Sicko

I finally rented this. Just like Fahrenheit 9/11, I've always enjoyed how Moore presents his argument with wit & banter while also triggering outrage & sympathy. It's also his ability to change (or at least challenge) your perception. Manipulation? Maybe. Maybe not. But it works.

It really is tragic when you see hardworking, middle class folks who do have insurance but run into serious, chronic illnesses and how their lives are turned upside down due to high premiums & deductibles , when you learn of the fate of a baby girl in an emergency situation because she was brought to a "out-of-network" hospital, how a medical director of a large HMO company really gets compensated, how you learn that there are 4 healthcare lobbyists for every congressmen, how Al Quaida prisoners at Gitmo appear to have access to a higher quality of care than most Americans, and how what appeared to be a homeless person with incomplete stitches but without insurance was just thrown out into the street from the hospital, how there are healthcare professionals employed to research and look for -anything- in your history that you might have overlooked or did not know about so that the HMO can deny your claim / treatment even if it is life critical, and many other stories. Exaggerated? Maybe. Maybe not. For example, re: the middle class couple, the film does not disclose if they had sufficient savings to cover their deductibles or if they were in fact living paycheck to paycheck.

The Universal Healthcare in Canada, England, France, & Cuba seems too good to be true. For example in France the film shows how mothers get a generous 6 months paid leave and a goverment worker comes to your house to care for your child. Contrast this to my coworker who pays $1600 / month for daycare. Housecalls from doctors are supposedly free. And in all of the countries mentioned, no one gets turned away or denied healthcare. "But the quality of healthcare in those countries are substandard! " Not according to what is shown. " But doctors in those Socialist systems don't get paid well!" Not sure about the other countries listed above but at least the doctor shown in Britain seems to be living pretty well. "Ok, then they must being paying up the wazoo in taxes. The money's got to come from somewhere!" That might be the answer if the information here is close to being current. But for those who are really sick, paying higher taxes is probably worth not being dead.

So yes - Moore's arguments, while seemingly convincing, are presented through a series of anecdotes . Which are not unreasonable to question - just how factual / balanced / comprehensive are they? The Mrs. tells me that many of the patients that she treats at the country hospital are in fact illegal immigrants without insurance yet still get treated. Supposedly no patient is ever turned away or "left to die." So what I confused about is there some loophole that those illegal immigrants know about? Or is it just certain hospitals that will toss you into the street? So Sicko may or may not be giving full disclosure but I think the film accomplishes it's objective in trying shock you and perhaps inspire you take some form of action - a simple discussion, your own research, or the fact that I felt compelled to blog about it to raise awareness of the film. And yes, I know of the Michael Moore bashing and how it continues on. Nonetheless, I still say watch it, research the facts and make up your own mind. More info on HR676 and here.

Thanksgiving dinner

Both of our sisters flew into CA this holiday but Selina had dinner with my mom and with Viks' parents up in Nor Cal. Ellie flew into So Cal and we all had dinner with the aunts & uncles in Roland Heights.

LA Auto show 2007

Honda FCX Clarity - hydrogen fuel cell vehicle

Nissan GT-R

Carrera S - a sports car we could actually sit in. The GT2 was on a spinning platform. No touchy.

Lamborghini Reventón - supposedly inspired by the F22 Raptor. Personally, it reminds me of the Batmobile

There weren't as many cool concept cars this year vs last year's show. As usual, we started off "ooh-ing" and "aah-ing" at the exotics then made out way down to the practical cars.

Onkyo PR-SC885 surround processor - part 2

The pay off - Spiderman 3: after speaker calibration, the battle scene between Harry (Green Goblin Jr) and Spiderman in uncompressed PCM 5.1 is simply AWESOME. I almost cried.

"Possibly-final-but-good-enough-for-now" post SPL meter settings

Speaker distances that I tweaked just a bit from Audyssey detection results. I may play around with the Subwoofer distance setting but it sounds pretty good so far.

Manually overriding the Audyssey crossover settings to 80Hz settings

Perfoming speaker level calibration using the SPL meter on a tripod. And yes, I made sure it was level ;-)

Radio Shack SPL meter - very handy to have!

So it was time to roll up the sleeves and do the calibration manually. I turned the Audyssey Eq off and made minor adjustments to the speaker distances as determined by Audyssey since they were not too far off the mark. I also set the cross over frequencies for the fronts, center, and surrounds to 80Hz. Next I used a Sound Pressure Level meter from Radio Shack and set the range of sensitivity to 70dB, C - weighting, and "slow" speed setting (averages the changes in pressure). Using test tones from the 885, I adjusted each speaker level up to the point where the SPL meter read 75dB except the LFE which I raised at least 5dB+ higher.

With the EQ set to "off", the highs were extremely harsh - maybe piercing is better adjective - such that I suffered listener's fatigue within 5 minutes. Thankfully, the Onkyo allows you to manually adjust the EQ for the fronts, center, surrounds and LFE individually. I toned down the higher frequencies for the fronts only and the highs were much easier to listen to.

