So a while back we had a power failure while the HT was running. When the power came back on the PLV-Z4 projector powered up then almost immediately closed the front shutter and turned on the "Replace Lamp" indicator. No spare. Toy budget low. Bad language.

I had an old 32" CRT sitting around so hauled it up to the front of the room, hooked up component video cables and sadly set everything to 480i, 4:3, and resigned myself to watching 2.40 aspect ratio BluRay disks on a 480i 4:3 32" screen and feeling sorry for myself.

The toy budget finally coughed up enough money for a replacement bulb. It arrived the next day - looks like the UPS guy threw the box the last few feet because you could see the marks from where it rolled in the snow before coming to a stop on my front porch. Getting nervous now.

Go upstairs, disconnect projector, turn it over, remember I left my toolbox at the old house. 24 hours later, undo 4 screws, pull the bulb, put the new one in, replace 4 screws, turn it over, hook up the cables, turn on the power...

... and the shutter closes again, then the "Replace Lamp" light comes on again.

More bad language. Pull the new bulb, stare at it... filament looks OK. Look at the old bulb... filament looks OK too. Weeks pass while I decide whether to firebomb the UPS depot or the place that sold me the bulb.

Inspiration hits one day and I poke around on the internet to see if anyone else had the same problem. Yep, although most of the advice is either "buy another bulb and don't get finger oil on it this time", or "you're gonna have to replace the ballast, ha ha it's gonna cost you".

After a while I realize that nearly all of the problems eventually get fixed by pushing a button. Turns out there's a safety switch which trips when the temperature gets too high and which needs to be manually reset in order for the fun to continue. Pull 6 screws, looking carefully at the first few to make sure they're all the same size.

Lift lid, push button, close lid, go to replace screws and realize that 5 are the same size and one is tiny. More bad language. Waste time figuring out the number of possible permutations before realizing that all I have to do is drop the small screw in each hole and see if the threads bite.

Hook up cables, turn on, everything happy. Amazed how good a DVD can look (I was watching the Season 1 "Sanctuary" DVDs). The new bulb seems to be quite a bit brighter than the old one, or maybe that's just placebo effect.

I'm probably the only person who didn't know about that damn switch, but posting this just in case...

Nice of them to have an erroneous error message.

Hey, life wouldn't be as sweet without the sour (blatant 'Vanila Sky' rip-off).

I'm sorry to hear you figured all of this out before you went forward with your plans to firebomb someone. Now THAT would have been an entertaining read!

Do they let you post on your favorite website from your jail cell?

Yeah, it's a shame but no matter how I gamed it out neither of them seemed to be at fault. I was hoping for a rumor that one or both of them was harboring WMDs, but no luck.

Wag the dog!

BTW it seems that the new bulb is not brighter than the old one, at least not significantly so. Somewhere during the proceedings my user image settings were lost and set back to the (somewhat brighter) defaults.

I don't care. I have a projector *and* a spare bulb, and got lots of work done while the projector was hors de combat, so all is good.

Just curious, you weren’t going to pop the new lamp in after just bringing it in from the cold were you?

Also what are you thinking of Sanctuary? A friend loaned me the first season but I’m not sure I want to rush to watch it before he asks for it back.

No, the bulb actually sat on the dining room table for a few weeks between "Getting nervous now" and "Go upstairs...". If I inserted <procrastinate here> every time it applied the post would have been twice as long

I quite liked Sanctuary. Anyone unhappy with the direction SGU has taken may find that Sanctuary is actually more in line with the previous Stargate series (particularly SG-1) than SGU is. It has the same feel (present-day events wired tightly into historical context), although I guess you could say the same about Men in Black.

There was something that bugged me a bit about the show but I haven't been able to put my finger on it. I didn't find the characters quite as interesting as (say) SG-1's, maybe because they were "more different from each other", not sure.

Anyways, I would put it on a par with a weaker season of SG-1, which in my books is still pretty good.

Thanks for the feedback on Sanctuary. I haven’t watched SGU yet. Tried to order it from Netflix this weekend because it was supposedly available. Suddenly switched to “short wait” the day it was suppose to ship. I liked SG-1 so if Sanctuary is as good as a weak SG-1 sounds like I’ll enjoy it.

Yeah John, as was discussed at length in the past, it would be unlikely for the bulb to be significantly damaged by a power failure. Although the fan goes off, so does the bulb, and it doesn't get hotter while it cools down by convection.