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Two nice things happened to people I know and I wanted to share them.

First, Carey was waiting in a looooong line at Kohl's on Black Friday. A Canadian woman behind her ((We get a lot of Canadian shoppers at the Millcreek Mall for some reason.)) was wearing a heavy jacket and holding on to several items. Carey offered several times to hold the items in her cart (which were tough to come by) for the woman and, eventually, she gave in and took her jacket off, commenting on how she was burning up and how it was so nice not to have to hold all the items. Several of the woman's friends also used Carey's cart to house some of their items and to keep their place in line. When they all got to the register, the woman and all of her friends offered Carey the $10 (per $50 spent) "Kohl's Kash" coupons as a thanks. They're valid only on Monday and, as Canadians, they couldn't use them anyway. Carey netted $130 in free good at Kohl's.

Saturday, I helped my half-brother-in-law Rich buy a Plasma TV (he got a 50" Phillips with AmbiLight). We shopped for six hours, and then found that it wouldn't fit into my Touareg. As we were contemplating our options in front of the Best Buy, a middle-aged man and his father stopped by in their pickup truck and asked how far away we lived. I said "two miles; and, to cut out some unimportant details, they ended up driving Rich and his large television back to my house. When Rich offered them $20, they absolutely refused to take it and instead said "I told you we weren't doing anything else today. Just do a good deed and pass it on." Not quite exactly the "Pay it Forward" meme, but an impressive display of generosity, and now I am intent on doing someone an incredibly impressive favor myself.

Two stories on back-to-back days that really renewed my faith in human kind.

My 5-LNB satellite dish has been installed and I am now enjoying high-definition local content. Woohoo!

Some television shows are noticeably better, some only marginally. Most football games are incredible in high def, even 720p. I wish I had known that Pittsburgh's local channels were available in high definition sooner. I'd have switched months ago.

I also ran a second pair of lines from outside the house to inside the house, then connected them to two lines I had in the master bedroom. The old DirecTiVo is now there with a really old, really decrepit 19" TV with a single coaxial input. Yeah… but, worst case, it'll record shows if the HD-DVR from DirecTV goofs anything up.

Watched some football. Ate too much. Tossed the pigskin around. Stayed up until 2am playing the Wii with Carey's half-brother and a friend of the family.

All in all, a total success. I hope you had a great Thanksgiving as well.

The DirecTV HDTV/DVR I ordered a few days ago arrived, and I've unpacked and installed it.

Unfortunately, the installer who came to install the 5-LNB dish I need to receive local channels didn't know I needed both a) a dish and b) a pole to mount it on. The current 3-LNB dish picks up all the HD channels except MPEG-4 locals, though, and I'm stunned by the picture quality on some of the channels, notably HDNet, Discovery HD Theater, and ESPN HD. TNT:HD's 1080i picture (I watched the Grand Slam of Golf) appeared as though it was simply scaled up from a lower-resolution source.

The installer will be back on Friday morning. He, too, has the Pittsburgh local channels.

As seen on last night's episode of Studio 60:

Is anyone else bothered by the Wii's built-in address book? My list of complaints may be short, but each complaint is substantial:

• Nicknames are limited to what has to be an arbitrary ten letters. Sorry, Phil Letourneau, but you're just "P. Letourn" in my system. The Wii has 512 MB internal storage and you can't give me even 32 characters for names?
• I deleted the first item I ever added - my own email address - and the remaining address book entries stayed where they were. None moved up to take its place. So now I have four addresses on the first page and one address on the second page.
• The address book shouldn't prompt me to add a Mii to the entries - it should fetch the Mii from the remote machine after both owners have added each other to the address book.
• No sorting or searching will severely hamper the ability to quickly use the address book once you have more than four or five pages of friends. I don't particularly care for the fact that I'm limited to five friends per page, either.

I have other gripes as well. There is no one-way authentication, meaning both friends have to accept each other. I like the instant messaging approach here instead: I can allow people to add me as a friend without adding them to my buddy list, too. When they message, I can reply. Otherwise, they don't take up space in my list.

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My Wii console code is: 6703 3062 3247 5192. If you want to add me, go ahead. If you want to post yours in the comments, please feel free to do so. I'll add the people I consider friends to my console as they comment (and as they obtain their Wiis). Feel free to add me to yours if you'd like.

Shortly after 11am I dropped by the local Gamestop to pick up my semi-pre-ordered Wii and an extra controller. I'd already gotten the games a few days ago, after all.

