‘Twas a simply wonderful time at our MISCmedia.com tenth anniversary bash last night. Some 20 loyal readers crowded our comfy, well-lit new digs. Only one glass of wine was spilled (by me, on the kitchen floor). The thing started around 5:30, and didn’t conclude until seven hours later.
This site, I’m afraid, is showing its age. Up ’til now, every piece of HTML on it has been hand-coded by myself, whose programming skills are too rudimentary to even deserve the term “amateur.” The whole thing, some six megs’ worth of text pages with hundreds of archived photos, needs a complete redo. I hope to get at least started on it over the course of the next month.
I’m trying to place a tenth anniversary edition of Loser with a real publisher; or, barring that, to start a real publishing concern with real financing and real distribution. For now, the self-published second edition will remain for sale from this site.
Yesterday was also a birthday for me. One particular party guest (thank you Jen) exhorted me to pursue my dreams now, while there’s still time. In my brutal-despair mode earlier this year, I could only think of mere survival, and even that seemed a decreasingly likely ideal. Now that I’m no longer in that recursive mindset, I feel like I might actually be able to fulfill some of my larger dreams.
If I can only remember what they are.
Meanwhile in televisionland, my party guests got to see my aforementioned new flat LCD TV with full HDTV miraclevision.
As aforementioned, my cable system currently offers only six HD channels, all of which are local broadcast stations. They, in turn, only offer true HD transmission on selected programs. These include filmed prime-time network shows (but not taped programs such as news magazines and “reality” series) and the studio portions of local newscasts (KOMO also shoots its field footage in HD). KOMO’s Northwest Afternoon and KING’s Evening Magazine are also in HD. So are a few off-prime-time network series–Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien from NBC, The Young and the Restless from CBS.
The “killer apps” for HDTV, particularly among the male “early adopter” crowd, are movies and especially sports. Tonight’s first NBA Finals game looked simply exquisite in hi-def. I could see the sweat on the faces, the dimples on the ball. Unlike the regular-def digital cable channels such as ESPN Classic, in which in which fast camera pans and large crowd shots can get blurred due to signal compression, the HD picture remained as clear and sharp as if I’d been at the Alamodome myself.
I’m hooked, alas. Now I’ll have to get a progressive scan DVD player and a TiVo to keep my spectacular set properly fed. And I’ll have to pester my cable operator to add more HD channels. (The guy who installed my HD cable box said KCTS and KSTW would be added sometime this summer, along with ESPN, Discovery, and maybe a couple others.) (I can’t switch to satellite ’cause I’d lose CBC.)
