A/V Veteran

Sharp dressed up its booth with some of the tallest Japanese ladies I've ever seen.

Sharp is working on this Japanese-to-English and English-to-Japanese translation device. It translates both written and spoken language, though is still fairly rudimentary in its ability to handle complex communication. We're not quite up to Star Trek's universal translator yet, but you can see it coming.

As the old saying goes, what if they started a war and nobody came? That seems to be the case with the simmering format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD. To the consumer who bothers to keep up on developments, it must look like a phony war.

One of the key highlights of the CES trade show held every year in early January is a preview of the coming year's new TVs. These models don’t typically become available for sale until the spring, meaning most of the TVs you see “on sale” in the three or four months following CES are actually last year's models that need to be cleared out to make room for the new ones. And some of that old stock remains available into the early summer — as in now.

While many of you can’t recall when the VCR shook up the TV landscape, I remember the transition to color television. It was an exciting time, but those new sets were very expensive relative to the average middle class income. They were also seldom larger than 21-inches—about the size of many of today’s computer monitors.

Understandably, many consumers waited years for color television to come down in price. I still remember relatives and family friends claiming that they were waiting for them to be perfected. If by “perfected” they meant that they wanted to see the technology stabilize, they’re waiting!

Technology is never stable. While the Ian Malcolm character in Jurassic Park may have said, “Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should,” (truly an odd statement coming from a scientist—oh wait, it came from a screenwriter) there’s always something new and enticing just over the next hill.

The pieces are rapidly falling onto place for Home Entertainment 2006, to be held from June 2 to June 4 at the Sheraton Gateway hotel in Los Angeles. It's the first time that this annual event has been held in the City of Angels since 1998—far too long a wait for those living here. If you're coming from out of town and plan to fly in, the hotel is located just a short shuttle ride from the airport. Even short enough to walk, if you aren't weighed down with baggage.

I recently spent a weekend cleaning up my home office, the retreat where I write much of my deathless prose. I hadn't rummaged through some of my files for several years, but had to make room for the piles of new stuff that have managed to build up to the point where I couldn't find things. This sorting process invariably takes longer than you plan, as you find things that require instant action (as they did two years ago) and others that demand to be re-read and enjoyed again.