Seeking My Own "Digital Wonderland"

Thought my life was calming down post-book launch? Wrong. My husband and I are also buying a house! (Thanks Web 2.0!) We should be closing on it this week. The lenders have taken their good sweet time dotting every i and crossing every t on every loan so they are just now getting to ours.

A flood of money is about to leave our bank account for the downpayment (yes, you need those again to buy a house in San Francisco) and closing costs and moving costs. But we're nestling a little away for what we hope will be our own "Digital Wonderland." The phrase is borrowed from my book, chapter 6, "Return of the King." Marc Andreessen used it to describe how he pimped out his new home last summer. Mine will obviously be nowhere near as pimp. In fact, it will likely take us a while to afford the dream.

But we will be getting a new flatscreen for the living room and one for the kitchen-- we love TV and baseball and aren't afraid to admit it. Plus we've been a little late to the whole plasma-LCD revolution. We have a massive (300 lb!) CRT we use now. Amazing picture, but takes up, like, a whole room. (Here's a very very old column I wrote for BusinessWeek about past TV angst. So dated!)

Beyond the TVs we want to wire the place up. We want to be able to hear baseball games in other rooms of the house. We want some kind of sound system for movies. And, we're looking at some kind of movie/TV box-- other than TiVo of course.

We were thinking about Vudu. It's funded by David Sze, after all, who invested in practically every company in my book. So far following his nose has been a pretty smart bet! I got a demo a while back and my only gripe was that there wasn't enough TV on it. I got excited reading about the NetFlix box today, but even with the discounted price, Vudu seems a better option. I have no clue how great the Apple TV is these days. I hear such mixed things.

So questions for my more techy audience:

- Which box would you get?
- Is a hi-def TiVo worth the switch? We currently have the humax dvd record with an extra hard drive and we love it.
- Any other tips?

For my non-techy audience, I'll report back with the progress (and sticker shock!) as we work to make this dream a reality.

Comments

[Jason]

When I met my wife a few years ago, I was a Cubs season ticket holder and she had not interest in baseball. Fast forward a couple years, I come home, and she's laying on the couch watching baseball!! My friends are jealous, and I'm lucky. Gotta love a chick who loves baseball. :)

[sarah lacy]

jason: you don't know the half of it! this year was the first year we didn't go to spring training! We go to about 30 A's games a year-- it's our couple time.

[Jason]

Sarah...I can definitely relate. We spent more time at Wrigley than anywhere else in Chicago. :)