When a new season of TV starts up it’s always hard to tell which shows will last for another season and which ones will be taken off the air before the network even shows all the episodes that they paid for (see Firefly).

We didn’t watch Heroes when it started, but it’s got this great buzz and all my friends watch it so we just started. We Netflixed the first season on HD-DVD and downloaded the second season, so now we’re all caught up on everything.

And hey, you know what? Heroes is really good.

The coolest news to come out of CES this year so far could be Gefen’s plans to introduce a way to run HDMI over coax.

The commenters over at Gizmodo all seem to see this as a way of replacing HDMI to save a few bucks on cables, but they’re not looking at the big picture!

Right now if you want to watch HD from cable or satellite you need to put a converter/decoder box on each TV. Sure, you can mount a slick flat panel TV high up on your bedroom wall, but what about that stupid ugly box?

This development could potentially enable you to throw all of those unwieldy, unsightly boxes in an dark, unused corner of your home – the garage, maybe! – while using your home’s existing coax to feed HD signals to all of your TVs.

All of this depends, of course, on Gefen’s solution being a lightweight, inline balun-like product on the TV side of things. If it’s just going to be another box then there’s really not much point to it for a residential application, is there?

New Years Eve at a good friends’ house turned into a Rock Band party!

That’s yours truly on vocals, Jason on Bass, motherfreakin’ Chris Slade on drums, and Harvey on guitar.

I don’t know what song we were playing in this photo, but I remember not knowing the words to it and singing the hell out of it anyway.

When analog television broadcasts are killed off in 2009, you’ll need a TV with a digital tuner to continue receiving free TV. (If you subscribe to satellite, cable, FiOS TV, U-verse, or any other TV subscription service, this won’t affect you at all.)

If you’re a cheapskate using rabbit ears to watch TV now, you’ll need to get yourself a digital tuner. Luckily the government is making it easy and you can now request up to two $40 vouchers per household to apply toward the cost of an OTA digital tuner. Those vouchers get mailed out in the middle of February and will expire 90 days after you receive them.

On the surface, this seems like a great idea. Until you read the fine print.

The vouchers can’t be used to purchase any set top box with HD outputs. They can only be redeemed on thirteen pre-approved STBs, all of which are strictly SD. Wonderful.

I subscribe to satellite but requested vouchers anyway. My taxes already paid for them, so I might as well take what’s mine! I pay $5 a month now for a third SD TV that I barely watch. I can switch that one to OTA and save myself $60 a year!

If you’ve been wondering what kind of reception you can expect with an antenna, plug your address into AntennaWeb and it’ll recommend the best style of antenna for you based on your geography and the type of broadcasters near you.

And if you DO use rabbit ears now, don’t let the lack of HD dissuade you from getting a voucher. The all-or-nothing nature of digital TV means that you either get a crystal-clear signal or none at all. I’ve got a small indoor antenna at home to supplement my satellite service and it really is marvelous. It’s “The Future” as they say.