My First Blog Entry
Damn Heineken marketing, I go on one tour of their factory and I will be paying for those three free beers for the rest of my time in Europe.
This is a picture of what the set up looks like on the wall.
So it is Matt and Jill's Zurich Adventures, so I thought I'd try my hand at blogging. It seems to be the big thing these days. Hard to imagine my first blog would be about sports and technology...
This weekend is the start of the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. A time when I try to take off work and watch as much basketball as possible. With being overseas the games don't start until 5 pm. Thursday night we watched a few games, but thought I would save up for Friday night.
After work on Friday, Jill and I tried several bars around town to find what is commonplace this time of year in the US...bar food, basketball on big screens, and beers. We tried the most American bars we know. These are actually more English pubs then American bars so most people were broadcasting cricket instead of the tournament. (I'm not even quite sure what cricket is.)
As most of you know, we watch television using our computer mostly through Slingbox. We usually don't mind the size of the small computer screen, but for March Madness, it just was not going to be adequate.
At about 7:40 pm after we had been unsuccessful at finding a big screen and foresaw a weekend of basketball on my computer, we gave up and went out shopping for a projector. Since this is Switzerland and everything closes early, we were denied entrance to the two electronics stores downtown before ending up in the train station where stores typically have longer hours. After checking a few stores at the train station, we finally found a store with one projector left in stock. (It was their display model, not sure what to think about that, how many people buy a projector at a train station?)
About a year ago while preparing for our move to Switzerland, I thought about buying a projector to use in conjunction with our Slingbox and laptop instead of buying a television. I actually had already purchased a presentation remote in the US (basically a handheld mouse with few extra buttons) in anticipation of putting this set up together. When we got here we decided that our computer screen might get too pixiliated or fuzzy, and what we had was ok for what we were doing. But once we decided to buy the projector, we asked Jill's parents to upgrade their internet connection to help the clarity of the Slingbox broadcast and we have what you see above.
If we can't find a bar in Switzerland, we have to try to bring the bar to us. Not sure if we need picture this large after March Madness, but at least we can stop looking for artwork to put on that bare wall. The projector is actually not nearly as expensive as any "real" tv would have been. Plus this way I can log on to ncaasports.com (a free site broadcasting all the games) and be able to watch split screen games, one over the Slingbox and one over the internet. With the remote, I can switch volume between the two, select any of the games playing on ncaasports.com and check how I am doing in my brackets on the web. All in all, I think we have a better March Madness set up than we had in the US. Too bad my picks in for the pools are not as easy to improve.
At about 7:40 pm after we had been unsuccessful at finding a big screen and foresaw a weekend of basketball on my computer, we gave up and went out shopping for a projector. Since this is Switzerland and everything closes early, we were denied entrance to the two electronics stores downtown before ending up in the train station where stores typically have longer hours. After checking a few stores at the train station, we finally found a store with one projector left in stock. (It was their display model, not sure what to think about that, how many people buy a projector at a train station?)
About a year ago while preparing for our move to Switzerland, I thought about buying a projector to use in conjunction with our Slingbox and laptop instead of buying a television. I actually had already purchased a presentation remote in the US (basically a handheld mouse with few extra buttons) in anticipation of putting this set up together. When we got here we decided that our computer screen might get too pixiliated or fuzzy, and what we had was ok for what we were doing. But once we decided to buy the projector, we asked Jill's parents to upgrade their internet connection to help the clarity of the Slingbox broadcast and we have what you see above.
If we can't find a bar in Switzerland, we have to try to bring the bar to us. Not sure if we need picture this large after March Madness, but at least we can stop looking for artwork to put on that bare wall. The projector is actually not nearly as expensive as any "real" tv would have been. Plus this way I can log on to ncaasports.com (a free site broadcasting all the games) and be able to watch split screen games, one over the Slingbox and one over the internet. With the remote, I can switch volume between the two, select any of the games playing on ncaasports.com and check how I am doing in my brackets on the web. All in all, I think we have a better March Madness set up than we had in the US. Too bad my picks in for the pools are not as easy to improve.
posted by Matt Nachtman at 8:30 PM
1 Comments:
Hey - I thought anyone who grew up on a farm in Iowa knows what crickets are! Also, I don't believe you had trouble finding the bars in Switzerland - you are just too American to enjoy a good game of cricket over your glass of beer. From what I could see, the big advantage to your new system is that you can celebrate all night and not have to worry about where you will wake up in the morning. The picture looks awesome!
Jim
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