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Sunday, August 28, 2005

Out With The Old, In With The New TV 

I suppose I could elaborate on last week's non-post, but really, do you all want to read a bunch of my whining about OPNETWORK? Likely not. I'm sure you'd much rather read about my whining about how hard it was to get my new TV hope. I do lead a rough life. But if you'd rather read about neither, well, there's a whole rest of the internet out there for you to peruse, so be my guest.

Given that you're still here, I imagine you're interested in the conclusion to my tale. So...where was I? Getting the TV home...right. I was ready to buy the TV. I called my realtor, Shelley Gold (she's very good - check her out at www.shelleygold.com if you're buying or selling in the DC area...but keep in mind that she's a realtor, not a web site designer), who has a pickup truck named Bertha that she allows her clients to use for no charge. It turned out Bertha was free that night, so we were set.

I discussed the whole matter over with Sam, and after work I paid for the TV, then headed home to pick up Sam. Circuit City's about 15 minutes from my office, and about 20 minutes from our new house. We then headed over to Shelley's which is about 15 minutes from our place. We picked up the truck with no problem, and drove over to Circuit City, figuring things would be a breeze. I parked the car outside the pick-up area (I have a hard time parking my little Honda Accord, so you can imagine how adept I was at maneuvering a pickup truck.

At any rate, Sam goes in and presents the receipt, and I stay with the car. Shortly thereafter the stockroom dude brought the TV out on a little dolly. I have to admit that I was a little overwhelmed by the size of the box - after all, a 50" plasma really isn't that big - that's exactly why we got the plasma in the first place! So, we go to lay the box down, and the stockroom guy freaks out. In broken English, he tells us that we can't lay a plasma down ever. Another guy who's on his way into the store tells us that he actually did lie a plasma down, and it damaged the TV and voided the warranty. And, sure enough, right on the box, it says not to lay the TV flat...we figure better safe than sorry. We certainly wouldn't want to void the extended warranty we paid for right outside of the store.

Well, that should be no problem, right? I neglected to mention that the pickup had a camper top on it. We look at the box and the size of the truck, and quickly determine that the box is too tall by about six inches. This seems kind of ridiculous to me, as the TV is actually only about three feet high, but the box is hugely oversized. It seems the only option is to remove the camper top. How hard can that be? I look at the bolts that keep the top attached, and they require a wrench. Ok, it's freakin' Circuit City. Certainly, they must have a wrench around, right?

Wrong. There's no wrench to be found, even in the car audio department. I'm growing increasingly frustrated, and running out of time. I don't want to have to come back on a different day, when the truck might not be available. It's around 8:30, and the store closes at 9:30. But we have no other choice, so we head on home.

We get home and I'm a whirling dervish of activity. I tell Sam to go and make dinner, because if she doesn't eat for a while, she gets migraines. I figured that fate was worse than not getting the TV home that night. I run to get a crescent wrench, and then back to the car. I unscrew all eight brackets, which are much more complicated to remove than I originally suspected. After removing the brackets, I try to just take the camper top off myself, but it's way too heavy. It's just a freakin' piece of Plexiglas! But I estimate it's about three hundred pounds.

I call Sam out to help me, but it's too bulky for us to handle. Fortunately, a sympathetic neighbor sees us struggling, and helps us put it on the lawn. Then I hightail it to Circuit City. I get there with about 15 minutes to spare, and easily load the TV into the car. But the fun's just begun. Since I can't lay the TV down, and don't have any bungee cords or rope, I just have to angle the TV across the back of the truck and hope it doesn't slide around or fall over. Fortunately, the oversized box helps a bit with that. But the road back that's under construction certainly doesn't. I swear, I must have picked the hilliest, bumpiest route possible. I'm going half the speed limit, sweating bullets with each hump I go over. Every divot feels like a speed bump at twenty miles an hour. It certainly doesn't help that the truck's a little old and loud and the suspension's not great.

I plod home, tired and exhausted. The return trip is a tense forty-five minutes, but the TV doesn't fall over. Sam and I unload the TV - that's the easy part. It's a nice change from moving a 323-pound TV to a 99-pound one (in about 50 pounds worth of cardboard). We get the TV inside the house, and then I go to work. I quickly figure out that there's no way Sam and I are going to get the camper top back on by ourselves. So, after a little deliberation (it is not 10pm, after all), we decide to knock on our next-door neighbor's house and ask for assistance. Hey, what are neighbors for, right? Fortunately, they're home and free, so a couple guys help me place the camper top back on the truck. It's disgustingly humid, and by now I'm dripping with sweat, but I fasten the bolts, and slide all of the weatherstripping back into place, and I'm finally ready to go.

