Well, the holidays are over. Oops; I mean "the exclusively Christian celebration" for those who are convinced there's a "War on Christmas" going on. So, here's a recap.

We ended up reading the Christmas story. Nobody liked it. I didn't care.

My wife got me a sweet Christmas present: an Audiovox STS1199 5-disc DVD changer home theatre surround sound system. At least, we thought it was a sweet present. Until I plugged it in. The thing generated this horrible electrical humming sound, and when I tried to run anything through the A/V input I only got sound through the front center speaker. When I say a horrible humming sound, I mean hideously horrible. It was loud enough that when we tried to put in a CD to play some music softly in the background, we literally couldn't hear the music for the hum. "Crap," I thought to myself. "I got a defective one." So I called the Target store where the missus got the thing every day until they told me they had one in stock, and I took it back to swap for a replacement. Plugged the replacement in and got the exact same problem. So, I decided to see if I could find a solution on the internet. Didn't find a solution, but I did find the product page for it at Target.com where there were (I kid you not) 14 reviews of this model, all of which said the exact same thing: horrible humming noise, no sound from A/V input except from the front center speaker, and no way to fix it. In short, the Audiovox DVD changers are absolutely worthless and should be avoided at all costs.

So, I decided to return the thing and get something else. I've been really, really wanting a DVD recorder for quite a while. For one, I have enough VHS tapes to fill two closets, and DVDs are much smaller and easier to store. For another, the VCR built into the TV we have in our bedroom is slowly but surely dying. And, of course, there's the whole VCR-is-outdated-technology thing; my understanding is that the tapes aren't even going to be sold much longer. As it happens, they had a DVD recorder at Target for a decent price: the Trutech TT1620 DVD recorder for around $100. I picked it up and trotted home with it.

Let me say this: this recorder is not perfect, but it's definitely not bad. I'm actually pretty impressed by what I got for the price. In addition to DVDs, the thing plays CDs, MP3s, MPEG video, and (most) Windows media files. For the most part, it seems to work really well.

But there are some glitches. According to the documentation, you can record at six different quality levels, with the higher quality taking more disk space. In reality, it only has four functional quality levels; the bottom two are too horrible to even consider using. In fact, they don't even work reliably: I tape a Monty Python special using the "SLP" setting, which allows 6 hours of video to be recorded on a single DVD and which the documentation says is the same quality as videotape. I don't know what videotape they're using, but I have videos I recorded on ow quality videotape in 1985 that look better than this did. Not only that, but halfway through the show, the video inexplicably starts running in fast forward while the audio stays at the normal speed. This makes anything past this point unwatchable. This problem happened consistently with every show I taped at that quality level. I never even tried the lowest quality setting. The "EP" setting (which allows for four hours, and which the documentation claims is "better than videotape") is about the same quality as low-quality videotape but is watchable and seems to work. The three highest quality settings work more or less flawlessly.

Not all DVDs from the thing want to work in all DVD players. I can't get any of them to play back reliably on my Orbitron surround sound system, but that may be because it's an Orbitron surround sound system, which is a cheap system that is working less reliably each day. Video recorded in the three highest quality modes seems to work on most, though.

The programmable recording schedule works pretty much like a VCR. And that's disappointing. The number of programmable slots is limited to something like 8. Why? This has been a major pet peeve of mine on all of my VCRs and now on this. Why should I be limited to scheduling 8 recordings? That's just silliness. And you can only program things 30 days in advance. One more thing: there's apparently a bug in the software. On December 31, I programmed the thing to record Battlestar Galactica on Friday, January 6. No big, right? Except that the stupid thing assumed that since I was in 2005 when I was programming the VCR, I meant January 6, 2005 (which was exactly 359 days in the past), and there was no way to adjust the year. Annoying. The programming also doesn't allow you to set a title for the recording; it automatically assigns the date/time of the recording as the title on the DVD menu. It would be nice to allow users to include the title in the schedule.

But, overall, I have to say I like the thing. The quality is much better than video tape (if you stick to the top three quality levels), it automatically inserts chapters, it has a commercial skip feature, and the DVDs are portable from one place to another. And the DVD-RWs are actually cheaper, more reliable, and easier to store than VHS tapes.

So that was Christmas. On New Year's Eve, I played in an 18-hour LAN party at a local internet café. Yeah, I'm a geek. So what?

And then today, it was back to work: finishing up web sites for one client, getting ready to start some more for another (a huge project that will probably provide enough income for me to live off of for a good six months), meeting potential legal clients, and so on.

Ah, the holidays. And only 358 days to go until they're back!