Published on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 .
Yes, really… I FINALLY bought a dedicated DVD player. I had, for the longest time, been using my PS2 as my DVD player. I have a 32″ LCD HDTV and while it didn’t look too bad, the PS2 just isn’t a standalone DVD player. I have it connected via component cables so it was able to do progressive scan output but that’s still just 480p. After looking at a few options (mostly the Oppo 971HD), I happened to be at Best Buy and found the Pioneer DV-400V 1008p upscaling DVD player. It has HDMI output and upscales ordinary DVD’s to a maximum 1080p resolution (though it also does 720p and 1080i). It also plays DIVX and WMV files burned on to a disc along with having a USB port through which it can play these filetypes as well. I decided it looked like a pretty good deal @ $99 and took it home with me….
I got it home to hook it up and discovered my one and only real beef with it so far: no optical-digital output. It uses coaxial-digital instead. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s no real difference in sound quality that I can tell so I don’t care THAT much. It’s just that my other stuff is hooked up via optical and I kinda wanted to keep things the same. Oh, well… I dealt with it and moved on. Connected the HDMI output to my TV, went through the initial setup and put in a DVD to watch. We rented Apocalypto and decided to try that out since it seemed like a good title to run the player through its paces. I set the DVD player to my LCD’s native resolution of 720p and proceeded to enjoy the movie…. I’m not really sure if it looks any better than the PS2 since I didn’t do any direct comparisons, but I will say that it did look absolutely fantastic! I didn’t notice any tearing or other types of weirdness with the picture at all… I did really enjoy the “last position memory” feature since I had to stop the disc a couple of times for various reasons. Press stop one time and it stops the disc but remembers where you were in the disc so when you press play it starts right back up where you left off. Pretty sweet. The remote is very easy to use and laid out pretty well. Not 100% perfect but about as good as I’ve seen anywhere else, honestly. The one thing that struck me as odd is the fact that the player is black but the remote is white. I’m not really sure why they’ve done that but whatever. Maybe it makes it easier to find? I know it doesn’t quite fit in with everything else I have. My receiver, TV, TV stand, coffee table, PS2, Gamecube, speakers and subwoofer are all black. My TV remote is silver, though now that I think about it. Anyway, I digress… Point is, the DVD player kicks some serious ass and I can’t wait to throw more stuff at it to see how it looks on my TV. 
On a side note, I’ve decided I’m going to have to get a new receiver soon. I’m tired of having 900 wires going all over the goddamn place and my current receiver doesn’t upconvert, nor does it have HDMI. That’s for a later date and time, though. We’ll see how that works out. I’ve decided I either want Pioneer Elite or Yamaha. More geek stuff to come!
Here’s a pic of the DVD player, thanks to Pioneer’s site.
Published on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 .
So we definitely had a great trip to Atlanta this past weekend. I’m a bit late in posting about it, but I’ve been busy with work and shit. In any case, it went down a little like this….
We both left work early on Friday afternoon and went to AAA to get our Six Flags tickets. They were $31 for AAA members instead of the normal $49 at the park, which is a killer deal. We drove down to Atlanta and checked into our hotel, which was the Crowne Plaza in Buckhead. We ended up getting a killer deal on THAT too, thanks to hotwire.com! The hotel ended up being pretty nice, but we weren’t too concerned with it knowing that we wouldn’t be spending much time there. We left the hotel and went to the Target a little bit past the hotel to pick up a couple of things we needed and then came back to the room and changed clothes. Then we took the MARTA to the midtown area and ate at what has become one of our favorite restaurants down there, the Vortex. We both ate kickass burgers and had a few drinks… ended up a bit tipsy and had to walk back to the MARTA station and take the train back to the hotel. Quite interesting when you’ve been drinking, for sure.
We woke up Saturday morning and spent the entire day at Six Flags…. It was lots of fun, don’t get me wrong but I fucking HATE waiting in line. It’s basically an hour or more in line at every ride for 45 seconds (at most) of fun. I love riding roller coasters and I love thrill rides in general, but I just hate waiting that insane amount of time. Six Flags does offer what’s known as a “Flash Pass” that you can pay $80 for and get right through to the front of the line. We didn’t want to pay the extra money this time but if we ever go back, I think we’ll do it. I really hate lines THAT much. Six Flags has some decent coasters, to be honest. Not the best in the world, but still lots of fun. “Goliath” was pretty damn cool despite not going upside down. The Georgia Scorcher is their stand-up coaster, which is sorta fun but actually pretty uncomfortable because they have sort of a bicycle seat under your ass. Then when you go through the loops and the g-force pulls you down it shoves you agains the seat and all your weight goes on your balls. Not cool! My favorite rides are still Superman and Batman, amusingly. Batman is a bit smoother and you can actually SEE. Superman is awesome except my damn hair kept getting in my way! It’s too long, but I like it long so I’ll be damned if I’m going to cut it on account of some ride. Next time I’ll just stick it in a ponytail. In any case, we had a really good time except for being just absolutely worn the fuck out after 10 hours at the park. We pretty much went back to the hotel and crashed hard. I managed to stay up long enough to take a shower, but the girlfriend had to take one in the morning.
Sunday morning we finally got out shit packed and were out of the room by 11-ish. We ate at Johnny Rockets in Buckhead shortly thereafter. We spent the day dicking around in downtown Atlanta, went to the New World of Coke and ate at the Hard Rock Cafe. The New World of Coke was pretty fucking kickass. Hard Rock Cafe was of course overpriced and not all that great. The atmosphere was cool, but $71 for two people to eat is fucking absurd. $23 for a steak that tasted worse than what I can cook with my eyes closed… Yeah, I can honestly say there’s absolutely no good reason to ever eat there again. I’ve eaten there before but it’s been a LONG time and I don’t remember it being THAT expensive. In any case, the only thing worth getting there is the dessert and splitting it (which is what we did in Nashville). In any case, after dicking off all day in Atlanta, we finally left and came home… got home about 12:30 and then I came to work. Fun shit. I can’t wait to go out of town again.
Published on Monday, June 11th, 2007 .
Yeah yeah… I’ve just not been much of a good blogger lately. I should, but I just don’t feel like blogging much lately. I guess my life isn’t that interesting? Two months and nary a post. I’ve really been slacking lately or something. As it stands, I’ve been working 60+ hours a week every week, making good money…. I don’t hate my job or anything and it doesn’t even bother me to work this many hours. I’ve actually gotten kinda used to it. In any case, we’ve made a few trips in the past few months. Went to Nashville a few weeks ago to see the Deftones…. probably one of the most amazing shows I’ve ever been to. I took some pics and videos, which are posted in the gallery. This weekend we’re going to Atlanta to go to Six Flags over GA and probably to the Ikea store and stuff. Who knows what else we’ll do while we’re there. We won’t have TOO much time to do other stuff since we’re going to Six Flags but we’ll do what we can. I really like going to Atlanta but I wouldn’t ever live there. Nice place to visit, shitty place to live. In August we’re going to go to Cedar Point since my girlfriend has never been and I haven’t been in 7 yrs. That should be a shitload of fun. We’ll probably take a couple more trips in the meantime, but I have no idea where. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. That’s all for now! I’ll try not to neglect it so much
