ABC: Wow, that HD feed looks like *ass*. Seriously, guys. I know this is your first dive into the whole “high definition news coverage” arena, but don’t have such a crap-tastic looking signal. I can’t watch this.

CBS: Good looking feed, but Katie Couric’s on my 32″ Samsung. Next.

NBC: Now we’re talking. Best looking picture of the night, and good choice using the skybox rather than reporting from the floor like CBS and CNN. I understand ignoring McCaskill’s speech since you wanted to interview JFK’s spawn (and who really cares what Claire had to say anyway?) but WTF is with that standard definition camera at Ann Curry’s position? Shooting your most attractive attractive reporter with a substandard camera = genius.

CNN: Where to begin? First, enough with the invasion of the graphics. The “Gavel to Gavel” schedule on the right side of the screen was a nice touch at 5:00 PM, but at this point I really don’t need to know that John Legend performed live two hours ago. You can stick the remaining schedule down in your lower thirds, where you’re constantly scrolling the same “Convention Facts” that you were five hours ago while you also remind us that this is Day One of the convention; thanks, I’d forgotten already. Oh, and that damned “Sound from the Floor” fake VU meter on the left side: not only is it a stupid idea, but it doesn’t match up with either the podium microphone or the crowd noise level. Which means it was just put there to piss me off.

Furthermore, I understand CNN’s need for commentary rather than dry coverage; the latter is why God placed Brian Lamb on this planet. But don’t spend five minutes complaining about how the Democrats are blowing the evening’s program by putting on pointless speakers when you ignore every single one of them. Especially when you bitch that “you go from a moving Ted Kennedy tribute to Jim Leach” when Leach’s speech, a (admittedly dry and awkwardly delivered) stinging, accurate indictment of the problems in his own Republican Party was the most honest and relevant oration of the evening. That’s the message the Democrats wanted to send, and you ignored, Turners. And then criticized a lack of that message. Bra-frickin-vo, guys.

MSNBC, Fox News: No HD? Next.

(Sidenote: I flipped over at the end, so I’m not sure, but there’s a chance that Fox News is the only network other than C-SPAN to carry any of Claire McCaskill’s speech. If so, kudos to them. But don’t need a single spinning graphic, much less two of them.) (Again, not that anyone cares about McCaskill, but still.)

CSPAN: If only you were in high def. Pity. Mr. Lamb’s network is still the best, with no commercials and no commentary - just the bare convention, with enough locator shots and close-ups of random, wacky-dressed delegates to give you the feel of the convention. If the various cable operators haven’t ponied up the cash by 2012 to give C-SPAN HD capability then I’ll be declaring jihad on each and every one of them (starting with Comcast and Charter, of course).

Okay, self. You’re a tech geek. You like shiny things. Sell yourself an iPhone.

Well, okay. I guess I would have to start with…DUH. IT’S A FREAKING IPHONE. Not only is it the coolest damn looking mobile out there, but it’s an iPod. And don’t tell me you don’t like iPods and that you’re not an early adopter; you had a first-gen Windows iPod a full month before they hit stores.

Yes, but I have an iPod. A Touch. Just bought it a couple months ago.

Go sell that brick on eBay then. With an iPhone you get every feature your iPod has plus, like, a zillion more. Literally. Steve Jobs’ boys were actually able to locate the number zillion; it’s actually one of the free apps available. Along with AIM chat, Facebook, GPS locator crap, song recognition technology, AOL Radio, a zillion (again, literally) games, live WeatherBug radar and you don’t have to be near an open WiFi network to use it all like with your pitiful iPod Touch.

I’m under contract to Verizon for another eighteen months, and I’m not paying the early termination fee.

So get around it, then. Consumerist lists a way to do that, like, everyday. In fact they just gave instructions JUST YESTERDAY for the EXPRESS PURPOSE of people USING IT TO GET OUT OF THEIR CONTRACT AND GET AN IPHONE. You stop by that site like ten times a day; how did you miss it?

Wow, you like to shout, don’t you? I didn’t miss that post, actually. I just ignored it because it’s not as easy to break free as they make it sound. Plus, I’m not the only one on the account: Emily and my mother are on it as well, and of the 700 minutes we’re allotted each month we usually have just under half of that left since we don’t talk much on the phone and most of who we do call are also Verizon customers, so the call is free.

But you could get a similar deal for them on AT&T…

Not with an iPhone I couldn’t. The data rate is horrid, and even worse since after they reduced the price of the new iPhones they jacked the rate you pay for your subscription. It would cost me in one month to have just one iPhone what I pay for three phones now. And AT&T certainly isn’t any cheaper as a whole; Lifehacker pointed me to this site that runs a comparison of your current plan with every other available one for your ZIP code. It’s conclusion was that it couldn’t save me a single dime by switching to another plan.

