So we made it through the summer.

Actually, an interesting thing happened to me a few weeks after the last post. I went to Florida for a week and while I was down there I got a call from a recruiter who noticed something specific and unusual on my resume. That very quickly resulted in my moving into a new position.

I am now back to being a web site back-end developer, which is where I was back a few years ago, minus some of the management responsibility. That is good because it lets me spend time with the kids, and it even came with a bit of a raise. The new company is a part of a multinational, which has been a challenhe in itself, as I have not had to deal with bosses (plural) in a decade or more.

The newest toys are an HD Tivo and a Sony PS3. I mention them together because they are 2 ends to a single means - HD Video! I had owned a tivo a while back and two events combined to make me want to get a TivoHD: The price of the new TivoHD and my Cable DVR screwing up yet another recording. No other PVR interface compares with Tivo's. If you like HDTV you should just get one.

PS3 as a means to HD Video? Hell yes! For the price you cannot get a better Blu-Ray player. It's not perfect, but nothing that you can grab for under $400 is.
Actually it is slightly more than $400 once you buy the remote control you are going to want to make BluRay viewing easy.

Both units, the Tivo HD and the PS3 allow for external video to be viewed, the Tivo through their software or some open-source alternates and the PS3 through open and closed source software on various platforms. They go about it in 2 entirely different ways - the PS3 through streaming and the TiVo HD through downloading, but even though I think streaming is the better way to go in general, the TiVo experience is better overall. The inability of the PS3 to do anything but let you watch from brginning to end in realtime, without any pausing, fast forwarding or rewinding just does not cut it for me. The TiVo will let you move through whatever you have downloaded so far. Since downloading generally happens faster than realtime, it means that you can fast forward through commercials on contents from older PVRs or that had originally been sourced from the tivo itself.

Aside from that I am just doing work for the new company as well as continuing my (forever-)ongoing side projects, all of which are doing quite well at this point, plus handling a few clients that I have picked up whose needs are pretty minor.