Window shopping

Couple of weeks ago we bought a DVR player, to replace our old VCR that doesn't work in this country. It's a Sony RDR-HX900, and it's got a 160 GB hard drive and burns variety of different DVD medias. I've been waiting to write about it after I had some proper experience, and after two weeks or so I have to say I'm very satisfied. The user interface is beautiful and very intuitive - there is a lot of functionality, but the basic functionality of recording programs and watching them is very simple. The only gripe I have is about the TV Guide - which is the basis of the simplicity - you just scroll the guide and when you see a program you want to record, you press one button and everything is taken care of. The guide took a long while to upload initially, and for the first week or so it seemed to only upload the new details maybe twice making the whole feature pretty much useless when every single channel showed "no listings". It seems to be pretty good now though, and hopefully it will stay that way - only I'm still missing couple of channels from the line-up that just haven't showed up. I guess it couldn't be perfect.

One of the nice things about having a recorder like this is that I actually spend less time in front of the TV, believe it or not. I don't have to watch out for the program I want to see and wait for it to start, I can program it, go and do something else and watch it when it's convenient for me - and skip the ads that take about quarter of the time anyway. So program Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Star Trek: Voyager, and just go and do your thing.

So today I took a long walk - walked to Robson to Chocolate Mousse, the fantastic kitchenware shop on Cardero and Robson, to buy a cheesecake cake pan. The baking fly has really bitten me, and I'm just wanting to try out some new recepies - Laura and Clay should be coming on Saturday to play, so what a perfect opportunity to bake a (cheese)cake.

My real aim was to go to Mac Station on Homer - as we're considering buying a Mac, imagine that - but on the way I popped into quite a few shops on the way. I tried on about five pairs of shoes, but didn't find a perfect ten so left it, and I was trying to look for a new denim jacket to go with my new fashionable jeans I got last week, but no luck on that front either. I took lunch to go from a hot dog stand in front to Sears and had a conversation with the guy selling them - "Oh, you're from Finland - I really like Finnish hockey players, Temu Selan is great" [my phonetic spelling] and "Hot dogs are a North America thing, aren't they!". I like hot dogs - fried onions, pickels, hot sauce and peppers... mmm.

At Mac Station there was a young guy that despite of his age was quite helpful - he wanted to sell me the smallest (and cheapest) iBook which is what we need, no matter how much more I lust after a Powerbook. Now we just have to figure out if we really really need it or if it would be just a nice-to-have - I've been wanting one for years now.