Friday was Christmas Eve and the associated party with my mom's side of the family. That went well, although I'm not as much a people person as most of them. I sat around and took pictures. Saturday was Christmas Day and the associated party with my dad's side of the family. It was at my parents' place so I had Internet access too. I took more pictures, as I borrowed my dad's lens for the day. Unfortunately it was a little long for sitting in the same room as people, but it worked. After they all left it was Family Christmas. It went well, I got some cool stuff, and ended eating too much and not getting near enough sleep. I went home after we finished presents at like 2am Sunday morning (yea, my family stays up late). Then there was church and back to the parents' for lunch. Sat around there all day, and some other relatives came over to hang out. Went home some time on Monday morning, and stopped by work to fix some stuff which broke on Friday morning. I brought home another stack of laserdiscs to watch.

Over the weekend I managed to acquire a Dwin LD-2 (not as a present). For those who don't know, that's a nice line doubler. Basically put Composite or S-Video in and get RGBS out. I hooked that up between my receiver and projector and threw in a laserdisc. It looked awesome, other than some hum bars which look like possibly a ground loop somewhere. Now I remember why laserdiscs can be nicer than DVDs - it's just my projector's color separation and transcoding system sucks... I ended up watching two sides of Star Trek: Generations while tweaking the thing. The biggest thing I was annoyed by was the black level or lack thereof (I'd previously seen this quality on CRT projectors). I went to bed and slept for around a dozen hours. While laying in bed on Monday afternoon I realized that my projector had threads on the lens but I had never done anything with them. So I checked and the size is the same as my camera. So on went the .6ND filter, and the blacks are a lot better now. After finishing up the 3rd side of Generations, threw in a trailer disc and compared DVDs through the component output in progressive mode and the s-video out through the doubler. As the doubler basically puts out the same as the player in that mode (480p), it was a reasonable comparison to try. One would think that after combining the colors into one signal and then pulling it apart the quality would be crap. Keep in mind though that this thing is not consumer level, and the transcoder in the projector (convert from component to RGB for the panels) is likely pretty cheap. They were actually very comparible, with the color output from the doubler blowing away the component. It makes the DVD player's stock output look flat. Now if I could only get rid of those hum bars... And figure out what to do with anamorphic discs. Unfortunately the projector won't do 16x9 on a VGA input...

Anyways, also watched Fahrenheit 9/11. It was decent technically, but should be laughed at as a documentary. In the interviews it's obvious he's leading people along, he leads people confronting him to say stuff in the way he want so he can twist it, and he does stupid stuff. It's funny how he portraying people who are ignoring the guy with the camera who's trying to ask them question as if they're personally saying they're against his policies. He's just as much a prick to everyone as in his previous big hit about Columbine.

After that sat around for a while and talked to AT&T support about my Ogo. Apparently it needed a complete reset. That caused it to lose all data, but luckily I have a dedicated POP3 account for it so it was able to just pull most of it back in. Sounds like a design flaw to me. Now that I'm able to get GPRS connectivity again I tried signing on to AIM as I was chatting with the guy. Yea, they're admitting that they have major issues with the portals and it's affecting everyone. Fun stuff. Between that and their coverage, I'm thinking it's still on the track for this thing to go back before the end of the trial period. Maybe it'll be more mature in a year or so. Anyways, my brother came home and we watched X2, which is still a good movie. Oh yea, I'm up for movie nights this week, just let me know if you're interested.