Golden Anvil

Well, with some of our Christmas money Mrs. Kheldar and I took advantage of a Barnes and Noble special deal to pick up the first season of 24 and the first season of Lost for only about $60. Yesterday the shipment arrived, but unfortunately, although the shipping receipt was correct, we actually received 24 and Dharma and Greg. Then to complicate matters, we started watching 24, and in the second episode started getting very regular skips in the DVD.

Wonderful, and not too long after we got problems with the Batman series I got for Christmas too. Guess we'll be exchanging both of those DVDs.

Well, then this morning we continued watching Babylon 5, and it had the exact same skipping problem we encountered with 24 yesterday.

Grrr... That means it's a problem with our DVD player (which seems to have been having more and more problems lately).

So, we spent the rest of the morning doing research, and finally settled on a Panasonic SC-HT740. This is a home-theater-in-a-box with fairly nice features, and rather good reviews. We've been thinking about replacing our stereo for some time (since it's been having troubles for a while, so this seem like a good time to replace the DVD player and stereo together). After much agonizing at the store, we finally picked it up on sale for $270.

Then we brought it home and I spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening getting it set up... and going back down to Radio Shack to buy a plastic coil to protect the speaker cable from our cats... and getting it configured.

Finally, it was all set up, and we rewatched the Babylon 5 episode from this morning. Everything was great! And the surround sound was wonderful!

Then we rewatched 24, and it was good up until near the end when we got another playback glitch. So, it looks like we'll have to return that set after all.

*grumble*

And here I'd had plans to do some programming work this afternoon.