So basically you want me to literally double my mobile phone cost per month AND probably pay Verizon an ETF just so I can use Google Maps with GPS in the car and control my iTunes from six-hundred miles away.

I’m just going to repeat what you just said: Google Maps with GPS in the car.

Oh. Drool…

So we’re going to the AT&T store then?

Still no.

The blog has become droll and lifeless. With nothing going on, there’s plenty of time to write…but nothing to write about. Such is the ultimate irony of the online journal: when a lot happens, you’ve no time to write about it. When you’ve time to write, there’s nothing that’s worth the effort. Sad.

So I’ll just list everything that’s currently on our DirecTV HD DVR. Listed from oldest to newest.

The West Wing | BravoHD - The first six episodes of the series as telecast on Bravo a couple months ago. They never run The West Wing anymore. We didn’t even have Bravo in Effingham and I didn’t miss it since their once-common West Wing marathons just don’t happen that much. I caught this one and have been afraid to delete it; those DVD box sets are EXPENSIVE.

Ratatouille | Starz West HD - We haven’t bought the DVD yet, and this version is OAR HD. Looks gorgeous.

Employee of the Month | TMCHD - A guilty pleasure. It’s a really crappy movie, but the former retail worker in me enjoyed it. And for some reason I haven’t deleted it yet.

30 Rock | KSDK-DT - The last five episodes of season two.

The Office | KSDK-DT - The last six episodes of season four.

King of the Hill | KTVI-DT - The last six episodes of season eleven.

American Idol | KTVI-DT - The season seven finale. Again, I’m not sure why I haven’t deleted this.

Backbeat | TMCHD - The early 90’s film about the Beatles in Germany focused around Stuart Sutcliffe. Haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Cars | Starz Comedy HD - Like Ratatouille, we keep a beautiful HD copy of this on the box because it looks so damn good. Unlike Ratatouille, we actually own the DVD of this film. But the HD version looks better.

Transformers | Cinemax HD - We haven’t watched this yet. Maybe one year.

Trading Places | Cinemax West HD - I hadn’t seen this in years when Cinemax ran it. Then I recorded a later run in HD. And it’s still there.

Idiocracy | Cinemax HD - A highly underrated film from Mike Judge. Not as good as Office Space - not even close - but worth a watch if you haven’t seen it. It’s somewhat quotable, and it warms my heart to see more and more references to it popping up in the Fark forums.

Starz Inside: The Pixar Story | Starz Kids & Family HD - A tremendous documentary about Pixar produced by Starz. Worth keeping for a while.

Get Smart | WPXS-TV - Three episodes of the series recorded a couple weeks ago. Emily had never seen the show, so after we saw the movie I gave her a sample of it. I would delete them, but this is Kaos. We don’t delete things here. (No? Okay, let’s try another one.) I would delete them, but when I went to hit the button I missed it by…that much. (Still no?) Would you believe…I’m too lazy to delete them?

Donut Paradise | Travel Channel HD - A random hour-long show on donut places. Yeah. Hasn’t been watched yet; might not ever be. I miss the old specials the History Channel used to run (mostly on weekends) detailing the history of American cuisine, and this is no real substitute.

WWE Monday Night Raw | USAHD - Two recent episodes (the draft and the week after) that haven’t been deleted yet. This is why my DVR only has 13% capacity remaining.

Let’s Go To Prison | Cinemax HD - A supposedly wretched film that features Will Arnett and Dax Shepard and so I DVR’d it for some boring day. Odds it gets watched: meh.

300 | Cinemax HD - Haven’t seen it yet, so I figured I’d record it for later. Especially since it’s in HD and I’m canceling the premium channels before long. Odds it gets watched: good.

Road Trip | Discovery HD Theatre - Two recent episodes of the old Travel Channel series that DHT reruns sporadically. Love the show. Odds they get watched: probably tonight.

Jon & Kate Plus 8 | TLCHD - Four episodes I haven’t seen from their marathon last night. This show is highly addictive, and not just because I’m still trying to learn how to tell the three girls apart.

The Matrix | Cinemax West HD - Recording right now because A.) It’s The Matrix and 2.) It’s in HD. Duh.

For future reference, my season passes for this coming fall will most likely be: Chuck, King of the Hill, My Name is Earl, The Office, Pushing Daisies, SNL, The Simpsons, and 30 Rock.

