Dogma. I thought "The Buddy Christ" was out there... I guess not.

HDTV. For those of you who are curious and want to take the plunge here is some worthwhile reading material.

Song of the Day . "Lover come back to Me" by Dead or Alive

Song of the Day . "C'est la Vie" by Robbie Nevil

Song of the Day . "The future of the future" by Everything but the Girl

High Fidelity. As most of my friends know I tend to be a geek when it comes to home theater. As time marches on, technology gets better and best of all it gets cheaper. I'm always reading up on performance, specs, video quality, chroma tests, black levels and cadence processing... In any case, I always like sharing information when I find it for those friends that are interested. Of course I know that most of my friends prefer the cliff notes version of the whole thing or in the end they just want to know "what do I buy"? So for those of you who haven't yet jumped in the whole thing here are some pointers in the right direction...

The DVD - Which one do I buy without worrying about the specs? The Panasonic DVD-RP82. There are others, but this is the cheapest one with the best picture reproduction and fewest test failures.

The Tuner - Which tuner will give me enough power to run my speakers and sound good with music and movies? Well, I'm partial to the Onkyo TX-NR801. I know there are alternatives and most people have their own opinions so I'll tell you why I picked the 801. It has low harmonic distortion specs, plenty of power, an isolated chassis, an ethernet port and best of all it has enough connections to handle my digital cable, DVD player, X-Box, SACD player and my HD signal sources without breaking a sweat.

The Speakers - There are so many choices, which ones sound the best? Well, here I'm definitely biased but the friends who have heard my Definitives will attest to their clarity and power - and I only got the entry levels... In the higher end setups my fronts are used as rear surrounds! I originally started with Bose speakers and no matter what people say about them I enjoyed them and the perform very well considering the size but when it comes to speakers size does matter. Now that we have a detached home and a little more space we splurged for the bigger sound. If you haven't heard Definitive speakers do yourself a favor and try 'em out.

The TV - Plasma, DLP, LCD, LCOS... what does it all mean!? If the wife doesn't object to a large TV then you only have one choice - The Samsung HLN5065W. The only alternative to this would be to get a wall mounted Panasonic Plasma TV but the Samsung is definitively the reigning king for HD signal and DVD movie reproduction.

Yeah, I know its about $8k after you get the Monster Cables but you don't have to do everything at once and once you have everything setup you will never want to go to the theater again - I promise. Stock up on the popcorn and candy and let the good times roll. This is the gift that keeps on giving - year after year after year... Well, you get the picture.

Song of the Day . "Rock Me" by Liz Phair

Song of the Day . "Love Resurrection" by Alison Moyet

Song of the Day . "Ibiza" by Chicane

Netflix. You'd think I would have been one of the early adopters for this whole thing - right? Movies right to your home and no more late fees... Well, it took two years of fighting for control and getting reemed at my neighborhood Blockbuster for me to get the hint. As most of you know Netflix is a good thing - made even better by the convenience of being able to drop off movies in your pajamas. So why did it take so long for us to switch? Well, at first I have to let you know that I'm a cinema whore. When I went to Blockbuster I would rack up 3-5 flicks in one go. Of course even under their new rental structure that still meant that I had to watch one the night of, one the next day and finally one more the morning they were due back. For a while there I had everything under control and would make sure I had set aside the time on the weekends for my binges. Well, as you know even the best laid plans don't always work out the way you'd like them too. On more than one occasion I would trudge myself over to the counter and wait for the damage to add up... I sometimes spent double and triple the price on some of the videos (in retrospect I guess I should have bought them outright). So what was I to do? I certainly can't buy everything... So we switched. At first I thought I'd miss the spontaneity of getting movies when I wanted them but in reality I don't miss standing in line and not finding anything all that much. The movies come when they want and we watch them at our leisure and we're still managing to roll over the movies twice which means at the end of the day they're only costing me about $1.85 - HA! According to m predictions I will break even in 2006 and then start "saving money" in early 2007... So that's my story. All I can say is that if you haven't tried it you should, especially if you have kids. There's just nothing better than having the choice to not watch a movie and not have to pay extra because you don't have the time. Sniffle, I think I'm going to cry...

