Bryan C. Fleming

Friday night was fun in Detroit and I’ll post some pics from it soon. We used Sherry’s Treo 650 to take the pictures so they’re OK, but not great. What do you expect? It’s a cell-phone!

Now, I want to post about something we’re all hearing about: HD TV. I never really sat down and watched anything (except in Best Buy) on one of these sets, but little did I know the Super Bowl would be my first HD experience.

My buddy Marzen invited Sherry and I over to his Super Bowl party where he had a Panasonic 42” plasma HD TV. I guess you just had to be there. I don’t really know exactly how to describe the picture, but it was just very very clear. You could see things during the game like the texture of the grass. You could see if a player didn’t shave or even missed a spot.

I wasn’t really sold on High definition, and although it’s certainly a nicer picture I don’t think I’m going to run out and buy one. Apparently they’re not the easiest things in the world to hook up as a few friends have told me.

Comcast is quick to jump into the game and charge you more money for the HD signal. Now, a quick piece of advice: You can use a standard antenna and get plain-old fashioned HD TV signals that reportedly have better quality than what Comcast wants to sell you. Of course you’ll only get the standard 2,4,7 channels.

Also, HD TV’s are crashing in price. Just walk into Costco and you see the prices falling.
My plan is to get a Laptop LCD projector and build a home theater. I’m sure I’ll always have friends with these HD sets where I can go catch the game.

Well, Living in Detroit has gotten really fun this weekend. Everyone’s hoping we can make a good impression on the world for the Super Bowl. Rumor has it that they’ve done a ton work downtown to clean things up for the big event.

For those of you who don’t live here, downtown Detroit normally looks like a scene from World War III. There’s a lot of abandoned buildings and it’s generally a very dark place. We’ll it sounds like they’ve band-aided that for this weekend.

Sherry and I are heading down tonight to check out the festivities. It will be really nice to see the city with life pumped into it. This is a first for all of us here. We’re just enjoying our day in the sun.

Now, the celebrity parties are out of control everywhere. You can forget going to a nightclub or bar. Most have been rented out for Private parties or very expensive public ones (to the tune of $1,000 a person). In any case, we’re not going down for the parties, we’re going to see what this city *could* be. They are having a big winter-blast street fair this weekend and who knows what big names will be playing there. Tomorrow is really the big night: Kid Rock Concert, Eminem’s Shady bowl, and more. We might go down there tomorrow too.

If I see anything cool, I’ll snap a pic with Sherry’s Treo 650 and post them here.

I live in Detroit, so when they announce that they have to cut a bunch of jobs it just puts the whole town down in the dumps.

So I’m reading fortune magazine (this month’s issue), and they’re talking about E85. E85 is a Ethonol fuel that’s only 15% gas and the rest comes from corn, grass, etc. It has a lot of promise of being a future fuel source.

Now, here’s the funny part. Ford & GM made a ‘deal’ with the government to get a little break on gas mileage laws. In return for the break they would make their cars run either fuel source– E85 OR gas. So in fact, there are millions of Ford/GM cars and trucks on the road right now that can already run on E85.

You know, I just find it funny that when gas went $3.25 a gallon, GM/Ford didn’t pull that trump card. I think people would have been screaming for E85 and it would have shown just how innovative these guys are.

But they didn’t say that. Most of the public doesn’t know– and keeps their perception of poorly made American Cars. Get with it guys…