Robot Claw

I missed Sydney yesterday. I wanted a doner kebab for lunch, and I wanted to drink a Lift with it. I wanted to lose myself in the pedestrians downtown, walk to Circular Quay and ride the ferry to Manly and have a ‘second lunch’ at Sea King.

Somewhat strange, because usually if ‘I could be anywhere’ it would be somewhere in Japan. But yesterday it was Sydney…

< Second lunch

Our yard needs mowing badly, so it seems I must brave the 91 F heat to do just that.

My back still hurts, but a lot less than last week. I find that when I sit still for long periods the pain abates, only to return when I move. I expect mowing will trigger it for a bit, so I think I may take some pills before I start. I’m very sick of the pain by now (it’s a dull ache at this point, only sharp when I move something heavy)…it could stick around for another week at least according to the doctor…

We got digital cable yesterday. Of course Time Warner didn’t supply the HDMI cable for the DVR so I had to go buy one ($80!!). Talking with the salesperson at Tweeter (a local electronics store) I found the upgrade from component to HDMI from the cable box/DVR would be marginal since the DVR’s “don’t support it very well”. So I actually bought the cable for a new DVD player I also picked up, which can upconvert from the 480p signal that typical DVD players do to the 720p or 1080i our TV can display. However upconversion requires a HDMI cable (solely for copy protection purposes), so now we have the DVD player using that slot. Furthermore, some DVDs are apparently encoded in 720 resolution, and without a new player we wouldn’t have been getting the best of them.

Digital cable is cool. I feel compelled to mention that neither KLS or myself knew about the large amount of (free) on demand programs available (this in addition to the 200 or so channels). Given that at least two readers of this blog have had digital cable for a while now, I’m surprised no one ever mentioned this to me!

And the HD transmissions look – as expected – impossibly sharp and clear. We watched a documentary on tattoos last night in glorious 16:9 1080i HD resolution and it was breathtaking. Can’t wait till some of the shows we like to watch (Smallville, Supernatural) return so we can start watching them in HD 🙂

Here’s a shot for Joyce of our flowering Hosta

< Hosta