Friday was sorta slow. Put together the drive cabinet for the Avalon replacement which took a good chunk of time, so that helped a bit. Also poked around with HTML applications (the IE things) some more. It's pretty cool how easily some stuff can be done, but sorta scary too. The security implications of how it's started are sorta scary. At least it looks on the surface like execution from inside IE still prompts the user. Friday evening I started doing codec comparisons between mp3, ogg vorbis, and flac. Flac by far wins, and there are distinct differences between mp3 and vorbis. I'm used to the mp3 artifacts a bit so they sound more normal to me, but I think long term I'd like the vorbis better. And the fact that q6 vorbis is around 192kbps and compares with 256abr vbr lame encoded mp3s is nice too. I tried varying the bitrate a bit and have to say that q4 sounds a lot like 128kbps mp3s, which reminded me how much I hate those things in headphones. They just destroy the music... Saturday I was planning on getting up by 9 since that was the beginning of the install window for Comcast. Of course the doorbell rings at 8:50, so I had to get up quick and go let the guy in. Install went smooth, although those things take forever to download the software they run. The installer said it bugs him since they could easily let them all sit for a bit in the warehouse and not have to do that. I had all the cables needed to hook it up, but he gave me a 12ft cable with component video and 2 audio RCAs too since they normally use that. Not a bad dela there. The guy knew what he was doing and was cool to talk to for the most part. Other than he plugged the digital audio into the wrong plug (we fixed it by switching to optical right away, but I discovered it later). Since I only have the lowest basic service I currently just get the OTA broadcast channels in HD. Of course all the rest of the analog channels look pretty decent since the tuner is nice. The box is a Motorola DCT5100, which is pretty cool. Looking through the diagnostics menus and stuff that thing can handle lots of stuff. It has an integrated docsis cable modem, but it's only used for it to talk to the cable co. Unfortunately it's IP is listed as 0.0.0.0 in there. The box itself supports Firewire and ethernet (although neither is installed), as well as usb (which is installed). It also has some pvr options and support for hard drives. Too bad this box is leased from that perspective, but that's probably a good thing since I doubt it would be cheap. It has DVI output so maybe I'll play with that eventually. A bonus to this whole thing is I get all the digital music channels too just for having the box. Haven't looked to see if anything is good, but we'll have to see there. Digital music feed, with digital output...hmm... I wonder if the song data is available by text or if it's only video. Screen scraping and OCR would be possible but probably too much work. Anyways, after the install more sleep was necessary. The next task was to put in this thermostat that's been sitting on my counter for the past week. It's the old programmable one from my parents house that was replaced by a newer model. That went pretty smooth other than the fact that the old one was screwed into the drywall with tiny screws and was more held on by paint so it's a little loose, and the fact the new one has two totally separate electrical systems I had to jumper. It seems to not be reading ambient temperature right (it was reading like 8 degrees warmer than true - interesting when I have the house set at 64 normally), but hopefully that'll be fixed soon. After that went shopping and got some rugs. Now hopefully my entryways will stay somewhat clean, and I won't be tracking mud everywhere either. Also picked up some cheap dvds for the price of renting since I was at Walmart. There are occational good ones, but I have to say there's a reason most of the ones that are still in the bin are there. From there went to the parents' house and picked up my server machine and some other miscellaneous stuff. After that to home and watching extra features. I got Two Towers Extended, T3 and X2. Nothing spectacular on the last two. Finished off the day by watching Caddyshack, so I got that going for me, which is nice. Funny movie, although sorta odd in parts, and short. Successfully avoided another day of cleaning, although gonna have to do that tomorrow before people get here. :(