September, 2007:

Sit down for this one.

No, trust me. Sit down.

I still have a 27″ TV.

There! I said it! Are you happy now?!?

But it’s time for change. I’m in the market for a new television for my living room. I have a guess regarding what I need/want, and I hope those of you who know more about this stuff than I do will help correctly me if I’m wrong.

My Criteria:

• I’m thinking somewhere between 42″ and 50″ should be enough.
• Because of the odd angle we intend to place our couches in because of the shape of it and the fact that I don’t like making the TV a huge overbearing statement in the living room by pointing all my furniture directly at it, it needs to be visible from at least 45 degrees to either side.
• It needs to be visible in broad daylight with all of the curtains open. Often, the television is only a secondary activity for us and our primary activity requires more like than typical TV watching does. It needs to perform fairly well in this situation.
• I don’t actually need a tuner though I imagine it will come with one since most do.
• HDMI, S-Video, Component, DVI, blah, blah, blah. I don’t know what most of that means do I know that I’d want to connect it in a way that I can get the best quality I can with the equipment I have. I have an Echostar two tuner DVR from Dish Network, an XBox, and a Nintendo Wii. If it’s really big, it’d be fun to be able to show random photographs in high resolution on it as well.
• Lighter, of course, is better. But, it doesn’t have to be incredibly light if I can get higher quality and a lower price by tacking on a little weight or bulk.
• Money is always an object when your wife is frugal like mine. Cheaper is, of course, better.
• I probably don’t need 1080p, but it sure wouldn’t kill me to have it. However, I most of the images I view will not be at that high of a resolution so it needs to look good even with less than optimal sources.

I’d also like a very small, very flat TV for the kitchen, and two medium sizes TVs for the office and bedroom. Quality is much less important on these, however, the lighter and flatter the better. I’m thinking 19-26″ for the kitchen and 26-32″ for the bedroom and office.

What do you think of the Samsung 50″ DLP HLT5075S? I require pretty acute vision. Will the DLP colorwheel bother me?

Please offer any product recommendations you have as well as any modifications to my criteria that you think I should make. Thanks!

My new job requires me to be away from my desk quite a bit which, in turn, requires me to use my mobile phone a lot more than I did previously. If my indicators are correct, this will be even more true in the future. So, I’ve been approved for a company mobile phone. This is good and bad.

It’s good because I’ll no longer have to carry the expense burden of overage minutes and, because carrying two phones is silly, will reap some personal gain by using my work phone for both purposes.

It’s bad, however, because my current personal usage pattern includes a lot of PDA usage, data access, and SMS/MMS messaging than it does talk time and because those are personal needs and not business needs, it is highly unlikely that I would be approved for a Blackberry which is the only PDA our corporate plan offers.

So, I’m stuck with four options.

1. Carry two phones. Use one for work and one for personal needs. Reduce my current personal monthly plan to the lowest possible rate. Use the work phone for all calls and the personal phone for all PDA, SMS, MMS, and Email functionality.
2. Carry just the work phone and deal with not having this level of connectivity and convenience that I’m used to.
3. Carry just a personal phone and deal with a complex billing analysis every month to show how many minutes were used for business vs. personal use in order to justify an expense report for $10-$50 every month.
4. Just suck it up and eat the personal bill.

Which option would you choose and why? Have I left off any options? Discuss!