To complement our spiffy new HDTV, I managed to find an Xbox360 on eBay for not-too-high a premium. JoeBobATLThe Fedex guy came a day earlier than the tracking said it would (who knew that was even possible), and I was like a kid on the first night of Hannukkah as the delivery dude came up the front steps. In a word, the image this thing produces on the SXRD is stunning. I had picked up Project Gotham Racing, Madden 2006 and Kameo – and every one of them is just mind bogglingly beautiful. PGR is especially slick – driving the streets of NYC and seeing the skyline come hurtling toward you, driving past the casinos of Las Vegas by your headlights – all the while seeing true-to-life reflections and dirt on your windscreen. I’ve also partially hooked this up to our Dell PC running Media Center Edition 2005. I did have to update it to this year’s patch, but once I did, the two machines saw each other easily. Now I can get photos, video and music from my desktop on the Sony in the living room. Spiffy! Embedded here in this post is my XboxLive ‘GamerCard’ that shows my current reputation, score and ‘zone’, whatever that is. It will also show any games I’ve gone online with.
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Digital Edge Awards
The Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation (one of the top two online
journalism ogranizations focused on the newspaper business) has announced their 2006 awards nominees – and two of my old companies – The Savannah Morning News and The Augusta Chronicle received the ol’ hat tip in the Best Overall News Site (50k-99k circulation).
Also receiving kudos for innovative storytelling in the 50k-100k category is a multimedia project photographed by Josh Meltzer for the Roanoke News, where Josh and my good friend Natalee Waters are photojournalists. Augusta also gets a nomination for their ‘Spotted‘ site – a slick take on user-generated photo-blogging their parent company, Morris Communications, has syndicated to several of their newspapers.
Also nominated is the Chronicle’s Masters web site. I launched this back in 1996 in a joint effort with Sports Illustrated magazine. In 1997, we took the “Digital Edge Award”, recognizing the most innovative web site in the newspaper industry, besting papers of all sizes including the New York Times which took the number two spot that year. Morris has a great history of breaking new boundaries in the online news business, and it looks like this continues today. Great to see my old cohorts keeping up the good work!
technorati tags: savannah, augusta, newspaper, morris communication, naa, digital edge awards
Happy Happy Joy Joy
I’m happy to announce that the Trotz household has finally entered the HDTV-age. Since I’ve been working for a broadcast company heavily involved in HD technologies for the last several years, I’ve been eager to experience this at home. After much research, agonizing, and negotiations with my lovely wife, we purchased a Sony KDS-R50XBR1 Grand Wega SXRD rear projection television last weekend. We talked about buying the 60″ version – Best Buy was selling both the 50 and 60 for the same price – but Amy knew that the 60″ would be waaaay to big for our living room.
I finally cancelled my DirecTV service last week – the constant outages and costs to upgrade to support HD (a new dish for $300, a new HD-DVR for $500-1000, new boxes for my other two rooms ($250+)). So we’ve been enjoying free over-the-air HD. It’s kinda sick that there is such a beautiful TV signal just floating in the air for anyone to pickup. I’m looking forward to today’s visit from the Comcast guy however – they should be bringing Motorola’s latest and greatest – the 6412 dual-tuner DVR. That baby has all sorts of features I’m eager to check out, including the ability to output recorded HD content over it’s Firewire ports to a Mac.I can finally get back to seeing how our own networks look, especially the Law and Order HD channel. Oops, I mean TNT!
Sammy Update
The little guy just continues to amaze. As of last week, we’ve officially entered the world of Cheerios and other solid foods, and boy is he enjoying them! It’s been great to watch as he can amuse himself for 30 minutes at a time eating them one-by-one, and he’s also been getting into bits of chicken, bannana – whatever we put in front of him, really. Sam and I are spending lots of time bonding this month since Amy is playing umpteen Nutcrackers at the Fox Theater, so this has been great fun. New pictures coming soon.