I drive back to Shelley's, after filling the truck back up, of course. I pick my car up, and return home, finally eating dinner around 11:30. But I'm definitely not going to go through all that crap just to leave the TV in a box. I set it up in about an hour, about fifty minutes of which is devoted to removing the insane amount of packaging. By the end, I have enough cardboard on my floor to make myself a shanty town.

So, we turn the TV on, hook up the DirecTV, and...it looks like crap. It's really frustrating. The HD doesn't look any better. I switch to a DVD, and that looks minimally better. The old TV was far superior. What gives? Sam goes to bed, but I keep working, hooking up different cables (including a hundred-dollar HDMI cable), and just getting really frustrated. We don't have internet yet, so I can't do any research. I go to bed quite irritated, but at least satisfied that I got the TV in the house. I hope it was worth it.

The next day at work, I do some research on the internet. It turns out that by default, some TVs have their "sharpness" set to the maximum setting. You'd think that sharpness is a good thing, but at some point it just turns into pixellation. So, we set it to a reasonable value, and all is well.

We break the system in with "Finding Nemo", and I have to admit, it looks pretty fantastic. The picture's incredibly clear, and there's no distortion at all. The viewing angle's great, and the color is amazingly vibrant. After all that crap, I'm glad we didn't lay the darn thing down.

Sunday, August 21, 2005

OPNETWORK 

I hate OPNETWORK. I'd have more time to tell you why, if not for OPNETWORK.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

Give Me TV or Give Me Death! 

Where was I? I'm too lazy to go back and check, but I believe I was talking about getting rid of my old TV and deciding we needed a new one.

So, given the dimensions of the room, it seemed to us that a flat-screen TV would be necessary. I wanted a sizeable, clean picture, and figured that plasmas and LCDs had come down enough in price to make them worth investigating.

We went to Best Buy on three consecutive weekends. Now, I realize that Best Buy is not the place to go to find advice from knowledgeable people, but it is a good place to go to judge the aesthetics of TVs and compare them in person. As it turned out, we ran into a woman who actually was moderately intelligent with regard to TVs, and didn't seem too saleswoman-like. She actually seemed eager to help, unlike most Best Buy employees, who appear burdened by having to deal with customers.

She, of course, pointed us to one of the most expensive TVs they had, a 50" Phillips. I was leaning towards a 50", while Sam wanted a 42", but I believe that was because she was traumatized by the size of my previous television. I figured I was willing to get a smaller screen, but not THAT much smaller. I asked her if they were willing to negotiate prices, and she said they probably would be willing to if we got some sort of a package deal.

We went home and I did some research. One of the best-reviewed TVs was a 50" Panasonic, and I did some comparison shopping. I had never really thought Panasonic was that good a brand, but it turned out that it had gotten rave reviews. Plus, I looked around, and it was pretty reasonably priced, at least compared to some of the other brands (Sony, Phillips, Pioneer, etc.)

So, on the second trip, we returned to Best Buy and hunted our salesgirl down. I told her that I had found the TV online for about $1000 less than they were advertising it in the store, and that if they could match the price, I'd consider getting it there. She went to her manager, and they said they could go about $500 less, with free delivery, but that was about it. And, I'd have to take it right then. Well, we weren't prepared to do that, so we thanked her and left.

We stopped at Circuit City, but it was basically the same selection. There were even less salespeople around to help, and the didn't seem to really be interested in keeping the store clean. Once again, we postponed our purchase, figuring we could always order it online.

Finally, we decided we were ready to make the purchase. I did some intense comparison shopping, as prices seemed to fluctuate from day to do. I also wanted to make sure we ordered from a reputable company that would give us a service plan. As it turned out, there were only a couple decent sites that would ship us the TV, and give us a service plan for less than the total cost at Best Buy. I selected one of them, and even with shipping, I would save a few hundred bucks over what Best Buy would do.

I went ahead and placed the order, and had a weird time checking out on the internet site. The instructions conflicted a bit, giving me one shipping option for free, but also having a disclaimer that certain types of TVs needed to be shipping by some other method. Of course, I figured that if the free shipping option wasn't available on the TV I had chosen, it wouldn't pop up as selectable. Silly me. And, by the way, when you're shipping a 50" TV (yes, I won that debate), we're talking at least a couple hundred dollars in shipping, so it was significant.

