Our 3 year anniversary

Crazy how time flies..

DLP Digital Cinema becoming mainstream

It's been a while since I've been to a movie theater. I think the last movies I saw were Jumper (awful movie) and American Gangster (decent, but not Ridley's best) at my local cineplex. While the movies were ok, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that each theater room was outfitted with a Christie CP2000 series DLP projector. I couldn't believe that all of the film projectors in the cineplex were gone! At home, I've become so accustomed to digital projection that whenever I see a film based projector in a commercial theater, the image appears too soft to my liking. So hence, what I like about digital cinema projectors - the image is very clean and sharp but at the expense of inky blacks / high contrast. With today's technology, including home theater projectors, that seems to be the tradeoff - you either build a light cannon with less than stellar contrast or a lower light output machine with superior contrast. Resolution is now commonly 2K and on a screen up to 100ft, you can discern the pixel structure if you look for it but honestly, it's not too distracting. In fact, knowing/seeing how good the image is makes me wonder why some people still fuss over 1080p resolution on a 42" - 50" HDTV.

I've missed on the April releases so far but it looks to be a great summer in terms of movies !

My Blueberry Nights -> 4-4-08
Forgetting Sarah Marshall -> 4-18-08
Forbidden Kingdom -> 4-18-08
Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay -> 4-19-08
Iron Man -> 5-2-08
Speedracer -> 5-9-08
Tracey Fragments (Ellen Page indie) -> 5-9-08
Chronicles of Narnia Price Caspian -> 5-16-08
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull -> 5-22-08
You Don't Mess With The Zohan -> 6-6-2008
Happening (M. Night Shyamalan) -> 6-13-08
The Incredible Hulk -> 6-13-08
Get Smart (Steve Carell) -> 6-20-08
Love Guru (Mike Myers) -> 6-20-08
Wall-E -> 6-27-08
Wanted -> 6-27-08
Hancock -> 7-2-08
Hellboy II: The Golden Army -> 7-11-08
The Dark Knight -> 7-18-08
Step Brothers (Farrell, Reilly) -> 7-25-08
The X-Files 2 -> 7-25-08
The Mummy -> 8-1-08
Pineapple Express -> 8-6-08
Tropic Thunder -> 8-13-08
Clone Wars -> 8-15-2008
Quantum of Solace (new 007) -> 11-7-08

Savings improvement method

Going over budget. How many of us actually stay within budget each month? Tracking our monthly spending has been a powerful tool but despite saying to ourselves "Ok, we are only going to spend up to $X amount on discretionary items each month," we've still managed to go over our budget more than we would like to admit. So what we've started doing now is taking our monthly overspend and carrying over to our next months spend tracking. The idea is that when we tally our expenditures for the next month, we''ll have accounted for the overspend from the previous month and this greatly influences our spend decisions for the present month. The end result - even if we go over budget for a month here and there, we are still meeting our savings goals from a long term perspective. I wish we had done this earlier but better late than never.

A very cool cooling solution

On top of the Onkyo and behind the PS3 with the thermo sensor on the right. Very unobtrusive! The fan to the immediate left of the thermosensor is where the Reon chip is.

You would think a pre-amp/surround processor which by definition has no amplifier inside would run cool. Maybe with some Mfg'ers but not the Onkyo 885. In the case of the Onkyo, it has a Reon video processor that runs relatively hot and sits right near the top of the inside. It can be visibly seen if you look through the ventilation holes. The funny thing is I don't really "use" the Reon video processing. I set the Onkyo to "through" mode and let my source devices perform the video processing and yet you almost feel like you can grill a steak on the Onkyo. For sometime, I considered a DIY cooling solution but then I can across the amplifier/reciever cooling solution above. Don (drmckenzie) who sells these on eBay has several flavors and I opted for the solution with the themoswitch (ebay item #: 360042894734 ). It's so cool (no pun intended) - the 80mm fans are dead SILENT. I honestly could not even hear them turn on. The fans have a foam padding underneath that work really well to absorb & minimize fan vibration. You can also adjust the fan speed via the voltage selection switch. The thermoswitch turns the fans on at 32C and they stay on for a bit even after you've turned off your equipment - I'm guessing until the temperature falls below the 32C threshold. I saved the best for last. The fans actually work as advertised! The top part of the chassis is no longer too hot to touch! Don also responds quickly to your questions. Great seller. Great product. Highly recommended if you're in the market for a A/V cooling solution.

Epithelial inclusion cyst

For some time now, I've had a epithelial inclusion cyst very near my right eye tear duct. Viks removed it for me this afternoon. I thought it would be a simple tweezer removal but because you can feel pain without being numbed, she had to inject me with some anesthetic and then she used a tweezer and scissor-like apparatus to perform the actual removal while I was lying down on the futon. The injection kind of hurt like a shot but once I was numbed, it was painless. For a few days I still have to apply some erythromycin ointment daily to prevent infection.