Song of the Day . "Housequake" by Prince

Song of the Day . "We life so fast" by Heaven 17

Song of the Day . "Angels and Lovers" by Howard Jones

Song of the Day . "Tenderness" by General Public

Song of the Day . "Sour Girl" by Stone Temple Pilots

First time for everything. Well, today I'm a little less jaded about our political system. Despite all the other issues at stake and all the possible outcomes the vote I cast for the former Mr. Olympia has put $468 in my pocket. As I've said before, most of the time the political choices we make rarely touch our daily lives. This is an example where money was changed hands, and in the right direction too! You can't beat that. Now I know that there are other issues that we're all dealing with, but other than gas, the other issues don't affect me all that much. I still get up, go to work, come home, unwind and start the program all over again the next day... In any case, I have a little faith restored in our system (which says a lot, especially after the car insurance fiasco of a decade ago) and that faith is going to be repaid in the form of a new home theater tuner/receiver to accompany my shiny new Definitive surround system.

Song of the Day . "Situation" by Yazoo

Song of the Day . "Wood Beez (Pray like Aretha Franklin)" by Scritti Politti

Its the size of Texas Mr. President. Okay, all you Harry Stampers out there... If you're worried about the next global killer that's going to collide with earth and place us all in a nuclear winter then you're in good company. Now there's an on-line tool that allows you (with a little bit of effort) to find out if your home will be in trouble in case the big one hits. Remember, real input will give you a more realistic simulation.

Song of the Day . "Europa and the Pirate Twins" by Thomas Dolby

Song of the day . "Number with Wings" by The Bongos

Busted. Now you can ticket the ones that you love. Identify the crime and set the punishment and bail. Doesn't sound like a bad idea and it saves on the argument. Use your citations judisciously.

Experience . Van Helsing

Song of the Day . "Ezekiel Dreamtime" by Rebecca Timmons

Song of the Day . "Always" by Bent

The Brunch. I just wanted to post a quick note and thank everyone who joined us for brunch on Sunday. Karen loves cooking and I love hanging out with friends, its a perfect match. We hope you all had fun as that was the real goal for us. We both know that we have great friends and we want you to know that we appreciate you all.

P.S. Keep an eye out for the invitation to the beach picnic...

Say Cheeez. I guess it was only a matter of time before phone pics became a form of amusement and voyeurism. If you've got one of the new camera phones and have an opportunity to take interesting pictures feel free to share. You can start your journey here: Textamerica

MIA. I know its been a while since I posted something - you'd think with all the face time I have with my desktop I'd have more time... Typically, I have enough down time to collect some thoughts and write them down but the last couple of weeks have been hectic at work. So, if you don't mind I will let you in on some of the irritating things I've been dealing with at the J-o-b.

Over the last 2 months we have undergone a total resource change in our web server pool and have decided to throw the dice again, betting on Microsoft's IIS 6.0. Originally we had all of our servers running on IIS 5.5 but had some problems with caching on Communique. Our solution was to migrate everything to Apache (which we did) but that had some other problems with our Blue Martini servers which caused us some other pain. In any case, we've had all our fingers in a dam that continued to leak with software that continued to fail or work incorrectly. In order to try and get things stable we took our whole environment apart and began to simpllify the code and application base and try and get to a common platform. In the last 3 months we've upgraded all of our production and development servers to Windows Server 2003 and we've moved all our website to IIS 6.0 (again). As of now, it seems that we're stable (a nice change) and finding more time to "iron out" the small problems that we had developed with our Active Directory schema and DNS configuration... We have come to find out that my co-hort and I maintain 60 sites (prod and development), manage 120 registered domains, 4 web servers and 8 development servers, 3 development environments and 9 client workstations. At least now we know where our time goes...

As we continue to move our company on to bigger things and e-commerce we can only hope that the decisions we're making now will be able to support the growth that we're projecting over the next 2 years. In either case you can hate Microsoft for the maze of problems they create or thank them for the job security.

What time is it . A show of hands?