Category: Personal
365 Adventures in 2011: Day 354 – New 3D Projector
My new projector arrived today. It’s an Optoma HD33 1080p 3D projector. With it, I bought 2 pairs of Optoma RF 3D glasses and a 25-foot HDMI cable. I didn’t want to take down the old Yamaha 720p projector from the ceiling mount before making sure I wanted to keep this one, so I set it up on a step stool with cables running everywhere, hooked up to the $70 open box buy Blu-ray 3D player I got from Best Buy a couple weeks ago (normally $300-400).
The result: Pretty darn amazing. Tron: Legacy looks STUNNING when blown up to nearly 100″ and displayed in 3D. Like any 3D presentation, I’m still a bit disappointed by how much darker the image is when wearing the glasses, but even big movie theaters have that issue. Short of that, everything about this projector is perfect and I think I’ll be keeping it. I’ll be hanging and calibrating it in my home theater soon to give it a proper evaluation.
It’s pretty amazing to have full HD 3D in my own home. I always thought 2 projectors would be necessary for this type of thing. Hopefully Universal’s Terminator 2: 3D attraction film will be released to Blu-ray 3D some day.
My Yamaha 720p projector is around 6 years old and I think it’s worth around $800 if anyone is interested in buying it from me. It only has around 310 hours on the bulb, so it’s practically new. I originally bought it for around 3 times that amount.
But I think my favorite part of the new projector is the stunned/amazed look on the girl’s face on the box. I wonder what she’s watching.
365 Adventures in 2011: Day 353 – Tax Planning
Most of my daily photos involve something fun. Not this time. I paid a visit to our accountant to go through a stack of IRS letters that have been piling up. Nothing bad, but things that needed to be addressed. We also discussed planning for paying taxes next year. Definitely not fun, but necessary.
365 Adventures in 2011: Day 352 – New Toys R Us
After another trip to the monthly Food Truck Bazaar, we visited a semi-new Toys R Us that we’d never been to, near UCF. On the way out, I noticed it has a row of themed pylons in the shapes of various toys: a little toy girl, building blocks, LEGO, a crayon, a domino, stacking circles, and a little toy boy. Fun!
365 Adventures in 2011: Day 351 – Ear in Review
After spending the afternoon at a local flea market searching for collectibles and other goodies (which we found a few of), I sat in my office chair for nearly 5 hours straight. Okay, I do that every day when working, but this time I was also recording a podcast continuously for that same amount of time. It was our annual “Ear” in Review show, in which I discuss the year’s Disney news with Paul Barrie from A Window to the Magic. The show went very well and those listening live seemed to enjoy it. It’ll be released on January 1. And I was happy that it didn’t last quite as long as last year’s show, breaking the trend of it becoming longer year after year. Maybe next year we can trim it down to 3 hours. (Yeah, right.)
365 Adventures in 2011: Day 350 – Dancing Lights
We finally made it out this year to see the Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. I still miss the old Residential Street and think that the display was much better there, but the addition of the new multi-colored light canopy really enhances this year’s setup. The dancing lights are fun, but often too bouncy and seemingly random. I’d like to see all those lights get programmed to be less blinky and wild and more carefully matched to the songs. But it’s still fun.
