Stuff like this....

Subject: $RANDOMIZE
From: "$FIRSTNAME $LASTNAME"
To: jc@buildhigh.com

... is always pretty funny. Looks like this would be spammer hasn't quite figured out how to master that Perl script he's been writing.

I have never had a nice stereo. Sure, I had a decent tabletop stereo (if you consider 30W per channel and a 3 cd changer decent), but I never had one of those big booming numbers.

Which really is fine. I just felt somehow left out, since I sold them for years at Sears, but never had one of my own. Imagine listening to stereos day after day, pointing out features, and not being able to have one of your own.

Okay, so I was in college and I really had no money. But this is 5 years later, and my DVD player broke in when I moved. And my stereo makes "electrical sparking noises" when it's plugged in.

One of those Home Theater systems with a DVD/Reciver combo looked to be a nice way to fix both problems. So off to Best Buy I went. Then straight on to RadioShack.

The shack seems to have undergone some sort of renissance. They have good products and their prices are actually cheaper than what you'll find at the competitors. So I walked out with one of those 5 speaker DVD home theater systems. With a subwoofer.

Back when I was at Sears there were no DVD players. Seriously. And the "Home Theater in a box" concept was in it's infancy. The idea of a Pro Logic capable receiver with 5 speakers and a subwoofer for a reasonable price was revolutionary, and they sold like hotcakes. As one of those "audio type guys" I looked down my nose at them, but what the hell, it's good enough.

Anyhow, the unit I got isn't bad... for an apartment. Subwoofer and 5 speakers, 200W total which actually puts it lower than what my car can do. In it's defense, it sounds much crisper than the car. And it has enough audio and video inputs to hook everything up to. Not high on the geek quotient, but it works for me.

So it's been about 24 hours now, and my neighbors have probably had enough of Bill Murray turning on his protonic accelerator and shooting highly accelerated particle streams at non-corpreal entities. Time to turn it down a notch...