HD TV

We bought one - it's wonderful.

But.

There's always a but, it seems...

I spent several hours yesterday with a VCR/DVD Writer trying to get a TV show onto a disk for a friend, first putting it on tape. The Sony device supposedly will dub tape to DVD (I bought it for that purpose - too much tape taking up space at our house, and DVD's are so much easier to store, not to mention easier to find...) and thought I'd just dump the show onto tape at first, just for drill.

I tried, I really did - and learned a lot.

Our HD TV has one set of outputs. It's 3 RCA plugs - that's right, stereo sound and composite video.

What I learned was that if you recorded it in HD, there's no way to make it come out of the composite jack and onto a VCR.

You get great sound, just no picture.

Tonight I'll mess with the other holes on it to see if it has a component-in on the deck - and if it does, maybe I'll try to send it that way from the cable box, since the TeeVee is on the HDMI.

I'm glad I didn't start out using the media center PC and a Dazzle capture box - I'd've got really ticked!

Ain't technology grand! But the really amazing part is that I am old enough to remember transistor radios being expensive and flaky. I have a couple of radios around the house that use tubes, and I have worked on computers that had tubes - and ever time I say something like that out loud some smartass will ask "What's a tube, Grandpa?"

But what I do for a living was not even good science fiction when I was about deciding to be if I ever grew up.

So I decided never to grow up. To hear my wife and kids tell it, I've been a resounding success.