Speakers everywhere

OK, random blog about miscellaneous things. First off, I now have a totally kick-ass, no compromises whole house home theater system! w00tz! I've been looking forward to this day probably since some time in high school. The guy came Friday morning and spent all day running speaker wire through the attic to almost every room on the main floor (including the bathroom. Grooving in the shower oh yes!). Then he hooked everything up including the 50" plasma TV that just barely fits on the table I have for it and almost looks out of proportion with the room. The AV receivers they have today are just amazing, and affordable. I also found a fantastic deal on a Blu-Ray player. I bought a new LG model that does Blu-Ray and has an ethernet jack and support for streaming both NetFlix and CinemaNow. The remote from the receiver can control the TV and Blu-Ray player adequately so there's no mess of remotes. And for the first time in two years I have my entire CD collection and a good stereo on which to listen to it. I refuse to listen to The Tallis Scholars in any kind of Lo-Fi or compressed format, so now it's full on CD quality and speakers in the bedroom. So basically with NetFlix I can watch a huge library of movies instantly and with sonos/rhapsody I can play damn near any piece of music instantly. It's pretty fantastic. Can you imagine showing this to someone from 1950?

Last night I christened the system with The Bourne Identity on Blu-Ray. Awesome. You don't watch the movie, you ARE the movie. For any of my local friends, you are welcome to come to the new Adams Ave Theater anytime. Just be prepared to have it loud and deep.

Yoga continues to go well. I got a block and am forcing myself to do the seated pretzel twists that I hate but crack my back in a unique way. My inversions are getting good and I think soon I'll be ready for an unsupported arm balance. Today I went to the Louisville Recreation Center, which will be my local gym from now on. It's just a quick zoom on the bike on Via Appia around the corner. There was a cyclocross race today and it was very crowded. So crowded that I didn't want to bother actually, y'know, joining the rec center, so I just went in and worked out. This was probably somewhat influenced by watching Jason Bourne do black ops last night, and chatting recently about my old days at Accenture getting hotel discounts by saying we were consulting for whatever company was having a big event at the hotel. I swam forty laps in their fabulous pool. It's a few degrees warmer than the one at 24 Hour Fitness in Boulder I think, which takes that initial hesitation off.

Tomorrow the guy comes to install all the window blinds and other treatments. That will leave just basically the light fixtures in the basement as the last remaining (low priority) new house fix-up. Oh, let me briefly mention the bed frame fiasco. I bought a bed frame from the utterly incompetent The Great Indoors (Sears) on July 4th. They needed 6-8 weeks for delivery, as if it was still 1954 or something, but OK, their price was pretty good. So after 8 weeks and not a peep from them I called to check where the heck my bed frame was. Oops, said the retail zombie on the other end of the line, it looks like it arrived here in the local store about a week after you bought it and we just forgot to schedule home delivery. Duh. OK, so I scheduled home delivery and it showed up a few days later. Of course this involved a highly regimented and fully automated Interactive Voice Response (IVR is the industry acronym for the computers that talk to you on the phone and everyone hates). So after a few messages from their IVR about when the delivery was to occur, it arrived. The box looked like they had dragged it here behind the truck. There were numerous large tears that crumpled the thick cardboard. I unpacked it but it had been dented and scratch in numerous places in such a way that it wouldn't even assemble. I called to complain. TGI credited me 15% and ordered a new one. After two more weeks I called to see where it was. Oops, the manufacturer has it back ordered. It'll be another month before it's ready. Stop. Cancel. Refund. About another week later they sent someone to take the busted one out of my garage. They still haven't refunded my credit card. Plan B was American Furniture Warehouse. I bought a bed frame online on last Saturday I think. It showed up on Thursday and they assembled it and took away all the packaging. It was about $300 cheaper than TGI. I did misread their website which said "platform style design" to mean it was a platform bed, but it wasn't. This meant I needed a box spring, which I didn't want initially but by now I just wanted this chore done, so I rented a pick-up at Lowes, drove to their Broomfield warehouse store, bought the cheapest box spring they had, and got everything set up. This was all before TGI could even come get my busted, overpriced bed frame. So anyway, now I have a bed frame that I thought was a bit risky stylistically, but in the room I think it looks great. It's called the "Matrix" bed and it's all chrome and black leather. I know it's kind of a cliche bachelor thing, but I'm not ashamed of my Matrix fascination, and it looks great with the red wall paint and black night stands I got.

So with that, the Pete Lyons Personal Economic Stimulus Plan (PLPESP) is now concluded. I think we're on the road to recovery and you can all thank me later when the Dow hits a billion.

Had a demo of the past month's work on Friday. Not as much to show for a nine person team as I would have hoped, but it was the start of a big new ambitious project so we lost some time to ramp-up and general panic at the workload I had promised we can deliver. Oh well, the next one will be great. I'll be working a lot of hours to get it done, but I'm psyched about it so now's the time to do it.

Tonight I'm headed to The Sex Show at the convention center in Denver with a friend. Not sure what to expect, but for sure it will be entertaining.

The coffee shop just spun up Vampire Weekend. I hate to leave during good music, but got to get home to meet Jen. Cheers.