Well all I can say is that it came as a slow dawn as I sat and listened to a few of my favorite channels (they are MY channels after all).  Pandora is encoded in Dolby Pro Logic.  After having listened to music in stereo for my entire life, and only having had brief encounters with 5.1 channel music, this is an odd experience.  I have to say that I’m a little disappointed that the bulk of the mix is in the center channel, since my left and right speakers are built for music, and I am wildly distracted by rear channel effects.  In fact after 10 minutes of listening I have a mild headache, that I think is from trying to focus on the center past the surrounds.  I will likely get used to it, but I’m on the hunt for any settings that would allow me to listen in stereo.

That said, its been a long time coming, and I’m glad to have the music.  Now if Netflix would get their act together and roll 5.1 out to more than just the PS3, I would be a happy camper.

The jacket is made of Schoeller fabric, and given other backpacking garments I own that are made of the same stuff, I know its tough stuff.  hopefully I will never find out if it stands up to falling off a bike at 20mph and sliding across the pavement (likely it wouldn’t fare all that well, as nothing ever does), but overall I am guessing it will be pretty bombproof.   It has a retractable mudflap for riding in wet conditions, and elastic-ish thumb loops, which I didn’t even realize were there until I put it on.  Additionally it mimics a standard jersey with some nice gear pouches and a little side pocket that I have yet to discover a purpose for.  Overall I think it will perform outstanding.I’m wearing it on my ride today, and I can’t wait for a bit messier day where I get to wear it in the elements.  I will report back with some more info after a bit of wear. Update: Rode today in some wet nasty conditions.  Normally this would involve me being cold and having a wet strip going down my back right onto my butt.  Today was quite pleasant.  In fact, even in the light rain that fell, I was quite comfortable.  Given the number of times I stayed home last year due to weather like this, I think I’m going to get a lot more miles and rides in this year.  

So here I am stuck in roadmap limbo. With no smoke signals coming from Cupertino, I have 30 days to run the trial of Aperture, after that I have to have all of my projects converted, so that I can get my pictures out of Aperture libraries.  Then its on to Lightroom. Its a shame, because despite the risk of having a file format go obselete (see the above paragraph) I much prefer my files stored in databases rather than on the file system, and I really like the way Aperture feels.  But despite all of that my next chunk of change will go to Adobe.  At this point I know Adobe is behind their product, that they will continue to release updates, and whatnot, plus I have the comfort of knowing I’m on the industry standard platform.  I can’t say a single one of those things about Aperture.

If anyone has any experience migrating and how to get some of the data off the platform and into Lightroom (as if I would get any of my edits…) I would love to hear it.

Twonky is a DLNA reference implementation and it serves up media on Mac, Linux, and PC.  Its esentially a web server that keeps a database of all of your media and streams it on demand.  So far I’ve been able to use it to view pictures, watch youTube, and play MP3s from my MacBook Pro.  All of this is great, but the real challenge is video.  Its been a dream for a while to have a system for watching movies from a server on the TV without a vga cable strung across the room.  DLNA seems to deliver on this promose.  The biggest hurdle is getting over video formats.  Video_TS, ISO, MPEG-4, wmv, H.264, whats a technically savvy but video stupid guy to do?  Ideally you would rip your DVD to thefile system as an ISO or something and the server would serve up whatever format was necessary.  Thats close, very close actually, but not quite there.  And the not quite there is a royal pain in the ass.

I think this afternoon I will have all the kinks worked out and a m4v file will be streamed to my TV with sound played over my stereo.  I don’t have rear speakers wired up in the ceiling yet, so I won’t be able to verify 5.1 sound, but soon, very soon.  Keep your fingers crossed and I will report back soon.

I’m doing some initial investigation into DLNA because the TV supports it.  It should be interesting to see if I can stream DVDs direct to the TV.   I will report back when I know more.