Mitch Carroll's Page

As I mentioned in a previous posting, my parents invested in a new home theater system just last fall. And there was definitely a wow period. Not only did the old entertainment center’s replacement by a wall-mounted flat-panel HDTV and low credenza dramatically change the feel of the living room, but the full HD picture offered by the pairing of the Blu-ray player and 52” Sony LCD certainly gave movie night a super charge.
But once the initial stupefaction had run its course, it was extremely ed… Continue

It was a dark and snowy night. In January. In Montana. And we were racing cows.

No, this is not some romanticized tale of rural ranch life in the West.

It might, however, be an account of two generations coming together over a little technological levity.

It was a cold, snowy evening at the end of January of this year. And we were in Montana. But my aunt, her two grade-school-age daughters, and my wife and I were warmly sheltered inside, racing digital heifers on the Wii.

Previ… Continue

Recently released figures indicate that some 6.5 million U.S. households will not be prepared for a February 17, 2009 switch to digital television programming. Accordingly, the DTV Delay Act was passed last week by both houses of Congress, postponing the DTV switch until June 12 of this year. The president signed the act into law yesterday.

In all likelihood, there are multiple reasons why so many households might be unprepared for DTV reception, chief among them a lack of information, misinfor… Continue

It hasn’t even been a year since Blu-ray triumphed over HD-DVD as the new standard optical audio and video disc format, and already it seems as thought its fate is in question. Or is it?
Recently, I’ve been happening across tech opinion pieces with titles announcing “reasons Blu-ray will succeed”. The presupposition here is that there are also reasons why “Blu-ray will fail”, which need to be refuted to restore balance to the blogosphere. What’s curious about all this is the fact that I have not… Continue