 I inherited a hard-working Weber Grill upon moving to Studio City in 2001, left there by the previous tenant. I had never used a grill before, so the Weber was a great teaching tool, and I have never felt the need for anything else.
Well, over the past seven years of kids running through the yard, gardeners with other things on their minds, and the belief that a man's grill should never be coddled, the Weber - and who knows how long it provided faithful service to its previous owners? - has lost its legs, its replacement legs, and its winning spirit.
Seven good years.
My Toshiba HD-DVD player, on the other hand, and for reasons not entirely its fault, lasted less than a month before it got shipped off to a virtual graveyard, namely a table in my office serving a 36", 105-lb. non-HD TV. I should have known what was in the air when, upon buying an HDTV around Christmas, I was given the HD-DVD player for free.
A week later, Warner Bros. announced it was supporting Blu-ray, and then the next month Toshiba threw in the towel. Ended this format war has.
I want to get a Blu-ray player, and I want it to be a Playstation 3. I have neither Blu-ray discs nor Playstation games, but in that the PS3 is backwards-compatible with standard DVDs (as was the departed HD-DVD player), I'm more likely to scale up.
 At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, the Blu-ray and HD-DVD booths faced each other from a distance of just a few yards, much like Father Merrin and the statue of Pezuzu. I remember the HD-DVD guys being very optimistic as they showed me how good "300" and "The Fast And the Furious 3: Tokyo Drift" looked.
I bought a new Weber for $50 at Home Depot and feel a little ashamed and unworthy of cooking something on a device so clean and stable. But I'm hoping someone will buy me a Playstation.
For now, I am returning to my good old Sony 5-disc DVD changer with one bad tray. I'd relegated it to my office when the new HD-DVD player came home, and I regretted it; why go from four working trays to a single (very slow) one if the only HD-DVD title I had was "The Bourne Identity"?
Plus, I've had that Sony for seven good years.
Labels: blu-ray, CES, formats, hd dvd, las vegas, mavervorl media, tech hysteria, tv
CES 2007
 This was the first year I attended the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show as press, and the experience was preferable to when I go anywhere else as press. The consumer electronics industry is dying, so there's a lot of money spent on people like me so we can keep that bubble looking fat and juicy with potential.
No sooner had I registered, in fact, that I got the World's Most Excellent Computer Bag. It was orange and shaped like a backpack, so visiting school groups up and down the Vegas strip would ask me what my MySpace page was.
One of the keynotes I attended was that of Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell. Alas, he was not as dynamic as I'd heard he was, or maybe I should remember that public speaking is not the strong suit of computer professionals so their opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
Dell's speech consisted mostly of techie platitudes, save for his company's new program of planting a tree in a protected forest for every computer a consummer buys, offsetting the computer's emissions.
The rest of the presentation featured Dell inviting various guests onstage for awkward scripted intervies in which the subject extolled the use of Dell products.
No mention was made of the "Dude, you got a Dell" kid's drug bust. No mention was made that at a convention of avid tech buyers, no oone could complete a cell phone call.
 The weirdest thing was when Mike Myers as Dr. Evil showed up. Dell and Myers performed a skit in which Myers needed to back up his computer. It might have been funny half a decade ago when that character meant something. As it was, I was happy that Myers would be cashing a huge check for his appearance.
Dell probably could have made the stage look much busier while saving on his talent fees and maintaining the relevance level by getting Freddie, Jason, and the other Michael Myers instead.
The CES was spread over two locations, the Sands Convention Center and the Las Vegas Convention Center. I spent more time at the Sands , checking oout the smaller foreign distribution booths. That is where the signage really paid off for me.
 I also approved of the coordinated suits of some of the exhibitors.
 "Earth Wind And Fire are probably wondering where their outfits are," I cautioned these gentlemen.
 This bank of laundry and refrigeration equipment was shiny and impressive but provided no information about how to clean and prepare a corpse.
 This man shoots like I type. I would repopulate the earth faster than this guy, I think, if it came down to it post-apocalypse.
 CES provided its press rooms with box lunches and wireless Internet access as well as couches on which to watch Steve Jobs' iPhone announcement. Apple doesn't come to CES. Instead, Mac World was held concurrently in San Francisco and the ten or so people who had Mac laptops at CES gathered around CNN to watch the announcement.
Someone left his or her PowerBook power adapter on the couch next to me. I looked around for a couple of days for its owner to no avail. So now I have an extra, which is very useful.
My wife says it's stealing.Labels: CES, coverage, faulty technology, places, vegas
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