Mr Mortgage

I have found another "doom & gloom" real estate blog worthy to add to my collection -> Mr Mortgage's Guide to the TRUTH! In a nutshell, this guy has anecdotal evidence that says the recent legislation to temporarily raise the conforming limits is a bust. He says the darn rates are still too high for people to want to re-fi or buy new. What is also scary (or encouraging - depending on which side of the fence you are on) is the Alt-A loans situation he describes for California. He has empirical data and it is pretty alarming just how many people have used their homes as ATMs. But now that many home values have tanked, a person living in those homes and who has these types of loans could very well have his/her LTV ratio all f-d up making it enormously challenging to re-fi and he/she could risk defaulting. And of course more defaults leads to more foreclosures which leads to more downward pressure to home prices. *cue the violin music* (I don't think the author is saying people should never take the cash out option. I'm sure there are circumstances where it's appropriate. I'm pretty sure the comment was toward people taking the cash out option for luxury items.)

This is going to sound really mean spirited of me since my own family and many of my friends have homes in the Bay Area. But I have to be brutally honest here. Part of me is still actually hoping for a major correction in Bay Area housing. And by no means is it because I want financial harm to come to those I care deeply about. Not true. We want to move back but like everyone else, we want the most for our hard earned money. Even today the Bay Area housing market fundamentals still don't make a whole lot of sense to me. I compare it to the year 2000 where you had ridiculous dot com valuations. I don't really buy the "Bay Area is unique" or "Bay Area is out of land" arguments either. A small premium for the aforementioned I can live with. But charge a premium such that a couple with an average six figure double income can only (or barely in some parts) afford a fixer upper? That just seems out-of-whack to me. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what I think or feel. More and more the numbers that I can see are saying that at least in the short term a fair number of us are going to feel a pinch or a major pain.

Let's not forget that Viks and myself are also in the line of fire here with regards to our own home value. Not too long ago, we were barely able to re-fi without putting more money down. We were fortunate to close the re-fi with minimal out of pocket. And we were the folks who even put down the traditional 20%. Talk about adding insult to injury. So to put my previous paragraph in context, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me!"

Looking for high yield, low risk holdings

4500 layoffs at AT&T. Dollar plunge helps IBM, Google, Coca-cola earnings. Citi writeoffs. And yet there is a stock market rally? Despite the strong rallies here and there, the fundamentals don't seem there yet and stock market has been a little too volatile for my comfort level so in early March I pulled out of most of our holdings with the exception of some bond funds. The only gripe I have is the paltry YTD returns with current investments. For example our savings yield had dropped to 2.96% which is expected due to the Fed moves. The bond funds we still own are,

Vanguard Long-Term Treasury Fund Investor Shares (VUSTX) with a YTD return: 4.05% (fee-adjusted)

Vanguard Inflation-Protected Securities Fund Investor Shares (VIPSX) with a YTD return: 5.31% (fee-adjusted)

This is barely keeping up with inflation! But yah yah, I know very well of the inverse relationship between risk vs reward. In Nightly Business Report, I learned of investment products like Inverse Index Funds which short the indexes and of course there are Bear Funds but these are little too exotic for me. Some people seem to think gold is the way to go but while I understand the dollar is weak, gold seems to have pretty inconsistent performance in down markets. Sometimes boring but safe is the way to go. I recently looked at money market funds but they don't seem to have much better yields over savings yields. CDs are a -little- better but the added yield is not worth the lock in period to me. So the search continues.

I've been kicking myself for not unloading more of my company stock when it hit it's 52 week high. I've been wanting to better diversify but greed got the better of me. The only consolation this year was that I learned from my own mistake and had my mom sell her holdings at her 52 week high. So based on my experience, in the future I plan to sell on strength so that I can diversify into other investments.

DTS-HD Master Audio has arrived for PS3!

When I first got the PS3, many people including myself banked on Sony enabling DTS-HD Master Audio capability. I tip my hat to Sony for finally delivering on this highly demanded feature. The ver 2.3 firmware update that enables DTS-HD MA was announced to be available on Apr 15th (tomorrow) but I was curious to see if they meant Apr 15th 12am Eastern time! So I checked around 9:30pm this evening and sure enough the PS3 detected that an update was available! I wasted no time in downloading the update. Went through without a hitch.