I read The Consumerist all the time.  At home, at work, on the road, in the shower, while asleep, in my coffin.  It’s a great resource of fun stories about our idiotic capitalist overlords, and occasionally they run with one my tips.  And then it makes Wikipedia. Cool.

Today editor Ben Popken ran a video from a PowerPoint presentation he recently did showing how businesses can hurt themselves with automated customer service, whether it be on the phone or through email. All of his points are valid, and for the most part these robots need to be done away with. But I wanted to pass on a recent example of how efficient it can be as well.

When we moved to Litchfield I was finally able to sign us up with DirecTV, a horrid little penny-pincher of a company that will screw you out of your grandma’s last nickle…but they have all the high defs. And cable here sucks. So we got hooked up literally four hours before the Cardinals’ season opener on FSN Midwest-HD. I wanted a three room system and only had two TVs, so the installer - seeing that I knew what I was doing - didn’t worry about dragging the little 13″ TV from the office to the bedroom to activate it. When I wanted to do that all I’d have to do is call DirecTV, tell them I have a “Error 22″ code (or something like that…those of you Googling that code please ignore my usage of it) and they’ll send me the programming. Okay, cool.

Several days later I did just that, and instead of having to talk to an operator I just pressed the button for service and said “error 22.” It made some noises and then the error code on my TV changed to a different one. I hung up, called back, thirty seconds later I said the new error code and *POOF*: the Fresh Price of Bel-Air was in my bedroom. Awesome. Great use of automated service.

On the other hand, I called a credit card company several days ago to activate our new piece of plastic, hoping and praying all the while to get an automated system so that some human didn’t try to sell me a protection program that I had no use for. Instead I got the real live person (who told me about sixteen times that he was in Phoenix. Phoenix, Arizona or Phoenix, India I don’t know, but it sounded like the former.) The man then proceeded to try to sell me nothing, instead explaining the rewards program, the website, activating the card, and then - gasp - spelled out exactly how long to the exact day the 0% interest lasted and what the APR would be after that.

Damn. I didn’t know credit card companies knew how to be honest like that. Chilling.

Paris, the desktop I built in December of 2003, has been giving me random freeze issues for the last year. Given that I only use her sparingly thanks to the laptop (”Chuck”) and the fact that she only seems to freeze up when idle (and I’m out of the room) I wasn’t too motivated to do much about it. Emily wants to use it for some of the programs she needs for her Master’s research, though, so suspecting the issue was with the RAM I jumped on Crucial to upgrade.

Four years ago I put a pair of dual channel PC3200 DDR sticks in the machine totaling 512 MB; at the time it ran me just north of $100. Yesterday at 1:30 PM I found a pair totaling 2 GB for $91. Not bad. I tossed $7 on top of it to get “two day delivery” and was given an estimated arrival of April 28.

At 2:30 this afternoon the FedEx guy knocked on the door. Hello, RAM.

I love Crucial. And so far no freezing.

Growing up in the industry and thus having a fetish for all things radio, my computer over the years managed to build up a large cache of audio files, namely various programs I produced and airchecks from my years at WHCO, an archive of production elements and music beds, as well as random songs and other crap. Many of them were larger, uncompressed formats (read: .wav) that are used by multitrack editors and automation/live-assist programs and thus they take up far too much room on my computer. Actually, I should pluralize that: computers. This all started three or four boxes ago and slowly migrated over to my current desktop and laptop.

You can imagine what a mess it was.

The only reason I could ever find anything is because I just happened to remember where I put it, and that wasn’t always the case. Adding to the jumble is iTunes; occasionally a file or two would get added to the library to get burned to a CD or copied onto my iPod Shuffle, and now there are two copies of the file on my hard drive: one where it started and one where iTunes copied it into its own hellish structure of folders.

Finally I was motivated enough to fix this mess. The last couple days has seen me completely organize and rearrange all of my audio, gutting duplicates out of iTunes and then recataloging all of the files into a logical order. “Illinois Loyalty” and all my CBS NFL music? That belongs in “Sports Music.” My Beatles parody songs and the oldies countdown shows I produce? “Radio Production.” All those wrestling themes? Out of iTunes and into the “Wrestling” folder inside “TV, Movie Themes.” Soooo much nicer now.

Even better: converting all the .wav files into .mp3s. At most I deleted 150 to 300 files off of my computer; the rest were retained and converted to .m3s. The haul: 104 GB was used before the project, and now only 89.7 GB is utilized. That still counts a whole slew of .wavs that have to remain due to their use in my multitrack program or else I could probably clear out another couple gigs.

All that room saved after only deleting a handful of files. God bless the MP3.