Some initial impressions after the manual calibration -> The sound quality on movies is simply fantastic - finally. For my demo material, I gravitated a lot toward the Spider Man 3 Blu Ray disc which has an unbelievably good uncompressed PCM 5.1 soundtrack. If you want to know how well your sub(s) can handle LFE, I highly recommend the scene where Flint Marko falls into the experimental reactor and transforms into the Sandman. The LFE from this scene even rivals the "Ironhide rocket jump" scene from the Transformers HD DVD. So are the new lossless formats more sizzle than steak? I did subjective A / B comparisons of the lossless tracks vs 448kbps Dolby Digtal. I have to be careful of placebo and probably should note the reference volume levels but so far I find that uncompressed PCM and Dolby True HD tracks sound have greater dynamic range, are more full bodied, less veiled, less harsh, have richer LFE, and surrounds are more aggressively utilized and blend better with L/C/R channels.

Onkyo PR-SC885 surround processor - part 1

It's been a long month waiting for the arrival of my Onkyo PR-SC885 surround processor . But alas...

" The beast had arrived and I wasted no time dragging the box inside like a lion after it’s kill."

:-)

I read this from an AVS forum member who just received his Onkyo 885 and I thought it was so funny because that is exactly how I was as soon as I saw it on my door step!

My very first impression was "Wow, this unit is huge" It measures about 16.5 inches deep vs my Sunfire amp which measures about 15.5 inches deep. The 885 is touted as a "professional" model and comes with rack mounts but I was glad the rackmounts came in a separate box and not pre-installed The overall build quality is excellent although maybe not as rock solid to the likes of other pre/pros in it's price range ie Outlaw and Emotiva. I prefer my HT gear to be as minimalist / spartan looking as possible. With that said, one of the draws for me to the 885 over the Integra DTC-9.8 (clone of 885) was the clean front panel and the metal hinged door hiding the infrequently used buttons.

I spent the first few days just doing basic set up and making sure all the connections were working. Given the history of HDMI handshake issues, lip sync issues, etc I was a bit worried about running into these kinds of problems but luckily I have been able to switch between HDMI 1.3 based sources like my Toshiba XA2 and Playstation 3 on the fly without a hitch.

Over the weekend I spent most of the time doing speaker set up and calibration. I tried two iterations of the Audyssey MultEQ XT speaker setup program measuring 6 seating locations on a tripod and using the suggestions from this thread. The end results were mixed.

First the good news. The detected speaker distances were not too far off which was good. It did report my sub as 30 ft away though which I thought was odd but according to the thread, this is not unheard of. OK, fine. My front Def Tech towers are bi-wired and Audyssey was also able to detect that my left front speaker was not properly connected even though sound was coming out. At first I thought the Audyssey program was in error but when I looked at the speaker connection, sure enough it was loose. Pretty impressive.

Now the not-so-good news. Audyssey set my front speakers as full range and my surround cross over frequency to 100Hz . With the fronts set as full range, this meant that LFE (bass response) frequencies were sent to my mid-drivers instead of my subs which I did not want. Speaker levels (dB) for the fronts vs the center channel vs the surrounds vs the LFE differed by as much as 9db! The LFE was utterly neutered using the Audyssey EQ settings. What is also frustrating is that you can't view what the actual Audyssey EQ settings are. So with the Audyssey settings, the sound levels were terribly uneven, soundtracks were colored, and lacked any OOMPH from the LFE. I'm not trying to poo poo the Audyssey program here. Many folks have reported excellent results but I just could not get it to work.

Gran Turismo Prologue demo

Not sure if I'll ever experience a Nissan GT-R so for now I guess I'll just have to settle for the Playstation 3 Gran Turismo 5 version. GT5 is not actually released yet but the GT5 Prologue demo is! GT5 Prologue is actually a demo of GT5 so in effect the GT5 Prologue demo is a demo of a demo. Haha. I had to create a Japanese PS account in order to get this demo since the demo has not been released in the US. Well worth the effort as the demo is pretty impressive. I am quite terrible at the game so far but the realism, physics and the graphics are pretty nice. I now better understand why fans of the GT series enjoy this game so much. Through the GT5 Prologue demo, you can also download a HD video of the Tokyo 2007 autoshow and a HD segment of the Lancer EVO X. Certianly beats YouTube picture quality. Pretty neat stuff for the auto enthusiast.

got my 5 free HD DVDs!

It was slim pickin's in terms of movies I actually wanted but I ended up with,

1) Seabiscuit - Good movie and fantastic picture quality
2) Casablanca - One of the great classics. Black & White never looked this good.
3) Lara Craft: Tomb Raider - Awful movie and mediocre video quality. Not the demo disc you want to use to impress your family/friends / sell them on the benefits of HD.
4) U2 Rattle & Hum - Great sound but awful video quality is nothing to write home about. Again, not the best demo disc you want to use to impress your family/friends.
5) We Were Soldiers - Good movie and above average PQ and very immersive soundtrack

When they say allow up to 8-10 weeks, they really mean it! There have been a number of complaints on AVS about the condition of the HD DVD cases being damaged upon receipt. It happened to me as well on two of my disc cases. It could be the way the distributor, Archway, is handling the discs. The discs themselves are OK and it took so long for the discs to arrive I just didn't want to bother going through the hassle of trying to get an exchange.

Baby Brandon

Michelle and Long's beautiful baby boy: Brandon. I still don't know how to hold new borns. I get really timid when it comes to babies. New borns seem so tiny and fragile!