I only had the chance to do a brief demo since Viks had to sleep early tonight so I quickly put in Live Free or Die Hard. Yipee-kay-yay-mother*censor bleep*! Doh! From what I remember - prior to the 2.3 FW, the extracted DTS core track sounded pretty awesome. I can't do an A/B comparison anymore since the PS3 no longer outputs the DTS core but the sound is noticeably better. Dialogue is more clear and like Dolby True HD or uncompressed PCM, I think the element I appreciate most is the improved dynamic range. It's one of those things that you may or may not notice right away. But once you do notice, you really start to appreciate it and when you go back and listen to lossy tracks on DVD they sound thin and veiled.

From the impression I got tonight, I will again say that I don't think one lossless format sounds superior over another or that lossy formats like Dolby Digital Plus sound worse. Despite all the hype about the specs on lossless audio I still think that the quality of the soundtrack source and mastering job have more of an impact to the overall sound experience vs simply relying on lossless encoding. For example, take a much older film like Die Hard 2 that is encoded with 24-bit/48kHz DTS-HD MA vs a newer film like Transformers HD DVD with a lossy Dolby Digital Plus. It's no contest that Transformers is a much more livelier track despite the fact that it's using a lossy audio format. A good analogy is Blu Ray picture quality. Just because you buy a Hi-def Blu Ray disc does not guarantee that it will have stunning picture quality (Just read the reviews of recently released Blu Rays like Commando or Predator). So it kind of ties into the question as to why we need three lossless formats. I'm not sure how it benefits the consumer. More than likely it probably confuses consumers. But rather than continue down the path where I sound like I am complaining that not only do we have lossless audio but we now have three choices in lossless audio, I"ll simply say that when done right (good source/mastering job + lossless encode), lossless audio sounds pretty amazing but like many things, you can't simply rely on the marketing numbers.

Fox studios seems to be in bed with DTS. I got my Fox Blu Ray demo material lined up for tomorrow evening -> The Simpsons, Kingdom of Heaven, Shoot 'Em Up, X-men The Last Stand, and the of course more Die Hard!

X-Arcade Tankstick - as advertised

Got my replacement Tankstick on Monday. It's been working well without a hitch. I'm using two TV dinner stands as a makeshift table for the Tankstick. The Tankstick overall is pretty heavy duty and it doesn't shift or move while you're playing which is a good thing. Way back in the day I had an older but much lighter weight "fighting stick" for my Super NES that would often shift around during button mashing. Iit just didn't work out very well. Viks was playing a game with me on Tues night and because the TV dinner stands are not that sturdy there was some rocking but it was really not that big of a deal. While playing with Viks, I was glad I opted for the Tankstick over the standard two player version since the trackball adds some nice spacing between two players.

The button configuration maps to the Dreamcast perfectly and looking at the PS3 buttons, it should map perfectly for Street Fighter as well. The feel of the joystick and the buttons really are of arcade quality. I cannot complain! I'm having a blast playing Marvel vs Capcom 2 now. Amazing what a difference a joystick can make. It almost feels like I have a new game system.

One of these days, I'll check out some MAMEs. I know there is a ton of good stuff out there.

Best NCAAB championship game in a long time

At least Kansas avenged the Bruins tonight. But seriously, no matter what team you support, if you are a fan of March Madness you could not have asked for a better game than tonight's. Unlike the previous two year's championship games, both Memphis and Kansas seemed pretty evenly matched throughout the entire game. You just could not tell who would win. The backcourt and frontcourt on both sides were awesome, defense was great on both sides, and I lost count of the number of lead changes. And wow, how about the Kansas comeback near the end of regulation - down by 9 pts, the Jayhawks fouled + forced the pressure free throws, clawed their way back and finally Chalmers' clutch 3 to sent the game into OT! They don't call it March Madness for nothing! It's mind boggling how the game came down to Memphis' missed free throws. I use to think fouling and forcing your opponent to go to the line was an act of desperation & futility. But apparently it does work!

Dawn of War - Soulstorm multiplayer

Josh, Danny, Nick and myself finally played our first multiplayer game together online. We played co-op vs 4 CPUs. We did well on the smaller maps but we struggled on the bigger maps where the enemy CPU had access to a lot of strategic points and could tech up fast and eventually overwhelmed us. Part of our struggles also had to with our inexperience with the new Sisters of Battle race as well as the fact that we all were playing the Sisters of Battle race and so we could not leverage the strengths of other races. But win or lose it's all good fun. I know I'll be content playing this game at least until the new Dawn of War 2 is released in 2009.

Foreclosure Heat Maps

The Bruins got knocked out and it's Monday. I'm annoyed so what better way to kick off the week with some doom & gloom. This is a really neat link on the level of foreclosures at any given area in the US. Our area is pretty bad (plenty of heat!). For illustrative purposes the above is a snapshot of the Bay Area since up until now I had thought the Bay Area has been pretty resilient. In some parts it still is like Palo Alto and Sunnyvale but wow, look at the red in East Bay. Flame on! Accuracy on some of the data is questionable (time lag?) but hey, don't shoot the messenger here.

