excellence

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving -- I certainly did (burp). I like turkey and every once in a while will have a turkey sandwich or something like that, but really it's this one time of the year that you really go all out and gorge yourself with plate after plate of the big bird. My father-in-law roasted a nice big turkey this year and there was plenty to go around, not to mention plenty to fill my refrigerator with afterwards.

Yesterday was Black Friday, the "first official day of the holiday shopping season" and as always the sales and doorbuster deals were the talk of the town... the news couldn't stop talking about it. I decided that I wasn't going to wait in line outside any stores this year, for a couple of reasons. The biggest one was that it was pretty dang cold outside at night, probably dropped below 50 degrees. And even on our way home from Thanksgiving dinner, we could see lines forming in front of places like Best Buy and Circuit City. I was thinking, if I was gonna try and get some good deals I wouldn't stay up all night waiting in line out front of one of these popular places. I'd just show up at a less popular place like Home Depot, where I could probably just show up maybe 15 minutes before opening and be like bam! when the doors opened I'd be among the first to get a really good deal on a riding tractor lawnmower, or some power tools. Maybe even score a free garden hose or something. I sure didn't see any news coverage from the local channels showing lines wrapped around the local Home Depot, so maybe that's the plan next year.

So instead I stayed home all day and didn't go out. Don't get me wrong, I don't boycott Black Friday. I just did all my shopping online. Well actually I just browsed online since I didn't actually buy anything. But I was pretty fervently combing the Best Buy and Amazon websites for deals though. Mostly trying to decide what Blu-Ray movies I should buy. I've been renting a lot of movies on Blockbuster and their selection of Blu-Ray movies is pretty good. So I'm setting a pretty high bar for movies that I would actually want to own. Quite simply, it has to be a movie or film that clearly demonstrates the awesomeness of the HD picture and audio. So far the only Blu-Ray films in my collection that really do that is the Planet Earth series from BBC, now available from Discovery Channel Store. This series is phenomenal, and I totally recommend it. But the visuals from PE far outshine the audio on this series, so I am in search of something that hits a home run on both counts.

I've found this site to be pretty helpful in evaluating what Blu-Rays are going to be contenders -- High Def Digest. Their reviews of Blu-Ray discs rates the movie itself, the video quality, and audio quality separately and you can sort the reviews based on these ratings. Not too many movies get the overall grade of five stars, but I guess it shouldn't be too surprising that one of them is Pixar's Ratatouille, which of course is completely digitally sourced. So I'll probably be adding that to my collection soon.