Do you turn up your nose at the thought of eating anything less than USDA Prime?

Do you throw up in your mouth at the mere mention of USDA Select?

Worry no more, you steakhouse whore! There is a technique you can use to simulate all the flavor, texture, and marbling you’d get from an expensive USDA Prime cut of beef by using any cheapo piece of supermarket meat.

You basically cover the whole thing in salt up to an hour before you grill it, and rinse it off right before you throw it on the fire.

This could revolutionize the backyard grilling industry as we know it today.

I haven’t tried this yet, but I plan to. I love my grill and anything that gives me an excuse to use it is a-okay with me.

Sorry, but it’s true.

Bioshock had me on the edge of my seat for a few weeks and I couldn’t wait to get home and play it every day.

Halo 3 is kind of boring, doesn’t look all that great, and I’m just not into the story. I haven’t gotten very far in the single player campaign, but so far it’s pretty blah.

I did play multiplayer with about a half dozen buddies from work last night for a few hours and that was pretty fun, even though I’m not very good.

Bioshock = Buy. Halo 3 = Rent.

I decided to not even try getting Halo 3 at midnight. Instead I got a full night’s sleep! That was probably better for me in the long run. It occurred to me that if I bought the game at midnight I’d have to play it right after I got it…otherwise why wouldn’t I just wait to buy it the next day?

So I waltzed into a Wal-Mart near the office this morning on the way to work and picked up a copy. There were at least 50 copies behind the counter and no lines to wait in. Tonight I’ll get to see what all the hubbub’s about, Bub.

–

Today Amazon launched their MP3 download store. They’re selling DRM-free audio for less than what iTunes charges, and they’re not forcing you to suck it through an Apple-branded AAC straw. 256k VBR is the name of the game! I would have preferred 192 CBR for less money, but I guess beggars can’t be choosers.

You can buy individual songs for $0.99, but the real savings comes when you buy entire albums at a time. Coldplay’s X&Y is $7.99, or $4.68 less than what you’d pay for separate tracks.

–

Dish Network bought Sling Media. This is potentially great news.

Hybrid Dish/Slingbox receivers could be neat. But I’m thinking bigger.

Watching your TV and recorded shows over the Internet is a silly, nerdy thing to do. I don’t think Slingbox owners have girlfriends and I don’t see their product as something enough people would want to make a company like Sling Media profitable. Maybe it worked for them, I don’t know.

But Sling has experience in transporting video from one point to another, and that’s where I think they can really help out the satellite TV industry. Here’s my master plan.

Right now just about every home in America wired for cable or satellite TV has RG-6 or RG-59 running through its veins. I imagine a day where satellite providers change their model of putting full-featured decoder boxes on each television in the home. Instead, each TV would use a home’s existing coax fed from a central home server. This central home server would basically be a satellite decoder box, just like what’s sitting on top of most TVs now. The difference is that it would have four (or more!) tuners in it and it would connect directly to the dish with RG-6. That box would basically sit between the satellite dish and every other TV in the home.

All connected TVs would share the same recorded content and would use RF remote controls to control their feed from the home server. They’d also need to have ATSC tuners of course, because the server would modulate its output to match up with an unused off-air station. Turn to channel 003-01 on the bedroom TV and bingo – there’s all your stuff in SD and HD.

How great is this plan? Dish Network already does something like this – kind of – with their VIP 722, 622, and 222 receivers. Those boxes can all feed a signal to a second television using a home’s existing coax – no rewiring is required and you only have to pay for one receiver, not two. However as of right now the “TV2″ output on those is only able to output a modulated SD signal. That’s fine for most people now, but useless in a multi-HDTV home.

So! Someone at Sling Media/Dish Network, please do this. I’m giving you this idea free of charge. Just make it happen.

–

I guess that’s it.

So there’s this game coming out tomorrow… Halo 3. Have you heard of it?

I’ve never played Halo 1 or 2. I’ve never seen them in anything more than screenshots, and maybe a few brief clips on TV.

As a general rule, I don’t like first person shooters. They’re boring, they’re hard to control with a gamepad, and quite frankly I just suck at them.

However, MetaCritic has never steered me wrong before. It, combined with the demo, convinced me to get Bioshock (another fps!) and I really loved that game.

So I think I may get caught up in all this midnight madness and pick up Halo 3 tonight at one of Wal-Mart’s dedicated checkout lines, or at a GameSpot, EB Games, or Game Crazy if they’re sold out (not likely).

This will be tough, as I’m usually in bed by 10.

It seems like a crazy thing to do for someone who’s only got a passing interest in the game, but come this time next year I’ll have a baby! And who knows how much time I’ll have to play all my silly video games then.

Oh, and it’s a girl by the way.

I guess if you live in Michigan you might think that “Beaner’s Coffee” would be a very clever thing to name your new coffee business, not realizing that in most parts of the country that’d be considered offensive to hispanics/latinos.

