log

I ordered my projector about a month ago. At the time, I was fairly unconcerned about shipping time. No sense paying to rush it when it’ll (still!) be weeks before I can really use it. But we would like to make sure the room proportions are right.

Apparently, my projector got lost somewhere in UPS. The vendor was supposed to send me another one by 2nd day UPS so it’d arrive last Friday. Didn’t happen. Turns out it didn’t get sent until Friday.

Then the ZIP code got misread somewhere and it got sent to northern Michigan. After a tour of Chicago suburbs, it came back this way and arrived today. I don’t know why it went wrong- my address was right on the label. But it got here.

Worse the wear, though. The box was beat bloody and the packing materials were pretty well neutralized. The machine itself looks OK so far. Not a scratch on its piano black finish. It is a fetishistic piece of gear, but it has to be at this price.

The crew had set up a rolling scaffold and a box to try to simulate the location the projector will be mounted. I had it throw a test pattern and adjusted it until I got what I wanted. I couldn’t push it as high on the wall as I’d hoped because the ceiling beams aren’t straight. The frontmost one infringes on the upper-right corner of the picture. I called the contractor and he thinks we can swap them around to get a more level profile.

It’s hard to tell in a picture (unless I worked a lot harder at getting the exposure right), but it looks pretty impressive- especially considering that’s thrown at some pieces of that pink insulation sheet stuff nailed up. It’s also hard to tell just how big it is. It’s 9′ x 5′. Feet. Yeah.

How big is that? Say you’ve got a 40″ HD TV. Pile up nine of them. A little bigger than that. Honestly, I’d go bigger if I could, but there are several reasons a five foot tall screen is about the limit. And in terms of width, this allows plenty of room for a door and front-facing equipment.

The projector can certainly go bigger. It can also lens shift in all directions an amazing amount. It’s kind of spooky. Those things will give us a lot of choices for projector placement.

Before I left it for the evening, I dragged the PowerBook in and ran some of the “Dexter” DVD to see how typical moving pictures looked. The current “screen” has a really low gain, so the dark scenes were hard to judge, but the sunny Miami stuff looked pretty nice. Needs some tweaking, but it gives decent demo. Also gave me a chance to use my new GyroTransport Air Mouse. Ha!

I’m long overdue posting a project update. I wrote one weeks ago, but didn’t put the pictures in it yet. I’ll get it done over the long weekend if I don’t get to it before. By then, I’ll have a whole slew of new pictures.

It’s only really begun to sink in that this is actually getting done. I’ve spent a long time planning and wanting this to happen, and now it seems like it’s going impossibly fast. My hope is that that’ll encourage me to get the other things on my list done- well, as soon as I can afford them. At least it’s a short list.

And speaking of that, I need some new hardware for the screening room. I wasn’t planning to get a lot immediately, but a couple of things are essential (and overdue). Trouble is, I don’t have the money for them. I thought I would by now (there are some unsettled accounts on my books), but no soup for me. I’m going to try to stretch out my credit line a little more so I can do this now and avoid tearing out my new walls a few months from now.

Assuming that works out OK, I should have a functional, though unfurnished and undecorated, room in a couple of weeks. Gosh. If that doesn’t help my morale, it’s time to seek help.

The destruction part of the project is moving too, but we’re still trying to figure out how to unpaint the soon-to-be-exterior(-again) brick walls. Seems like there should be a chemical answer to that problem, but none has appeared yet. Best suggestion so far is to paint over the paint with the color of the bare brick and paint between them in mortar color. Yeah, doesn’t sound great to me either, but on the high part it’ll probably look OK. I’m betting the first floor wall will look like ass though.

I still need to investigate tax credits, energy rebates, etc. I really should be taking more time off work so I can wrap my head around all this stuff. Though, that might ruin some of the magic of coming home and seeing what the magic elves have done while I was off in the mine. Yeah, I mixed my fairy tales. You want to make something of it, troll?

Anyway, I can see light at the end of this tunnel. Now let’s see if I can squeeze through there…