Geek with Family

Is it a bad sign that I’m worried about copyright violations when watching this DVD that promises to explain analog audio and issues around its transformation into digital? The Family Guy’s evil pointing closet monkey and R. Crumb’s “Keep on Trucking” dude show up in a few slides of this poorly produced Powerpoint presentation. Yes, Audio: the Movie is a Powerpoint presentation. It makes every Powerpoint mistake in the book: literally illustrating whatever the narrator is talking about with Microsoft’s included stock art and photos (many don’t even make sense like a picture of a sleeping baby whenever the disc warns of math), blue and purple gradients on text slides with dithered, drop shadowed triangles and circles framing bullet point after bullet point, all full motion screen grabs of the company’s audio editing application, DC Six, are pixelated and unreadable. Worst of all, the narrator’s voice track isn’t well recorded.

Continue reading Audio: The Movie DVD Review

Popularity: 10% [?]

We watched Jurassic Park over the past two nights (it’s not overly long, we just have to start it late after my daughter’s in bed and the sun sets). Steven Spielberg’s movie holds up after all this time in only a few areas. Some of the actor’s performances (I’ll tell you who sucked: John Scottish-old-man, his grand daughter, the little kid at the opening dinosaur dig site that Sam Neill threatens to gut, and the hatchling velociraptor—so wooden, like an animatronic puppet covered in strawberry jelly popping out of an egg) were standard Spielberg over-emoticons, the writing is a little forced in the science-y parts as described by Jeff Goldblum (if you liked Michael Crichton’s take on cloned dinosaurs you’ll love what he has to say on the "myth" of global warming), the effects are great when the monsters are puppets and not CGI, in those scenes the filmstock gets all grainy and soft. What I really couldn’t believe was the sound of those dinosaurs.

Continue reading Jurassic Park DVD’s DTS Soundtrack Bites Me in Half

Popularity: 9% [?]

I was very stressed when I decided to buy my Optoma GrayWolf 92 inch 16×9 1.8 gain projection screen. According to posts on AVS Forum I had to worry about: finding a discounted online retailer that would ship me the right product (the Graywolf has the same product number as Optoma’s white screen), the screen surviving shipping damage (large dents in the roll-up housing reported) and a horizontal line across the image area from a plastic sheet used for packing (more on this later). I’m happy to say I avoided all these headaches and received an intact screen at a reasonable price.

Continue reading Optoma Graywolf 92 inch 16×9 High Gain Projection Screen Review

Popularity: 8% [?]

If you haven’t read Alan Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, you need to because it will expose the contemporary super-hero murder mysteries like Powers and Identity Crisis as shortsighted, insignificant stories. Murdered super-heroes can only mean one thing: Armageddon.

I worked in comic book specialty shops from 1990 to 1995. The Watchmen covers always stood out among all the other comics surrounding it alphabetically by publisher from Warlord to Wonder Woman. I never read them because they were expensive, too wordy and I wasn’t impressed with Gibbon’s art style. I was always more in the mood for Jim Lee’s X-Men and Todd McFarlane’s Spider-Man (I read Grendel and Shade the Changing Man too, so don’t think I’m a complete poser).

Continue reading Watchmen Absolute TPB Finally Read

Popularity: 21% [?]

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: 15% [?]