Time will tell but it will certainly be interesting to see if the Peninsula area gets more red. AMD just announced a layoff but it's unclear how many of layoffs are in the Bay Area vs Texas. My point being could this be the beginning of the lay off cycle in the Bay Area which might lead to even more downward pressure on the housing market? I wish there was an easy way to compare the level of foreclosure today vs 2000-2002 when unemployment was higher.

DTS-HD MA bitstreaming bug

There is an issue on various Onkyo and Yamaha receiver/surround sound processor DSPs where DTS-HD MA tracks on certain discs can cause loud popping and can potentially cause damage to speakers when bitstreamed. The PS3 only outputs lossless tracks in PCM so no worries there but my Toshiba XA2 can bitstream DTS-HD MA. While I have not read any HD DVD specific issues, I have a German import of Terminator 2 coming that has a 7.1 DTS-HD Hi-Res track. No evidence of issues with this disc yet (only bitstreamed Master Audio tracks reported so far) but I don't want to find out the hard way.

Now the funny (or annoying - depending how you look at it) thing is that Onkyo has not issued an official fix for my 885 SSP but they have a fix for many of their recievers. Luckily, some brave souls on AVS have tried and confirmed that the DSP fix for the Onkyo recievers also works on the 885 SSP. If only all CE updates were as easy as they are on the PS3 or even my Toshiba XA2.

The short form:
For this Onkyo fix, the way it worked was that I had to obtain a .wav file from a fellow AVS member, burn it onto a CD, check that the CD player had all the correct settings and run through a careful sequence of steps on the Onkyo to update the DSPs. And this is separate from the general firmware update! That is another deal which I won't go into here.


The bloody details for those who are interested:

• First I used CDBurnerXP (thanks to Wilco for this recommendation) for my PC to burn the DSP update. I burned .wav file as an audio file.

• Then I used my PS3 for the CD playback portion of the update. On my PS3 I used the optical out and connected to optical 1 on the 885. I had the following in my PS3 settings

1) Music settings -> Audio CD output freq: 44.1/88.2/176 & bitmapping : off

2)Sound settings -> Digital optical out: 44.1kHz & 48kHz

• My 885 has FW 1.04 / 07927A and originally had the following DSP versions,

1 – 07927A
2 – 07518A
3 – 07820B

I followed the Onkyo pdf file instructions. They were pretty straightforward,

On the Onkyo unit itself (not the remote)
1) Hold "Display" and then while holding display press "standby/on"
2) press tone "+" (it's the bottom button not the top)
3) press "return" (you should immediately see "S/PDIF..."
4) I immediately hit play on the PS3 controller and the PS3 played my CD

I then saw "S/PDIF Update" then "Writing 1st DSP" then "S/PDIF Update" ...then "Writing 2nd DSP" then "S/PDIF Update" again then "Writing 3rd DSP" and then "S/PDIF Update" again. I never did see "Complete" or "Clear" as the Onkyo instructions suggest. I just kept seeing "S/PDIF Update" and after about 10 min of not seeing any change, I stopped the CD and manually power cycled the 885. I immediately checked the DSP versions and was relieved to see,

FW 1.04 / 07927A (no change to FW)

1 – 08214A (this is new)
2 – 07518A
3 – 07820B

All my 885 settings were erased and I had to run set up again. Good thing I blogged all my previous settings. Since the PS3 cannot bitstream DTS-HD MA I just did a sanity test of a Blu Ray disc outputting PCM of the DTS core track from "Live Free or Die Hard" just to make sure my Onkyo was working and things seem to be fine.

Now, the above may seem like a big deal but in retrospect it wasn't all that bad. At least I didn't have to send my unit back to Onkyo. That would annoy me much more. Back to happy listening.

X-Arcade Tankstick DOA! doh...

I decided to get the X-Arcade Tankstick. Shipped out last Thursday and arrived today. The joystick came double boxed and there were no signs of physical damage. But when I tried it out on my Sega Dreamcast, PS3, as well as my laptop the joystick LED would not light up as it was suppose to. After exhausting the manual and website FAQ, I called up tech support and they suggested I open up the chassis and see if some of the molex connectors for the external cabling to the internal PCB board were loose. I inspected and reseated the molex connectors and still no luck. The tech support guy, Jeremy, was helpful and arranged an advance replacement today and also a prepaid shipping label for the RMA. After this experience, I'm really glad there is a lifetime warranty for these units. Marvel vs Capcom 2 in all it's glory will have to wait until next week.