Well someone clued them in because they’re going to soon become “Biggby Coffee.”

Hooboy.

RCP Tones makes ringtones for people who hate ringtones. They’re warm and simple, and they’re free.

Less than one week into its broadcast career, History HD is now off the air. A fire at the uplink center took it and a few other HD channels out of commission for the next few days. These will be sad, lonely days.

Cruising around the program guide last night I watched some of Godzilla vs. Megaguirus on MonstersHD, an all-monster-movie, all-the-time channel that I didn’t even know I had.

It turns out that Godzilla movies really aren’t that bad! Or at least this one wasn’t. It was refreshing to see a modern movie (2000) that didn’t rely on computers for all of its special effects. Miniature models, fishing wire, and small-scale pyro can still make great effects that are just as believable as Hollywood’s over-produced CG fakery.

HD really lets you get a good look at the strings holding Megaguirus in the air too.

Some neat stuff’s been announced at CEDIA this week.

DirecTV officially announced their HR21 Pro DVR. That’s great news…if you rack-mount all your a/v components. Still no word from DTV about the rumored return of Tivo to their DVRs, or of when their mega-rollout of HD channels might happen.

Dish Network revealed a trojan horse! The VIP211 receiver is their current entry level one-tuner non-DVR HD receiver. Welp, they just announced a coming-soon firmware upgrade that’ll turn it into a DVR! You’ll just need to add your own external USB hard drive to make it work. I wouldn’t be surprised if they rolled out a similar update for the VIP222 shortly after…turning it into a poor man’s VIP 722.

Series3 Tivo users are finally getting multi-room viewing and TivoToGo. Tivo has a great product, but they’re really slow with their software and hardware updates. They also seem to be obsessed with adding obscure features rather than improving their core service. It’s almost like they lost their focus somwhere along the way. Swivel Search? Kid-friendly now playing lists? Amazon movie downloads? Banner ads during fast-forwards? No more lifetime subscriptions? Ugh. The longer I go without without Tivo the less I miss it.

It’s a little sad that I recognize just about everyone in this video.

They forgot to include Ronald Jenkees though. HELLO YOUTUBES!

With a baby coming in the next few months, excess discretionary income will soon be a thing of the past. This means I’ve had to fast-track my mid-life-crisis spending plan.

I bought an HDTV. With my tech-savvy wife’s blessing. It has changed our lives for the better.

I did it all as cheaply as I possibly could. Why pay $100 at Best Buy for a 6ft HDMI cable when you can get it for less than $5 at Monoprice?

I ordered the TV online from Visual Apex who had the cheapest price on it at the time. I got a 50″ Panasonic plasma (TH-50PZ700U) for like 30% off the retail price.

I also paid guys to tear apart my walls to hide all the wires.

The TV now hangs above my fireplace, a set of 5.1 speakers hangs on the walls surrounding it, and there’s no wires to be seen anywhere. They patched the drywall and matched the texture but we haven’t repainted it yet, so I don’t have any photos of the end product for you. Yet.

For a while I felt like it was the most expensive mistake I had ever made. I was used to watching my old TV just a few feet above the ground, and this higher mount took some getting used to. Seeing my walls all torn up and then patched again was also really traumatizing and I kept asking myself if I had made the right decision.

It’s been about three weeks now and all those doubts are gone.

Watching TV in HD is like wearing glasses for the first time after thinking you really didn’t need to wear glasses. If you’ve not yet made the jump to HD, you have no idea how much you’ve been missing out on. It’s made me avoid watching regular standard definition TV altogether. I’m even getting rid of all of my DVDs because while they do look good, HD-DVDs just look so. much. better.

So yep, I picked up Planet Earth on HD-DVD and the HD-DVD add-on for the 360. The contrast between SD and HD is so striking it’s like night and day. There’s just no going back!

And video games? Holy cow. Bioshock at 1080i with 5.1 surround is really something special. And scary.

I decided to stick with Dish Network for programming. Their HD lineup is unstoppable, and their newer DVR receivers can power not one, but TWO televisions in your house, all without any extra wiring or any extra fees. My standalone Tivos with lifetime service have been my best pals for many years, but HD Tivo doesn’t play nice with anything other than digital cable, so they’re now keeping each other company in a closet. So sad.

The Dish PVR software isn’t too bad though, and while I miss Tivo I’m starting to realize that it maybe wasn’t the be-all and end-all of DVRs that I had somehow made it out to be in my head. Being able to record two shows at once and doing it in HD while watching a third HD program using the off-air tuner is pretty much the greatest thing ever.

I kind of wish I could have all of the standard definition channels removed from my service, but that’s unfortunately not an option. I really don’t watch them anymore, except for the History channel, and History HD launches tomorrow anyway!

Anyway that’s what I’ve been up to.