Happy fourth of July! Today is a day to celebrate by eating lots of grilled hamburgers and what not. Unless you are still moving into a new place, in which case today is the day to spend 3 hours searching for an HDMI cable that you swear you’ve been hanging on to for the last 2 1/2 years and to never find it and to feel like murdering someone because now you have to wait to set up the glorious 7 channel surround sound that you’ve been craving ever since you bought that badass Onkyo receiver 2 years ago.

Quick geek rant: why have they not developed a way for televisions and receivers to communicate nicely with one another? I should be able to turn my television on and choose my surround sound options directly from the TV. Instead, if I want to watch something in surround sound, I have to turn on the television, mute the television, flip into and out of the TV menu so the “mute” icon is not displayed throughout the film, then turn on the receiver and put it on the appropriate source. Which is maybe not that difficult if you’re watching a DVD. But if you’re watching satellite TV with a DVR attached, should you choose satellite/cable as a source or VCR/DVR?

In addition, in the age of a million different entertainment devices, why do they insist on hard-labeling the components? Especially when the display on the receiver is electronic? There should just be a stack of inputs on the back of the receiver labeled “input 1″ through “input 8,” and then I should be allowed to name the inputs myself. For example, I have an Airport Express hooked up to my stereo which enables me to play my iPod or iTunes through the wireless network. But there is no input labeled “Airport Express” or “iPod,” so I have to hook the Airport Express up to the “tape” input. As a result, the only person in the entire world who knows how to play a song from a computer over our speakers is me, even though it is a function that should technically be available to anyone on our wireless network.

Okay, I know this is seriously confusing people and putting them to sleep, but I need to vent, so one more. HDMI is this magical new kind of plug that works as both input and output. So you can plug a DVD player with an HDMI port into a television and voila! Sound and video through one magic cord. The problem is that only devices manufactured in the last 3 years have HDMI ports. So every new receiver needs to have 3 different input options to accomodate every conceivable configuration. So I can feasibly connect my DVD player using four different kinds of cables: an HDMI cable, a composite video cable, an S-video cable, and some other option that I don’t know the name of. The composite video cable is composed of three different plugs. And then there are 3 different audio options, one of which takes 2 different plugs. So for every video device that connects to the receiver, there are 10 inputs. This is a waste of space, not to mention an utterly confusing mess.

In addition, here’s what’s going on right now on my TV: I have 2 devices plugged into the receiver via HDMI: my DVD player and the satellite TV. And then I have another HDMI cord that attaches the receiver to the TV. So if you want to watch television, even if you don’t want to listen in surround sound, you have to turn on the receiver. And if you would rather watch a DVD, you have to switch to the DVD player through the receiver, not through the television, as one might intuitively assume.

It’s not a huge deal for me, because I hooked all the devices up and I know what’s going on. But this is happening in homes all over America, where you can’t just turn on a TV and watch TV. And every time anyone comes over and wants to watch something, they need a 10 minute tutorial on how to operate all the different devices.

It needs to be easier, is all I’m saying.

Breakfast
scrambled eggs w/ avocado and tortillas

Lunch
1 slice pepperoni & onion pizza
1 In & Out cheeseburger
a few fries

Afternoon snack
1 orange

Dinner
1 carnitas taco
1/4 cheese enchilada
some rice, some beans
1 margarita

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