Tag Archives: pioneer
Peg Meet Hole
For those who follow my misadventures over on my personal blog, you may be familiar with the fact that I recently finished construction on my basement. While it’s nice having a third bathroom, fourth bedroom, and laundry room, the best part about it is the family room. I wired the room to accommodate a 7.1 home theater. I even built a shelf over my fireplace that will be home to a 52″ LCD television. The whole setup is very sweet and I take great pride in knowing that it was my hands that built it all.
Despite construction having been mostly completed for weeks, it has only been within the past few days that I’ve had the time to begin moving my electronics into place. Unfortunately, I haven’t upgraded my components yet so I’m using a 12-year-old Pioneer four-channel receiver with a seven-year-old 27″ television.
In addition to the speaker and sub-woofer lines, I also ran coax for cable television and HDMI and component cables for the new HD television and receiver that I’m hoping will be mine next spring. We’re all familiar with the old adage concerning fitting a square peg into a round hole; that’s basically what I’m trying to do here. The problem is that my receiver doesn’t have television RCA inputs, coax inputs, or even auxiliary RCA inputs so running my television through the speakers poses a problem. It does have a video out connection though so it’s not totally obsolete.
I also have a problem with getting video from my DVD player to the television. Fortunately, my receiver does have connections for a DVD/Laser Disc (yeah, it’s that old) so I can connect the DVD player to the receiver; however, because of how the room is set up, I can’t run cables directly from my various devices to the television so the receiver and accompanying wall ports are all that I have to work with.
With my current setup I can listen to a DVD, but what good is it if there’s no video? I got to thinking about component cables, and since they’re basically just standard RCA cables on steroids (how’s that for a basic comparison?), I decided to try hooking the television up to the receiver using these via my wall ports. It worked beautifully. I can now see and hear a DVD but the problem of having sound piping through the speakers when just watching TV still posed a problem. To fix this, I finally decided to unhook the VCR from the back of the receiver and use those ports for the TV which worked well.
It’s been almost a week since I started hooking up wires and praying to the gods of outdated electronics but things are finally working. Granted, I still have two speakers and a sub-woofer that can’t be hooked up to the receiver but at least what can be working actually is.
You may be wondering why I’m sharing this little story. I mostly just wanted to post something but there is a moral. If you plan on building anything that could be considered “cutting edge” or “state of the art”, make sure that all of your parts are up to date. Jury-rigging old stuff will only get you so far but, if you’re good, it can get you pretty close to where you want to be. Unless you’re playing with rockets in Blood Gulch though, close may not be good enough.
Halloween as an adult
Happy Halloween everyone!!
Like most holidays, Halloween is a little different now that I’m an adult. As a kid, it was an easy day when school didn’t really matter, you wore your costume, and got candy. As an adult, finding costumes the right size and that are what everyone really wants sucks, candy can get expensive, and the very real fear of letting your kids wander the neighborhood (or farther) at night is always there.
For me, it’s also the fact that I know I’m going to have to deal with teen-aged losers who are trying to trick-or-treat wearing black hooded sweatshirts. Let me lay it out for everyone right now: No costume, no candy. Emo is not a costume, it’s mental retardation. Wearing all black doesn’t work either. Go ahead and kick in my pumpkin; it’s hooked into a 240v line.
The way I see it, if you went out of your way to really dress up into an actual costume, then you can have a fun size Milky Way. Of course, if that’s really your aspiration at 17 years old, then there’s probably a reason why you weren’t invited to the party across the street where all your classmates are actually having fun. But hey, don’t let me get you down! You enjoy that single serving of Smarties . . . you deserve it!
This does not get candy . . . this gets a beating.
Also changed for me is the idea of haunted houses. I was never really a fan of them as a kid (I was scared of a LOT of things), and the idea of spending money so some high school volunteers can jump out at me is even less appealing to me now.
Instead, I find myself wanting to setup a haunted house for the neighborhood. Of course, with neither the time nor money, it’s still a dream right now. But one day . . . .
Listening to the radio ads for various haunted houses/villages/forests/whatever’s that are going on though, I heard an interesting one for This Is The Place State Park. Within the park is a pioneer village (not a recreation, the actual buildings and everything) that they use as a haunted village every year. In the ad, they point out that ghost hunters all over the nation have determined that the area actually IS haunted.
I’m trying to think how that’d matter. This isn’t the Donner Party we’re talking about here, it’s Mormon pioneers who actually made it to the Salt Lake Valley and built homes there. If I saw a ghost there, what’s it going to be doing? Laundry?
Ghosts or not, some things just aren’t scary.
So, what’s everyone’s plans?
