Detox, Delays and Darn Big TVs

Well there goes one working week of trying to be healthy and it's been pretty good so far. Feeling like I have more energy in the mornings and generally more upbeat, which is saying a lot because work wise the past five days have been absolute $H!T. As a condolence, I was cheered up that my peers nominated me for an award at the Buzz Night on Thursday so there's a silver lining in my rumbling storm cloud of work issues.

I've managed to avoid eating anything fried and abstained from the booze for five days, but the next two will be a real challenge. Alison and I have decided to go on a 48 hour detox, which involves drinking the contents of these two boxes as our only means of sustenance (yikes!). I have actually been on a liquid diet before but at least I allowed myself to have glasses of milk to keep the hunger pangs away. These Goji berries had better pack some staying power.



This morning I woke up to receive some rather disappointing news when I checked my daily feeds. It seems that Apple have finally made an announcement regarding the availability of the iPad, which unfortunately spells out that they won't be released outside the States before late April. Not great news given my plans to pick one up on our trip back to Malaysia. The plus side is that when they do get released in Australia they'll be coming out with the 3G version at the same time, so I can at least resist the urge to pick up the first WIFI one I find before checking out what the carriers plan on doing (not that I have high hopes for Australian telcos). I guess this also means that I'll be able to read a few reviews before dropping cash on the counter so I'll know if it's a huge bomb.

Perhaps to console myself after reading the bad news, we somehow got into a TV buying mood. John's recent upgrade meant that Alison's parents had a bigger TV than we did, an intolerable travesty I'm sure you'd agree. We hadn't planned on getting one this soon, but on an unrelated trip to JB Hifi to pick up "This is it" on Bluray (we enjoyed the movie and love extra features), the call of the Sales tag was too much to resist.

In saying that I think we exercised some restraint here and only matched the parents in panel size (46" if you must know). We ended up getting the Samsung L46B650 for a decent price, and even convinced the sales guy to chuck in the Bluray disc and a wireless dongle for free. For a moment we were considering spending the same amount for a larger albeit inferior panel (a Hisense) but deferred to the wisdom of crowds after reading some opinions on forums.



Really happy with our choice from what I've seen so far. The contrast ratio is amazing compared to our old Hitachi and I'm still getting over how smooth the video is at 100Hz. We were watching an episode of Bones on the Apple TV and I thought the picture was bordering on freaky, which is pretty good considering the source media is just a compressed TV Rip. Must have some pretty good upscaling. The extra HDMI ports also mean that I can finally move the Wii off composite input.

As for the old TV, that's going to be heading to the new office/store room. I have plans on using it as a gaming TV (so that I don't bother Alison when I get in a PS3/Xbox mood) and perhaps even as a monitor for the MacBook. I'll need to pick up a Mini-DVI to HDMI converter as the Hitachi doesn't support VGA input but the cables seem pretty cheap these days.