HDTV

I guess since I heard of high definition television I’ve wanted to get it. It bothered me that Europe was able to enjoy higher definition broadcasts than the US because the US adopted a standard earlier. The prices on the TV’s have been too high though and I was fine with my $250 25 inch TV.

But then I bought a DVD player which held the promise of Dolby Digital surround sound and resolution so fine that your TV couldn’t even display it. My crappy old 25 inch TV didn’t even have S-video input, let alone separate connections for red, yellow, and green.

So I bought the surround sound system a few years ago and when my old DVD player died on me I replaced it with a “progressive scan” model that could read all of the detail on a DVD, not just skim the detail like a standard player (all of it moot if you don’t have HDTV anyway).

Prices of HDTV’s came down close to my price range and Mom said I should get whatever I wanted. Susan seconded it (but I think she coveted my old TV). And, after doing some research, I wound up with a 51″ Sony widescreen projection TV.

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Eco-tourism

This is a response to an article in the Saturday August 23 2003 edition of the AJC by syndicated columnist Randy Cohen of the New York Times who writes a column called “Everyday Ethics”. (Read the article)

I read your article with interest answering a person’s question about whether they should visit the Galapagos Islands or not. You should have done more research into the Galapagos before giving a generic answer like the one you gave.

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Netflix

I thought I’d try Netflix for a couple of months and catch up on watching movies and then cancel. So far I’m impressed: I joined Sunday and got two movies in the mail on Tuesday. I sent one back Wednesday and got the next on Friday. I did the free trial a while back and they were shipping everything from California. Now they have a center in Duluth (but I couldn’t get another free trial).

It’s $20 a month to have 3 movies out a time which probably means you could watch a movie every other day if you watch them the day you get them and mail them back the next. They pay the postage both ways. They have options where you can pay more and have more movies out or pay less and have 2 movies out a time (but that plan is limited to 4 movies per month).

You keep a backlog of things you want and whenever they get a movie back from you they send the next on the list. So you don’t have to keep going back to the website to pick movies. They just come automatically as long as you have movies in your queue.

It’s a very neat idea and seems like it should be very efficient using bar codes and automatically generating e-mails.

Read the follow-up posted in December.

Refinancing

I was talking with a guy at work who had just refinanced after buying a house a year ago. The rate he got was only 1% less than his previous but the lender paid all the closing costs. I said I was happy with my 6% rate, but he pointed out that it costs nothing to save $100 a month. Would you turn someone down who wanted to give you $100 a month.

So I’m refinancing. It will cost me nothing and my payment would be less. My broker even said that if I was worried about stretching the payoff date out 15 years again that I could just pay the 13-year amount every month and still be paying less than now and pay it off the same month in 2016.