The selection isn’t the biggest yet, but I have to say what is available is a decent selection. Poking around, I noticed among the HD movies available for download, the largest I spotted seemed to be just over 6 gb. I’ll be curious to see how long that takes to download and if it gets throttled by Comcast. I think I’ll need to look into upgrading the storage for the PS3 as well. Is this easy to do on the PS3? I haven’t looked into it yet.

Oh, and the episodes I watched were the first two episodes from season six. Wacky and weird as usual, but still hilarious. And Frylock, Master Shake and Meatwad don’t even show up yet.

Next, I stopped by the local Comcast office and picked up the digital HD receiver with DVR. After an activation call to Comcast and a few tweaks to the settings, I was in HD heaven. And we’ve been very happy with the picture – until it broke a few weeks ago.

I was watching football(one of the college bowl games I think) a couple days before the new year, when all of the sudden a 3 to 4 inch wide rectangle, which I highlighted with red border in the above picture, just went black. I tried changing the source of the picture, tried turning the tv off and on, but nothing was working. After some searching around on the web, I’ve concluded that a plasma cell went out – I think. At any rate, it’s going to cost more to fix the tv than it would to buy a new one. So that’s a bummer.

The tv is out of warranty – I didn’t purchase an extended warranty or service protection plan. I’ll be sure to get one of those next time. I called Samsung for support; they referred me to a local authorized Samsung repair center, TV unlimited in Sunnyvale. I’d need to bring the tv in to them, and it would be $150 upfront just to diagnose the problem. No thanks.

So now we’re stuck with a tv that shows all of a standard definition picture, but only about 85% of a high definition picture. If you’re interested, it’s officially for sale. I’ll make you a really good offer. We have begun to look around for a replacement, but haven’t quite decided on which one yet. I’d like to get it before the super bowl; there are some very good sales going on for tv’s right now before the big game.

My takeaway: get an extended warranty, especially for relatively new technology.

• Re-read some poker books before my trip to Vegas for the WSOP
• Start planning a trip to Italy with my wife
• Weekly basketball and softball games to play in(perhaps some soccer too)
• Fix my computer (I’ll get into that mess in a future post)
• Go to more San Francisco Giants baseball games
• More blog posts

Sounds pretty good to me.

I’d have to say Boston Legal is the most well written show on television. Of course I’m basing this on the small number of shows I watch on a somewhat regular basis, but I still think it’s true. More specifically, both the content and delivery from James Spader and William Shatner(Alan Shore and Denny Crane on the show, respectively) are just brilliant.

My favorite part of each show is at the end. Usually, Spader and Shatner, who are both lawyers for the big-time firm Crane, Poole and Schmidt, will rendezvous at the end of a long work day for a drink and a cigar on the balcony. They’ll generally chit-chat about the day’s happenings, but usually tie in some real-life issues into the conversation. Here’s a clip of one such recent interaction. I think it’d be fun to see a compilation of all the end-of-show meetings between Spader and Shatner.