And Squish, Then Stretch, And Squish, And Stretch!

Most of today was spent just randomly messing around with some of the features of the new computer.
Specifically, the Media Center features, most of which are pretty cool.
I did run into one issue, though.
Media Center is intended to be an easy to use, attractive front-end for Windows that provides convenience features for listening to music, looking at pictures, and watching TV, DVDs, and videos.
For the DVD part, it seems to use whatever your default DVD application is, allowing you to access it through the Media Center front-end and wrapping it up in a Media Center-style package.
I have a widescreen monitor, so when I watch widescreen DVDs I don’t have the whole issue of letter-boxing (at least not to the same extent I would with a normal monitor), and yet, when MCE was playing the widescreen “Elektra” DVD, it resized it to fit a non-widescreen monitor, with all of the resultant distortion.
I found this baffling, as if I went outside MCE and just watched the movie in the normal DVD application, it played it widescreen.
I had to go into MCE and tweak a setting to get it to go widescreen, but it was still somewhat distorted, as MCE was simply convinced that the DVD was in 4:3 format.
For the benefit of those who don’t know, 4:3 refers to the aspect ratio of most TVs.  That’s the ratio of horizontal to vertical (if the screen is 4’ wide, it’s 3” high).  Most movie screens have an aspect ratio of 16:9, which is why movies have to be resized to fit TV screens.  This can be done by either cutting off some of the background on the sides, squishing it in, which causes things to look really tall and thin, or adding those black bars at the top and the bottom.
Of course, if you have a screen with an aspect ratio of 16:9 (my monitor’s is 16:10), you can view the whole thing without losing any of the picture, having things squished, or letter boxing.
In any case, MCE was convinced that this 16:9 DVD was formatted as 4:3, which led to the squishing.  To correct this, I had to change a setting which made MCE stretch it out to 16:9.  However, this still led to some distortion, as rather than simply playing the movie in 16:9 format, it first condensed it to 4:3, then used its “intelligent stretching” to convert it to 16:9.
I’m not sure why it did that, as it seems kind of silly.  “Intelligent” stretching would have been to recognize that it didn’t need to be stretched in the first place.
Beyond that, I have one other minor complaint about the new system.
It’s designed to be quiet, as it has a very “open” design, which allows air to flow through it pretty easily, eliminating the need for noisy fans to keep it cool.  However, the fact that it is so open makes it easier to hear the hard drive grinding away whenever it’s active.
Still, it’s not a big deal.  I just find it kind of funny that a feature designed to keep the noise level down in one regard actually increases the noise level in another.
I’ve been pretty lazy in the cooking department this week, and, as a result, having been eating a little less healthy than usual.
Sunday night, for the first time in who knows how long, I actually ordered a pizza.  Leftovers took care of lunch and dinner on Monday.
Yesterday I had lunch at McDonald’s, and opted for dinner from the Chinese place across the street.
Leftovers in that case actually led to a sort of flip-flop of meals today, as I had cold Lo-Mein for breakfast which left me, having failed to do any real grocery shopping this week, with little in the way of options for dinner outside of bacon and eggs.
So I had dinner for breakfast and breakfast for dinner.
For lunch I had a smoothie from the place across the street.  Minus the whey protein, the particular smoothie I had is pretty much exactly like the protein shake I normally make for breakfast.  I noticed, after I’d ordered, that they actually make one with whey protein.  I may have to try that somewhere along the line, as their version is much better than mine.
It not only tastes better, it has a much better consistency.  I think that’s due mostly to the fact that they have expensive devices designed specifically for making smoothies, whereas I have a cheap blender.  I think that it’s also because they use frozen yogurt, though.
I picked up the smoothie when I was taking advantage of the fact that, for a change, it wasn’t raining by going for a walk.
And that was pretty much my day.  Nothing too exciting, though, honestly, I don’t think I’d really know what to do with excitement, nor do I really think I actually want any.
While listening to Nick Cave today, I may have come up with a title for my National Novel Writing Month contribution, which I will be starting on – sadly, again largely sans plot, though I do at least have a definite idea of what I want to accomplish – next week.
I don’t think I’m going to blog it as I write it the way I did last year.  I still haven’t decided yet, but I while there is an appeal – and a source of motivation – to blogging it as I write it, I’d kind of like to have something a little more polished to make available to anyone of a mind to read it.
While I am leaning towards posting it after it’s finished, I’m not totally averse to doing it the other way.  Anyone out there have a preference?
In any case, I won’t be too likely to make regular Threshold posts while I’m working on my novel, so that’s something to keep in mind.
In the meantime, I think this is enough of an entry for now.