So a coworker stopped by last night and wanted to play my pinball and see the theater. He has his own theater/bar/gameroom in his basement. He mainly wanted to try out the bass shakers.

We watched clips from Act of Valor (boat extraction scene), and the Matrix (basically the assault on the building to get Morphius until the end). He and his 17 year old son were impressed with everything and now are talking about getting some shakers themselves. I told them that I like them to be subtle, but knowing him like I do, if he gets them, he will have them "rumbling" even when someone is whispering on screen. Oh well, to each their own.

I also, FINALLY, found the charging cord for my Harmony One remote the other day, so it was time to charge it up and reprogram it last night. Works like a champ. It is running the projector, blu-ray player, hd-dvd player, main receiver, bass shaker reciever, Dish DVR, and Lutron lights.

There are 2 things that I need to tweak yet. One is the "projector off" control. My projector wants you to hit the off button twice, so I need to program that in or see if it can be disabled in the projector settings to accept a single "off" signal. The other is one that I hit in the past and was able to fix easily. That is that the Dish DVR device (or the "watch TV" activity) do not have a "DVR" button, so I can't get to any recorded shows/timers. Easy fix, just need to do it.

Other than that, it is worked well, and sure will be nice to get rid of those 7 remotes and have just 1. When I get the color changing LED lights up, I will manually program that in as well and prevent an 8th remote from being in the mix.

I know that these aren't noticable improvements to the room itself, but after being over budget on the basement finish, then throwing in a bunch of expenses like grad party, college expenses, pre-paying for other kids' activities, and still dropping over $2,000 on our trip to Los Angeles that we just got back from, I am not spending more $$$ for a while. I do have some credit at the one local hardware store, so as soon as crown molding goes on sale, I should be able to pick that up as essentially no (new) cost, and I already have the rope lighting, so it should be a straight forward add-on when the price is right.

My wife also gave me the green light (for this fall) to add some acoustical panels to the walls. Thank you studio tours in L.A. where they had small screening rooms with panels...


Farewell - June 4, 2020