The stereo arrived on Christmas Eve. UPS apparently left a note on our door while we were home?? Anyhow, we were able to find it down at the UPS facility here in town and I stayed up until 12:30 am getting it all set up. Man... hooking up all those wires at all those convoluted angles managed to do a number on my back. But a little exercise helped work it out. The only annoyance I ran into is that I discovered the receiver doesn't downscale component video signals to composite (the only thing our old TV understands). We'll have a slightly newer (but used) TV soon enough though.
So as far as iTunes goes, I've decided
FixTunes isn't worth the money. (see my previous
blog entry). Too bad I dropped $25 on it. It has a horrendous, non-intuitive UI if you want to edit its tags. However, I continue to use and enjoy using
iTunes Library Updater with lots of success. I just use
J River Media Center to update my tags.
Thanks to a friend, I have figured a way to deal with my podcasts a little better in iTunes. A friend of mine wrote me back upon seeing my last blog entry. Not sure why I didn't see this. I guess I was looking for a dialog that would allow me to configure each podcast as I wish:
> I saw you had a complaint about iTunes not being able to keep all
> episodes of some podcasts, but not others. I actually think you can
> do this - at least partially. Right-clicking on a podcast group lets
> you remove that entire broadcast from being eligible for auto-
> deletion. I think this will do most of what you want.
It's not a bad approach, but still not as flexible as JRiver Media Center.
So how's the Onkyo TX-SR705? It does what it is supposed to do. It sounds nice.
Having all components run through one central "switch" is pretty
handy. But in the end, it's a utilitarian piece of equipment, and
frankly, my excitement has already waned. That's the problem with
stuff. It's all very exciting until you use it for a bit... then it's
not so exciting. Sometimes I want to whisper that into people's ears
as I wander through mal-Wart... but hey, I'm guilty of it as well. <sigh>
On the other hand, if that piece of equipment is used every day in your life, and it breaks, it then becomes a major inconvenience! It's even more of an inconvenience when you live 2 hours away from any major city. 
That's it for now. Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. I know we did!