Blog Entry no1

A retrospective of the past 7 years

Please understand that at times I am trying to be humoristic.

7 years ago my parents and I moved into our new house. Back then I was in my last year of high school; everything was going well as my friends and I were already getting drunk and playing a butt load of SSBM (Super Smash Bros Melee for the n00bs). It was the start of a new era of pwning as I gradually started to build my toy empire. The basement was still full of virginity and I had everything ready to for me to take over from the vast empty space to the very useful sound-blocking door leading upstairs. It started with only 2 sofas of epic usage but soon enough the first valuable entity to enter the room came down the stairs held by 2 gigantic gorilla furniture movers: It was a brand new 32'' Sony Trinitron.

A bit later down the road it was evident that things were about to get BIG. As I grew tired of sharing a computer with my beloved family I then decided it was time for me to build up my first gaming computer. The specs of the machine at the time were good but not great as I was a poor student spending most of my money on stupid things to eat from the vending machine at my college's cafeteria. As I remember it was an Athlon XP 2500 with 512DDR 400 memory and a 9600pro on a nforce 2 board. What made it shine was the release of a game that IMO changed it all - the beta of Farcry.

Now I call this era, era Alpha - as it was the beginning of a long incredible adventure of ideas and experiments onto the golden path of the uberly ultimate entertainment center that is my basement today. Pandora's box was already opened as my computer was directly connected to my TV with S-Video. (they call it an HTPC nowadays ) and the only thing limiting me from total pwnage was my TV's resolution. To accommodate my eyes and guests I acquired a series of monitors starting from a 17'' curved CRT to later that year a heavy-as-hell 21'' Dell Trinitron. Doing multi monitoring at the time was considered marginal and I was already using 3 screens for daily computing. People often gazed at how 'the mouse cursor could move from the tv to my monitors and vice-versa'. This was very annoying to me as how it was sooo simple to do yet it was so far from being mainstream.

I was still not satisfied with having an analog TV set at the time, HDTVs were getting common and my imagination was dreaming of the wildest hardware. But it was during some forum lurking that I discovered plans on what would eventually translate into one kick ass time-consuming project: A home made HD LCD Projector. Yes you heard it correctly, home_ made_ projector. I think it's at that precise moment people started to consider me as a bizarre complicated geek... I never really got out of this.

The process was simple at first sight but ended up being more complex than previously imagined. In a nut shell I was to dissemble a common 15'' LCD monitor, strip the lcd panel and the control panel while keeping them intact, fit the panel into a rectangular wood box (ie projector's case), align a monstrous bulb on one side of the box with a reflector (popcorn bowl), put a projection lens on the other side of the box, put fans around plugged on a dissembled PC power supply to cool the rest and use plastic flat lenses to accommodate light flow inside the beast. It ended up with something like this after 100 hours and a broken LCD...

here's a random pic of one of the earlier steps:



PICS OF THE FINAL RESULT COMING SOON.

Don't laugh, the picture quality was actually pretty good - better than most projectors under 1000$ and the whole process cost me around 600$. (if you don't count the time i spent on it lmao >_>) Now here comes the funny part: I normally don't brag (do I ever?) but many of my handy capable friends (no sarcasm) picked up the idea... 4 actually, I kept hearing stuff like "cool, I'll do it 2", "can't be that hard", "I need a side project anyways", etc. | 2 Dropped out after buying some of the components, one (in fact they were a group of 2) made it 'till the end, but the picture was hardly visible and the thing was overheating after 15 minutes of up-time and finally another one got to better results. But again, the picture quality was um, well, very average to say the least. That leads me to one simple rule of thumb - advice you might say - when driving a project to completition, it's not how handy you are, heck, not even how skilled you are but rather how much you want the end result to kick some serious multi dimensional ass. My projector was ugly, awkward and smelled a like burned rubber, but damn it, it rendered my movies and games with great glory and actually was worth all the effort.

All that said there was one huge flaw with the design of the coffin looking box... My friends kept smashing it with their heads when moving around my basement... thus damaging it multiple times

It was the turning point, the critical decision I had to make... friends vs home made projector.

I think I took the right path with choosing friends over my huge PJ box. It forced me to go back to the drawing boards,... either I had to switch to an HDTV, or get a smaller projector. My lovely mother also pointed the fact at that time that the basement was a bit screwed up already due to guests acting crazy (bumped walls, scratched furniture, damaged items, etc.) so we started discussing on how we could perhaps change things quite a bit - her evil strategy was to make the place look so good that my friends would feel guilt from acting like juvenile dumbasses. It kinda worked, kinda. I call it, era Beta.

Just before era Beta:



We then rebooted the room aka hired some dudes to do parts of the work, like cabling, making walls (I could have done that, I know) and other stuff. The major goals were to contain more sound in the actual "ciné maison", enlarge an opening in the wall to pile up every electronics I had, make the place look nice with leather 'n glass if you know what I mean, etc. But the last call was still unanswered - I had to choose now, Projector or HDTV.

[LOOP]Projector or HDTV, Projector or HDTV, Projector or HDTV, Projector or HDTV, Projector or HDTV[/LOOP]

I couldn't sleep, food had no meaning, grades went down - all was irrelevant. Only what I would end up gaming and watching the sh!t out of was the priority. Research, research, research... eat&sleep to survive. Research, Research, Re... what? What is that? HD1000U? Holly Funk that thing is godly.

http://www.projectorcentral.com/mitsubishi_hd1000u.htm

There it is, the absolute god-like solution for projectors under 2000$ at the time. 1500 lumens for a 16:9 Projector was perfect for my needs, contrasts and color accuracy was above expectations, all inputs were there, response time is faster than light, no rainbow effect. I smiled and went to sleep.

It was decided, my Setup was gonna be Projector driven. It was just a matter of time until i received the beauty and married her (yes we're still together as of now! ) With the right ambient light management and screen solution I see absolutely no down sides to having a projector. (ok, maybe the bulb you have to replace but that's it m'kay?) I was/am officially a projector guru, I find groups of people at the futureshop and illuminate their minds with conspiracies on how big chain companies like Best Buy and friends do not carry decent projectors for the absolute fact that Projectors generate less profit than selling flat panels to joe six pack. People are constantly brain washed into thinking that projection technologies are not on par with TVs,... well guess what it's a big bowl of lies and deception

Here are some pics of that era:











Yea, I got carried away. But we all know I'm right... and it feels good, ok? Back to where I was, um... era Omega. (Now)

That era is sweet. I finally started my career and the money is good, I can now match my incredible spending skills with my newly acquired making money skills. I work for Tangara Tagentis, we make kick-ass software solutions for the big guys; nothing can stop a geek and his keyboard, well except a hot Asian school girl of course, but whenever that happens?

Finally, it's just a matter of perfecting my setup with more powerful hardware for my already beasty comp, better screens, buying consoles/games... etc. But I'm in urge of a new project that starts with you guys; buying stuff isn’t what I'm really into, it's tweaking and moding that I love. You will eventually help me pickup ideas and make this room even more rock-solid, it's up to the community to guide my future steps into the awesome forest of uber technologies. What will it be, Crysis on a curved screen? A surveillance camera/mic system? a LAN room? you decide.

PICS OF MY CURRENT SETUP COMING SOON

To my crew and my co-workers, I salute you and thank you for caring about a nerd's precious little world...