Neal Grosskopf Dot Com A NG Designs Site

It's been difficult for me to find something to talk about that is more exciting than my previous blog post. While I don't think I'll ever be able to top that achievement I suppose it's finally time to talk about something else (for a change).

I recently got a pretty good deal on an old school original Xbox along with 25 games. Since then, I've been re-living the glory days of the old Xbox I use to own before it was stolen. Probably my favorite game from the Xbox was Doom 3, which I've been playing constantly for the past two weeks now. Another pretty sweet game is Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory which is a stealth-based third-person shooter. The game has pretty good graphics for an original Xbox game and I find it to be pretty fun.

Then, on my birthday, I woke up decided I felt like buying a new TV set. I've been using my crappy 25 inch TV for the past year or more since the old one was a casualty of the before time. I didn't really mind this since I seldom played any games on it and when I watched movies I usually wasn't paying much attention to them. Then, Best Buy had a 36 month no interest deal running which was exactly what I was waiting for before buying another TV. I did some quick research and decided to buy a LG 42LE5400 LED 42 inch TV.

A couple cool things about it is it's only 1.2 inches thick (as you can see in the picture, it's only as wide as a nickel and more narrow than my 24 inch flat screen computer monitor). Another awesome feature is it has the ability to hook up to the internet for select websites. One of these is Netflix. I had previously used Blockbuster's mail service which was ok but once I started using the Netflix integrated service I was really impressed. I can now select movies on my computer and they'll instantly show up on my TV and I can start watching them streaming. Apparently the TV was a good deal because my friend Tyler went out to Best Buy that same day and bought the exact model I bought.

The picture quality for my LED TV is really awesome, but my main problem is I don't own anything that outputs in 1080p (HD). Time to upgrade. I ended up buying some cheap HDMI cables from Amazon along with a cheap HD Antenna which works great for the price. I had looked around some local stores for HDMI cables but they are wicked expensive, usually around $5 a foot with the shortest cable being 6 feet long for $30. I also bought a floor model LG Blu Ray player for $100. I got it mostly just to upconvert my DVDs so they're not windowboxed anymore.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with my recent purchases.