The brother is crashing at our place until he can move into his own, the parents have come and gone, and it now looks like a small village lives in our one-bedroom apartment. He loves our tv.
I always forget the extent of how cool our television setup really is until someone who doesn't live in the area, or frequently visit our apartment, stops over. It's all courtesy of Chris, obviously, but we've been running an HTPC (home theater PC) with Windows 7 since this spring (courtesy of a lovely Christmas gift from my parents, along with a little bit of tax refund help, heh). I truly would have had no idea how to even get started on a project like this, but Chris had previously built his desktop computer, and knows more than any mortal should about getting stuff like that off the ground.
We don't have cable and probably won't ever make that jump (it's so expensive and I'm so cheap!), but I have to say, this is definitely the solution. I've more than sated my super-mature craving for South Park, and we can stream Netflix through the app in Windows Media Center. Chris built a blu-ray player into the computer. We are obviously watching the two blu-ray discs we have repeatedly, haha. Just last week, Chris got a tv tuner for the computer so that we don't have to use eighty bajillion remotes to switch the input every time we want to watch actual network television - the tv now comes straight through the computer. Unfortunately, the guide has a bunch of foreign channels that are just too weak/far away for our dumb rabbit-ear antenna to receive, but it's the height of lazy awesomeness, if there are even degrees of that when it comes to watching tv.
When Chris explained the idea of an HTPC, it sounded parallel to cotton candy-pooping bunnies hopping giddily through a field of rainbows while singing the songs of sirens who don't want to lure you to your death, but instead want to gently toss gold coins in your direction. That wasn't too far off, actually. I approve of this nerd corner quite a bit.
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