Today Emily and I drove three hours through fog and rain just to eat good pizza…and the place was closed.

Connie’s in Anna isn’t just another pizza place.  We discovered the tiny diner tucked into the corner of Anna’s downtown stretch thanks to the Vienna Beef sign hanging proudly in the window, and as tentative as I usually am to sample new cuisine I jumped at the chance to CHOMP a Chicago Dog this deep in Southern Illinois.  We weren’t disappointed, not by the quality of the hot dogs or the rest of the offbeat, diverse menu featuring lots of food really bad for you but damn, damn good.  Nor by the unique ambiance, as the proprieter had dressed her restaurant by quickly redressing the old downtown store with a multitude of old food signs, maps and other appropriate oddities, not to mention the small board games throughout the restaurant to help make our wait for eats a little less tedious.  After a few months she added pizza to the menu (once passing out samples - and by that I mean entire pieces) and we were addicted.

Then we had to get married and move away.  Silly us.

Today we returned for the first time since May and the lights were off, denying us our treats.

Admittedly, I use the word “just” to lie to you: the pizza was only part of the equation.  Emily wanted to tour more of the region of Illinois she’s been assigned to survey as part of her new job, and while we were heading to the south we planned to swing by Carbondale so she could pick up some needed materials to work on her grad school research.  After that it would only be a half-hour trip south to Anna and the delicacies we missed so much, and since Sunday is the day Connie’s was usually closed we pushed back our planned Sunday trip to a Monday in order to be able to kill a bunch of red-tailed hawks with one 65 MPH stone.

Instead we had to settle for O’Charley’s in Marion, a fine meal but hardly the same.  And it’s one we get in Champaign or Springfield any day of the week.  Still, the trip to Carbondale had some rewards:

That’s right: one day after I finish the new blog design I purchase legal copies of Photoshop CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3.  I despise software piracy, and now I no longer have to be such a hypocrite.  Even if I am a hungry boy.

EngadgetHD has a gallery of screencaps from various new HD channels such as CNN and The Weather Channel, making your author drool with jealousy (especially the graphics on TWC.)

According to reports, so far baseball is all TBS has been able to show in HD, which is understandable considering the vast amount of 90s sitcoms they throw on their schedule. One would hope that their original series are at least filmed in HD, or else it’s a big waste of bandwidth. Give TBS credit for at least one thing: thanks to their exclusivity on the LDS and NLCS, they broke the Big Ten Network’s record for most HD penetration at launch, even if Comcast had to get molested by half of Chicagoland to give it clearance in Cubs Country.

Emily and I have a 27″ Samsung tube that I bought in 1996 to get us by, and it works (other than a nagging loose composite connection problem) for now and we see no reason to buy an HDTV until it craps out for good. That said, I find it hard to explain the level of my enthusiasm when I found out that our Mediacom DVR box, which is used as their HD box for customers that desire such options, passes through all the local channels in HD, which means I can watch the national HD feeds on the broadcast networks. Even on my little tube the difference between The Office in widescreen on the analog feed and the HD feed is incredible, with a sharper picture, far more brilliant color and a Dolby 5.1 sound mix to boot. Even better are the programs not fed in widescreen on the analog channels, in particular sports; watching some football on Sunday was far better having Fox and CBS’s widescreen presentation.

(Speaking of, NFL Picks tomorrow.)

If anyone knows how to NOT double or triple bogey on the ninth in Wii Golf, please educate me. My best on the nine-hole course is five-over, and I’ve gone into the last hole with par four or five times only to finish under my record. In other words, the hole sucks it and sucks it hard.

If you caught the season finale of King of the Hill tonight where Luanne got married, it was obviously meant to be a series finale. The crowd at the wedding was complete with a slew of characters from throughout the series’ history, including the social worker from the pilot, and the episode ended with Hank and Friends in the alley, the last word spoken being Hank’s “Yup” before a fade to black. It would have made a decent wrap-up for the show if Fox hadn’t renewed it for another season out of the blue. Silly network.

If you want to be blown away by a piece of audio, listen to the recording on this page. It says you need headphones, and they’re 100% right. It’s amazing.

MLB TV, just because I live in the state of Illinois it doesn’t meant that I have access to Comcast’s Chicago sports channel. That means I can’t watch the Cubs/Astros game on broadcast, cable, satellite or apparently your internet service.

Of course Verizon’s IP addresses are silly, you actually detect me as residing, on this current connection, in southeast Indiana, far closer to the Queen City than the Windy City or Mound City. So you lose. Now you’ll know how Jason Marquis feels - a lot.