Epiphany

I spend more time than I should on the AVS forums. As I was reading a thread, I noticed a member had the following on his signature,

"Don't let perfect get in the way of 'good enough.' "

There is wisdom in these words beyond home theater.

Anna Nalick - Breathe bootleg remix

Remixing a top 40 tune is risky business. It's easy to butcher a great track. The Blake Jarrell remix Anna Nalick's "Breathe" succeeds in this case. You can find it on Armin's ASOT 256 & ASOT 271. A lot of great music simply cannot be found on CD or I-Tunes.

Jenna's 2nd birthday

Viks and I went down to San Diego yesterday for Jenna's 2nd birthday. The party was at Torrey Highlands Park. The weather worked out really well since it was raining the evening before in So. Cal and forecasted to rain during the day. Man, Jenna is really growing up fast. I think the last time I saw her was at our wedding. Alice and Christine were also visiting for the weekend. At the party, we also met some really nice mom's that Susan met from meetup.com and the local library. I personally don't remember anything before the age of 5. So hopefully these pictures will help Jenna remember this special day.

Our Honda finally hit 100K miles. I took a commemorative shot. Before we went home, we went to look at some model homes in the Del Mar area, drove my Balboa Park and hung out for a little while at Gas Lamp District.

Level of trust

I find that just one indicator of how close you are to a friend is whether or not you feel comfortable discussing private matters such as your personal finances/approximate level of income/total compensation. When I do get into this topic with certain people, I appreciate the fact that I do not feel like we are competing or trying to "one-up" each other. Rather, we could be commiserating together about our level of compensation vs our peers in the same industry or keeping in check as to what we should be receiving or just understanding each other's investment philosphies.

HD junkie

Man, I am an HD junkie. I actually watch more television programming now cause it's in HD. Even commercials are worth watching when they're in HD and 5.1. Granted we only have the minimum HD offering from TW cable (analog basic, CBS HD, NBC HD, ABC HD, FOX HD, and PBS HD with Motorola HD DVR, and cable card), there's enough HD content to satisfy for now. Most of the quality HD programming occurs during primetime and weekend sports. The quality of cable HD is hit-and-miss largely due to compression used by both cable and satellite providers. Compression is one of the reasons why I always thought digital TV sets never looked very good at the big box stores (garbage in, garbage out). Hopefully, the transition to MPEG4 will improve things. Actually, DirectTV has an MPEG4 DVR/STB out now so I'm waiting to hear from users if PQ has improved. What's going to make this more interesting is if/when IPTV will gain traction (ie AT&T Project Lightspeed & Verizon's FIOS).

The city we live in is very unique in that it has a municipally owned symmetrical fiber-optic network capable of 10Gbps at the core and 1Gbps at the end nodes. It uses Allied Telesis' (boo!) fiber-to-the-home product line, which includes switches and routers. The offerings are 5Mpbs for $29.99, 10Mpbs for $50, and 15Mbps for $100. I actually know the Network admin as he use to work as a support engineer at my company. When we first moved in, there were a good number of network outages. It got to a point where I even ordered Verizon 768K DSL as a back up line. But for the past year, the fiber network has been rock solid..much more robust than even Comcast cable at my mom's house. I'm actually waiting to see if we'll get IPTV here but I suppose there are still challenges as described in this older BW article.