about poker or viagra. I got tired of deleting them, so I looked for an easy solution to integrate with .Text (DotText).

The solution is a control called Clearscreen SharpHIP. It can easily be dropped on a page, and basically acts as a validator for the page. The user must enter the text in the graphic correctly, or they cannot post. It’s what is known as a CAPTCHA test It’s designed to be extremely flexible, so I can integrate it into any of my pages. I may integrate it into my feedback page if it becomes necessary.

Feel free to make comments to this post to try it out, and let me know what you think.

Ryan has been sleeping more every night. He’s been sleeping over 5 and a half hours consistently, and last night, he slept about 6 and a half hours! We’re finally getting some sleep, and it feels good!

I added support for USPS in my shipper RSS feed and interface. FedEx support will be done when I get some free time.

Ever see a stored procedure that uses its parameters to filter data? You’ve probably seen people use “If” statements to check for nulls, and write a separate query for each. That leads to an exponential number of branches, and can get out of hand quickly.

My solution, which seems to elude most people, is to do the following:

  Select *  From MyData  Where (@MyParam Is Null Or MyColumn1 = @MyParam )  

This method uses a simple “Or” statement to check for null. If the parameter is null, it is not used to filter the results. If you want to add more conditions, it is extremely easy, because you only need to add 1 extra line for each. Just be sure to use parenthesis so that the “And” and “Or” don’t get confusing.

I called over to Best Buy, and they said they only have 1 of my TV in stock. They wouldn’t hold it until Saturday, so I told them to hold it for 1 day. I’m hoping that I get my coupon and gift card in the mail by tomorrow. If not, I’ll have to call them and beg them to hold it for another day. I have to get it on or before Saturday, because that is when the rebate is valid. It will also be nice to have it for the Superbowl.

They’re going to have fun when I check out. Here is what I’m using to pay (in this order):

1. Reward zone card
2. 10% off coupon
3. $200 Amex Gift Card
4. $30 Amex Gift Card
5. $15 Best Buy gift card
6. $50 Best Buy gift card
7. $75 Best Buy gift certificates
8. $690 Sony card points
9. $488 Best Buy gift card