Over the years, we’ve managed to cause quite a few DVD and CD players to stop working. Some of this has probably been due to the fact that we’ve only purchased cheap inexpensive equipment. Based on this assumption, we splurged last spring and bought a Bose 3-2-1 GS home theater system. We really liked the fact that it only had 2 speakers apart from the subwoofer, and the sound it produced was amazing. We were also able to save $100 on it by purchasing a refurbished unit from a Bose outlet. We were stoked.

Unfortunately, after only 6 months of use, the DVD player started to intermittently freeze. We went through the owners manual and followed the troubleshooting instructions, but availed not. So I called the outlet that we purchased the system from and they said that it was still under the 1-year warranty, and that they would swap it straight up for another unit. Best of all, I only had to bring in the receiver, not the entire system. The only drawback now was to make the 6 hour trek to the store. Fortunately, it happened to be on the way to Santa Barbara, where I had already planned on traveling to.

I ended up spending about 10 minutes in the store and walked out with a new receiver that was covered under a new warranty for another year. Even though it was a bummer that we had problems at all, Bose definitely gave us good service to fix the problem.

Through an email from Sitepoint, I recently discovered VectorMagic, which is a tool to convert bitmap images to vector graphics. (For those who are not nerds and/or graphics enthusiasts, you will not hurt my feelings if you stop reading right now.) Vector Magic is a vector conversion Flex application built by some geniuses at Stanford. Though this is not a new idea, the Stanford guys have really stepped up the quality of output, which happens to be leaps and bounds about Adobe Illustrator’s fairly new LiveTrace feature (arguably the best tool for vectorizing bitmaps…until now).

The samples prove the quality. And best of all, it’s a free online app! I can’t wait to actually use it.

After living in the mountains for over 4 years now, we’ve spotted our first bear…in our living room…wearing underwear….(the bear, not the living room).

We got it! The house we’ve been trying to buy is now ours…assuming everything goes well during escrow. We just have to make sure we can liquidate the appropriate investments and sign our names about a billion times.

We’re really excited about this house. It’s a 5 bedroom, 3 bath home in Clovis on a really nice sized lot. I’ll give more details later, but it’s been a very busy week and I’m zonked.

Nighty-night.

After some meetings last week at ShowitCon, DJ and Todd offered me a full-time job with Showit. So, after 4 years at Hume, we’ll be moving back to Fresno. We’re really excited, and particularly amazed to see how the Lord has orchestrated everything so far.

We’ll miss our Hume family quite a bit, but our hope is that we will be able to stay in close contact since we’ll be just an hour and a half away.

This past week, we put an offer on a house in Clovis, and we’re hoping and praying that it will go through today.

Stay tuned for the ongoing saga.