I took the box home and hooked it up. I wasn't surprised by the size of the machine, but the size of the sensor bar and the cord attached to it was a shock. It's tiny. As I quickly found out, too, it needs to be in sight. I tried it on the top of my TV and it didn't work.

I created some Miis for my family and then showed off the picture-viewing and editing capabilities by decorating an actual picture. I set up the Internet connectivity and looked for the Opera download (it's not there yet). Then, finally, I played some games.

Here are my impressions.

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Ben Roethlisberger: 20 of 26 for 224 yards. In the fourth quarter.

Let's perform a thought experiment wherein we take a pure, uncompressed 1080p signal. How much bandwidth would it take to display the signal at 60 FPS?

1920 * 1080 = 2073600             number of pixels
2073600 * 24 = 49766400           24-bit color (16.7M colors)
49766400 * 60 = 2985984000        60 frames per second
2985984000 / 8 = 373248000        convert to bytes/sec
373248000 / 1024 = 364500         convert to KB/sec
364500 / 1024 = 355.957           convert to MB/sec

So there you have it: uncompressed 1080p at 60 FPS and 24-bit color would take more than 350 MB/sec bandwidth. HDMI supports 48-bit color, so double the numbers and you're well above half a gigabyte per second of data.

Math like this really impresses upon us all how well modern codecs truly work. For example, a 1920 x 1080 "BBC HD" video I downloaded from Apple clocks in at 24 FPS, 1:33.5, and only 93.10 MB. Scaling 356 MB/sec by a 24:60 factor gives roughly 142 MB/sec. This particular video plays at barely more than 1 MB/sec (8.38 mb/sec), a savings of nearly 99.3%.

My research into HDMI and newer receivers led me again to check out DirecTV's HD DVR offerings. Though I'm located in Erie, my service location is in Pittsburgh ((Because Erie's local channels are not available via DirecTV.)). Thus, I get Pittsburgh local channels. Pittsburgh's local channels have apparently been available in HD over DirecTV for some time now, which means I can watch shows most nightly television shows in HD, along with sports programming like the Masters, some Steelers games, etc. Woot!

I currently have a DirecTiVo ((A TiVo with a DirecTV receiver.)). The TiVo isn't capable of doing HD, so it will have to go. DirecTV offers a fairly new "DirecTV Plus HD DVR" available, but you must wait 2-3 weeks before they'll send you one as it's new and in high demand.

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I found out yesterday that my TV only does 1080i, not 1080p, and was somewhat disappointed. Eh, no big deal - I'll ditch it in five years and get a new 60" HDTV capable of 1080p. By then, it should cost only $1.5k or so. I'll also get a new DVD player (when either Blu-Ray or HD DVD wins the format war) and, naturally, a new receiver. By then I may even own a PS3.

My current receiver is pretty old, and I've done all I can to maximize the quality of my various inputs. It has no component input, so my Wii and DVD player hook into the TV. I get local channels via an antenna (but Erie has no real HD) and Pittsburgh locals via the DirecTV TiVo. Then I have a VCR plugged into one of the receiver's S-Video slots. So, watching true local channels, regular TV, playing the Wii, and watching DVDs are all on separate channels.

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TUAW seems to think so, saying today's China Times says the iPhone design has been "finalized and released to manufacturing." Supposedly, the iPhone will include a 2.0 MP camera and debute in late Q1 or early Q2 2007. So I ask:

{democracy:2}

Feel free to elaborate in the comments.

I was in the area, so I dropped in to my local GameStop to pick up my pre-ordered Wii games (picture in the extended entry). I haven't pre-ordered any first-party titles, so they were all available to me as third-party games have no "do not sell until" restriction. Now all I need is my Wii, which I'll be picking up at about 11am on Sunday.

While the friendly Gamestop employee Dave was retrieving my discs, I wandered over to the PS3 booth where someone was playing NBA '07. I haven't read the review, but IGN gave it a 7.8 - good, but not great.

Regardless, the graphics were simply jaw-dropping. I haven't even looked at getting a PS3 because I don't particularly care for the controller (never have), don't care at all for the price ($600 for a game machine and a losing movie format?), or the hassle in getting one (why can't they make enough?). Now I'm fairly certain that, when the price eventually drops, I may just have to pick one up.

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My order for the Wii component cables, after brief five-hour stint as "backordered," has shown "Preparing Order" since about 5pm ET yesterdy.

One peculiarity, though, is the sales tax I'm being charged. The product is $29.95, but as you can see, I'm being charged sales tax on the shipping charges as well (PA sales tax is 6%).

So far as I know, I've never been charged sales tax for shipping. Can it be taxed? Is it normally included in the shipping price by the shipper?