I placed the order, with the total cost around what I had planned. But then I got an email from the company, first asking me to call the credit card company so the charge would go through (that was easy - they're always eager to help you spend money as long as it's not going to bite them in the butt later because it's fraudulent), and then informing me that the shipping charge would be about three hundred dollars more than what I selected online. They were friendly about it, but it was frustrating, because the comparison shopping site had gotten things all wrong, and now it turned out that Best Buy was probably comparable. (Actually, Best Buy would still be a bit more expensive, because I'd have to pay tax, but there's something comforting about knowing there's always a Best Buy down the street to hold accountable, instead of some phantom store in New York City, despite their good CNET rating. I figure that comfort's worth around a hundred bucks, maybe more. Plus, I wouldn't have to wait.)

At that point, I gave up ordering online, and resigned myself to Best Buy. Over the weekend, we went to Best Buy, but it turned out the friendly salesgirl was on vacation (despite her saying that she "lived" at the store, and would be around), so we tracked someone else down. The fact that we had to go find someone that would allow us to spend our money there should have been a sign. Clearly, they weren't that interested in our business. We asked the guy we found if we could have a similar deal, and he went to ask his manager, but they would have none of it. I went to the manager directly, but the best they could do was 10% off, which really wasn't close to the price we found online. Furthermore, it wasn't like they were even doing anything special - you can find 10% off Best Buy coupons everywhere you look. We said "screw it" and walked out the door.

Later in the week, I stopped by Circuit City. This time, there was a salesman on hand. I told him the whole story, about the price I was able to get online, and asked if they could come close. He talked to his manager, and actually they were willing to come closer. After all was said and done, they'd give me a 5-year service plan and only be a total of two hundred bucks over the internet price I found, including tax. Not a bad deal. But the kicker was that if I signed up for a Circuit City credit card at the time, I could use it, and get 5% of the purchase price back in coupons to use later. Since we knew we'd want to buy a TV stand, this would work out well. We were sold.

I filled out the credit card application, and waited for it to go through. We had a deal! Now, all we had to do was get the darn thing home. We had moved a 65", 323-pound television. This was less than 100 pounds! How hard could it be?

To be continued...

Sunday, August 07, 2005

I Want My Big TV 

As promise, here's the first of an ongoing (and possibly endless, now that I'm a homeowner) series of (hopefully) amusing tales about our homeowning adventures. I'm kind of hoping that eventually it gets a little easier and less hectic, but I'm not convinced enough of that fact to classify these adventures as moving-related. They're definitely more homeownership-related. What can I say - I guess I'm a sucker.

So, a few years ago, I bought a huge television. I love movies, and I love the experience of watching a movie and immersing myself in it. Furthermore, I'm a sucker for new technology. Unfortunately, that sometimes conflicts with my innate practicality, and I have to admit that in this instance, the former urges won out over the latter.

I was relatively fresh out of college, and just got my first bonus at work. It was a really large bonus (like 15% of my salary), as it was just before the tech bubble completely burst. I haven't had a bonus close to that since, not that I'm complaining. So I decided to go out and spend some of it (less that half - don't worry, I'm not completely crazy) on a kick-ass television. Many of you have probably seen this TV. It was a 65" widescreen rear-projection Mitsubishi. (I also bought a Bose soundsystem.)

65 inches is huge. At the time, it actually fit nicely in the house that I was renting. It had quite a nice picture, and once I invested in an HD receiver and a component DVD player (those were still 300 bucks at the time), it was really quite the experience. The picture was pretty darn clear, the sound was nice, and all in all, it was a worthwhile investment.

Then, we had to move the darn thing, once we moved out of the house. It weighed 323 pounds, I believe. We hired movers, and they were cursing in Spanish all the way down the stairs. When we moved again, my friends and I moved it, but not before we figured out that it split into two pieces. Still, it was quite hefty. Furthermore, it didn't fit as well into either of my two new apartments, but they were still adequate. It did loom kind of large in those rooms, though.

So, as we were looking for houses, I kept the thought of where the TV would go in the back of my mind. There were some houses that would have fit it perfectly, but they had other critical flaws. When we found the house we ended up buying, I was concerned that there might not be a good location for my TV, but we liked the place so much that we were willing to overlook that minor problem.

Quickly, the problem because more than minor. The only room the TV would fit in was the basement, but it was kind of oddly shaped, and not optimal for TV viewing. We placed the TV down there just to get it out of the way. Now that I think about it, it didn't really give me pause, but it is kind of strange that we placed a quite expensive, nice TV set in the basement with the rest of the "junk" that we just wanted to get out of the way. My, how things change.

Our house has a room that was clearly intended to be a TV room. The previous owners had a standard 27" TV, and it worked fine, but as you can imagine, I wasn't going to be satisfied with a TV like that...

(To be continued...)

(If anyone's interested in buying a 65" Mitsubishi, please give me a call...)

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