New Home, New Home Theater

My wife and I are just over a week away from moving into our brand new, built from the ground up home and we could not be more excited. Her, for the accomplishment of our hard work and budgeting over the last three years to make this dream a reality. I just want her to know how much I love her, even though it's been hard. We've made sacrifices, we've argued, fought, made up, and fought again.  It has not been easy and for two newly weds - a daunting task.

Me, I'm excited becau- WOOOOOOOOHOOOOO!! ALL NEW HOME THEATER SHIT!

I'm JACKED UP! New TV, new wireless routers, new media PC, new PS3, new surround sound. This shit is going to be EPIC. I can't wait. Damn I love technology.

If I can say there was one benefit for all the saving and budgeting is that it really allowed me to find exactly what I wanted and for the prices that I couldn't pass up. I became one with saving. I'm the fucking savings buddah. I could run down a major list of all the new shiny stuff I bought but that would be tedious and boring. Oh fuck it. You're going to get that list and you're going to like it. You're going to LOVE IT. Like hot loads of savings all over your fiscal chest.

I knew I wanted a Panasonic Plasma. The reason I knew that is because for some time I was the Supervisor of a very large electronics retailer, let's call them Tseb Yub, and I spent a great deal of time researching these things as it was my job. Panasonic TVs have been consistently rated as top buys. They have one of the only HDTVs on the market that has passed the rigorous THX quality approval system. The Panasonic G10 won Best in Show at CES a few years back. It's next iteration, the G20/25 won the next year. And this year? The Panasonic 3D TVs won.

So I knew I wanted a Panasonic 50G20 or a G25 (Skype capability is the only real difference). They were retailing around $1500, but I managed to bide my time and got a great discount package that with shipping only put me back $950. It's come down in price since then, but overall I felt a good deal.

I also gave a lot of thought to my sound and decided I didn't want to do a full 5.1 or 7.1 system so I instead opted for a Klipsch CS-500. A 2.1 system is enough for me, with simulated surround. The DVD player has and will never be used as I have a PS3 and a MyBook Live. I will probably pick up another MBL as I love the completely seamless integration it has with the PS3 as a media server.

All told, the entire setup ended up running around $1450 which considering the amount and quality, I feel like I got a steal.

The Arrival

So.

I've never really been good at inaugural posts on the few blogs that I've done, I'm far wordier when I'm speaking than when I'm writing (maybe this should have been a podcast). In any event, welcome. I started this site for a few reasons and I suppose these are my guiding principles for me doing this (in no specific order, hence the bullets).

• I talk to myself a lot. In my head that is. These conversations generally revolve around video games, music, movies, home theater nonsense, home office ideas and other dorky things. Rather than writing all this down in a marble notebook for the police later to find, I somehow rationalize that the Internet is a safer and cleaner way to do this. Yes, I realize the Internet is a fucking disgusting place full of disgusting people that are just looking for.. disgusting pictures of disgusting people doing disgusting things. Don't ask me where my rationale came about that this would be clean. I need a shower now.
• I just went to 4chan instead.
• Now I need a shower.
• Sorry, off track. Another reason. Oh! I read a lot of sites about Home Theater tips and tricks, and I like having spiffy stuff that I can show off to other nerds. This is a medium for that.
• I read gaming blogs and sites all day and therein starts my inner monologues around gaming (see: first bullet).
• I get bored and this is a good way to not bother my wife. Who is most likely doing something productive.

Great. Now that we have that out there, I think we're on a good enough start. Next post will be about the actual things I say I am going to talk about. Let's see if I can keep my promises.