Geek with Family

Most morning and evening commutes I cannot think a single album or artist I want to listen to, so I fall back on my shuffled "Geek Alt" playlist. Once in a great while TV on the Radio will play. I only have their Young Liars EP on the iPod though I listened to their full length, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes and loved the second song Staring at the Sun. This morning the title track, Young Liars, made the shuffle usually dominated by Built to Spill, Pavement and Elliot Smith (my shuffle seems to prefer those bands, somehow). This is one indie masterpiece. It has everything I love: a mix of complementary electronic and analog instrumentation different than standard guitar/bass/drums, obscure, mythical lyrics sung in three-part harmony, and an eery, driving drone of keyboards giving you just the right amount of dread to make you feel special that you’re not listening to Maroon 5. "Thank you for takin’ my hands…" TV on the Radio.

Popularity: 6% [?]

When you have a family, you constantly have to deal with differing sleep schedules. Toddle_o_Geek goes to bed by 8 PM, Wife_o_Geek passes out by 10 PM and I like to stay up till whenever. Those times when I stay up late or even when my wife is enjoying some other form of entertainment in another part of the house (usually Desperate Housewives) I can’t raise the home theater’s volume to a level where I can hear a Eastern Bloc commando sneaking up from my back left speaker. LTB Surround Headphone ads crept into my periphery vision while reading home entertainment magazines for the past few months. Curious, I checked out their website and immediately decided I couldn’t afford their nice wireless surround headphones. A few weeks ago, after reading one too many reviews involving wireless audio that mentioned hiss, I abandoned the wireless headphone idea likening it to leisurely riding a bicycle down an expressway, not pleasent. A scouring of a few online forums (they’re never wrong) led me back to LTB. Maybe I could afford some wired surround headphones.

Continue reading LTB 5.1 Personal Home Theater Headphones Review

Popularity: 19% [?]

Third in a series how my front projection screen compels me to shop, this time for Superbit DVDs.

Continue reading My Optoma Graywolf 92 in. 16×9 Projection Screen made me #3: Buy movies I really don’t need to own for their Superbit encoding

Popularity: 5% [?]

Now that all the 2005 holiday blockbusters that I cared about are on DVD, I still can’t find time to watch them. How do the creators of these movies expect me to find time to watch these with my schedule?

Continue reading Peter Jackson’s King Kong is too long

Popularity: 4% [?]

Second in a series explaining how my front projection screen compels me to shop, this time I’m finding too many fatal flaws in my current DVD collection.

Continue reading My Optoma Graywolf 92 in. 16×9 Projection Screen made me #2: Wish for new video transfers of my favorite movies

Popularity: 5% [?]

By day, I’m a corporate help desk manager, so I obviously love The IT Crowd, a new British sitcom revolving around a corporate help desk team: Roy (hipster t-shirt tech geek), Moss (socially retarded tech geek) and Jen (their new computer illiterate manager, Relationship Manager, that is). The first season is already done (only 6 episodes) but each installment is tear-filled-comedy-fun. You will fall in love with Roy’s, "Hullo, IT…"; Jen’s pitying, "Oh my God…" and Moss’ self-concious, chin in neck laugh.

My wife, brother and sister-in-law all loved the show as much as me and they’re not "Standard Nerds."

I like the show so much I made some fan t-shirt designs available over at cafepress.com. My friend Fuzzy even got the first shirt design featured on Boing Boing.

Roy: "That’s funny…"

Popularity: 8% [?]

When you watch all your DVDs at 92 inches diagonal you can clearly see all of the flaws serious DVD reviewers, like Widescreen Review and DVD File, gripe about. Since the install of the front projection system last fall I’ve had to modify my setup in the following way.

Continue reading My Optoma Graywolf 92 in. 16×9 Projection Screen made me #1: Buy a New DVD Player

Popularity: 8% [?]

If your toddler is having a bad day, tugging on your shirt every 30 seconds requesting "UP," sobbing when one her baby Kangaroo plush doll won’t standup, her imaginary friend, Cory (not sure if she spells it that way), has stopped speaking to her and she has resorted to kicking and screaming face down on the carpet, then you need to catch up on Cute Overload.

Toddler_o_Geek says, "I luv gwapes. I luv cuteovalud. Rabbits?"

Popularity: 5% [?]

We just watched Disney’s Dumbo because Toddler_o_Geek is sick and that’s all she wanted to do (after whining "no" to the shopping mall, snacks, and changing diaper). I must have had the Disney Story Soundtrack vinyl LP when I was a kid because I sure did remember all those songs about trains ("Casey Junior"), clowns, building circus tents ("Song of the Roustabouts") and black crows flying ("When I See an Elephant Fly").

Dumbo is probably one of the few cartoons from Disney’s catalog with a scene featuring the main characters so drunk that they hallucinate "Pink Elephants on Parade," which my wife doesn’t associate with alcoholism, guess she didn’t watch enough cartoons as a kid. Toddler_o_Geek totally cracked up over Dumbo’s agent, Timothy Q. Mouse, drunkily popping and floating between champagne bubbles Dumbo blew with his trunk (wonderful toddler laughter very welcome as she is quite miserable with her cold).

Continue reading Disney’s Dumbo Back on My Big Screen - DVD Review

Popularity: 5% [?]

I bought the Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3 Studio Isolation Earphones last week and have been enjoying them. Key benefits include: clean open sound with good separation of instruments and performers, very detailed yet smooth response in the upper frequencies, controlled, tight bass if not a little muted (though may improve when I figure out how to reliably lodge them in my ear canal, more later), adequate sound isolation from both your environment and the headphone wire itself thanks to over the ear hard, but pliant to fit snuggly over your ear, plastic encased wire stress relief, low listening fatigue and good comfort with the correct sized ear plug (still don’t know if I’ve found mine yet). Another great upgrade to the iPod sound system in my pocket. Read on for a more in depth look at my continuing headphone struggle.

Continue reading Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3 Studio Isolation Earphones Review

Popularity: 13% [?]