Simpsons From Seasons Past

I’m a rather on-and-off fan. For example, I watched every episode of the first three seasons of The Simpsons, then dropped it. No particular reason, except there was a baby in the house to take care of!

But I never got back in the habit, and since then I don’t think I’ve watched an entire single episode all the way through, but I’ve heard about episodes that I’d wished I’d seen. Stan Lee’s guest spot from five or six years ago was one of them. By chance, I caught part of that episode tonight. The black box around the image is because it came from an SD source shown on an HD channel.
[flv:/Video/2008/JAN/Simpsons.flv 440 300]

Work, Work, Work

Our son will soon be the age I was when I started working part-time in high school. Getting that job was the best thing I ever did. Besides finally having some money to spend, I did a lot of growing up during those two years.

In the 11th grade I worked at a restaurant, washing dishes for $1.60/hour. Then one of the cooks graduated from high school, quit, and left for college. To be sure he wouldn’t be drafted he attended McGill University in Canada. I was given his job, and I was a short-order cook until I graduated from high school.

With that bit of background, The Boston Globe has this news item about child labor in Massachusetts.

New provisions in the laws enacted last year bar 16- and 17-year-olds from working past 10 p.m. on school nights. They also cannot work past 8 p.m. without adult supervision, the attorney general’s office said.

I never worked past 10 when I was 16 and 17, but there was rarely an adult present after 8 pm. Just us high school kids. In fact, during my time as a cook I was often in charge of shutting down the kitchen. There were Saturdays when I worked from 8 in the morning until final clean up was done at 10 pm. Fourteen hours straight! A 25-hour work week was not uncommon, on top of school, homework, drama club, and volunteering at a teen hotline. And the Lutheran church! Let’s not forget about church. I loved my life during that time, but I can’t imagine ever allowing Eric to burn himself out like that.

New Tech, Old Tech

There’s Gizmodo, and there’s Engaget. They’re easy to confuse. Can both survive? Dunno, but my friend Tom has pointed out an item on Engaget about Ultra HDTV. I knew there was a good reason to not jump straight into 1080. Go to the link and see how pitiful the resolution of my 720p projector looks, compared to 33 megapixel video.

At the other end of the hi-tech spectrum is the lowly, long-lived vacuum tube. They’re still made, of course, for guitar amps and very expensive, esoteric hi-fi pre-amps and power amps. Here’s an amazing video of a triode tube being made the old-fashioned way, by hand. I’m embarrassed to admit that at the moment I can’t name the tune of the piano music, despite the fact it’s played multiple times in a chopped up repeating loop. Sounds like Gershwin.

 

Project: Projector

Da-Lite Projector StandWith disappointment I have abandoned the Sanus (that’s a lousy name for a company) shelf I was using for the Panasonic PT-AX200U video projector. A photo of the projector as it was is at this link. Click the small picture to enlarge and see how it now is, sitting on a Da-Lite projector stand. The Sanus TV shelf is a very good piece of inexpensive hardware that’s available at any Target store, but my mounting scheme didn’t hold up. It’s now going to be used to get the computer monitor off my desk, but this time it will be properly anchored with bolts to a wall stud.

The Panny 200U continues to amaze and delight. I’m especially pleased with being able to enlarge 4:3 material to fill up the screen, 80 inches diagonal. Looks super, man!

Photograph of Panasonic PT-AX200U projected image

But what are the projector’s faults? It must have some. Yes, it does. As I said before, two of them are common in projectors using 3LCD technology.

  • Color uniformity of bright white
  • Panel alignment

When there’s a large area of bright white — the ice of a hockey game, for example — the left edge is a bit reddish and the right edge has a green tint. As far as the alignment goes, with three separate LCD panels it isn’t perfect. I wouldn’t expect it to be, especially in a projector in this price range, but it isn’t a problem, because you have to make an effort with test patterns or the on-screen menu to see where the convergence is off. Neither of these minor issues is a reason to complain. In my life I’ve gone from black and white TV and vinyl records, to Dolby Digital and HDTV. Every technology has its strengths and weaknesses, and no product is perfect. I think this projector is a great deal for the money.

A major factor in favor of the Panasonic PT-AX200U is that it’s free of the screen door effect that plagues LCD projectors, like the 1024×768 3LCD Hitachi units I see at the office. Unlike minor panel misalignments, the screen door effect is very obvious. Eliminating it results in the 200U having an image that looks very much like watching a movie, which is what I want. Some projector fans may think the picture looks a bit soft, but my guess is their idea of image sharpness is actually due to seeing the outlines of the pixels. These are perhaps the same people who feel Clear Type (sub-pixel) fonts in Windows XP look fuzzy.

But somebody at Panasonic must have been worried about potential complaints about softness, because somewhere in the video processor there seems to be some edge enhancement. I really dislike edge enhancement. It appears only selectively, so it isn’t a simple always-on thing, like the old Scanning Velocity Modulation circuit in regular TV’s. Some of the better TV sets let you disable SVM, and I sure wish the PT-AX200U had a way to turn off its edge enhancement circuit.