I woke up this morning to find my one-year-old Phillips Plasma TV dead.  Well, that’s not quite accurate it was one year and 12 days old (I dug out the paperwork to check) – nice how it just made it past the one year warranty from Phillips, huh?  Puzzling thing is, it turned off fine last night, no storms or other external forces were in the area, and all my A/V equipment is on a high-end surge and battery backup system. Odd.  The only good news is, that this was the first time in my life I have ever purchased an extended warranty.  I’ve always considered them a sucker warranty – but I am glad I did it this time.  The onlyreason I bought it is because I wanted someone else to deal with getting this monster off the wall if I ever did have a problem, but I must admit I was not expecting to ever have to use it let alone just a year later.  We’ll see how this whole extended contract works out, but I was impressed their service center was open today (a Sunday), and someone will be here Tuesday AM for service.

So I don’t really watch a hold lot of TV anyhow (who has time?), but if I don’t have my news and coffee in the morning, I just don’t seem to wake up.  So I (finally) hooked my sling player back up correctly – I had ripped out my Media Center PC and replaced it with a Tivo2 a while back, and never got around to getting the sling player right since I haven’t been traveling as much lately (whew!).

So several software installs and firmware updates later, I am back in business with my Slingbox.  I must say, the newer Sling player software is MUCH nicer, and has a better picture quality than I remember it having – very impressive updates on both the client side and the hardware.  So now I am able to stream my TV around the house (via 802.11g wifi), and catch my news on both my Lenovo X41 Tablet PC and my Q1 UMPC.  Sling even has a special skin for the UMPC  – very cool!  During the whole process, I actually came up with (what I think) would be a very cool UMPC app for the slingplayer, but unfortunately they don’t seem to have an API or any other exposed interfaces.  Maybe I’ll hack around and see what I can figure out.

Now I’m just wondering, Why didn’t I get around to getting this setup before?!?! 🙂