Wasting Time

Why is wasting time more fun than actually doing something? I blame the internet… and TV.

Perhaps it is time to start unplugging. I mean, seriously, I spend way too much time either on the computer or watching television instead of doing anything productive. Sure, there are productive things to do on the computer and thought provoking programs to watch on the TV, but for the most part I am simply wasting away the hours on Pinterest or watching crappy B-movies on Netflix or television shows I’ve already seen. Maybe what I really need to do is start setting time limits so it forces me to do something else.

Fall Television Season

I admit that we don’t watch nearly as much TV since we traded our cable box for an antenna, but we do still watch it. However, I have mixed feelings on how invested I want to be with the lineup.

There are shows I will resume watching this year; Chuck, Parenthood, Community, Bones, Desperate Housewives and finishing off Brothers & Sisters. But I don’t see much promise in many of the new series broadcast TV has to offer. With the original Law & Order off the air, and yet another incarnation taking its place, albeit set in Los Angeles, I don’t know if that would be a draw for me. We may check out an episode or two just for good measure before making a decision, especially since Terrence Howard is in it. While neither of us were impressed with the one episode of Glee we watched, which, admittedly, I didn’t understand the appeal until Jane Lynch’s character had a tirade, we still plan to catch the season two premiere tonight before making any final judgments.

Honestly I think the problem is that too many programs are reality based, I remember when cooking and game shows were the only Reality TV on the air. I also remember the original draw to Real World, which faded quickly because you could tell that every season beyond the first was contrived in some way or another negating the raw interest the show held. Now it seems every channel on broadcast and cable television has some reality show or their entire lineup is filled with people being complete asses of themselves because they have an audience. I mean, c’mon, if I wanted to see that I’d simply go to The Most Evil Corporation in the World and people watch. But that would also require me to break my code of ethics.

I don’t think that reducing the offerings available on television is necessarily a bad thing, as I remember a time when every night but Saturday was spent in front of the TV for hours. Oh wait, Saturday was reserved for the shows that overlapped during the week that I recorded. However, I wonder if the networks have decided to cater to the lowest denominator in their programming efforts. This also seems true in their marketing campaign. The Event, for instance, had the hokiest campaign to make the show seem mysterious, but came off corny at best. I can’t imagine any show’s producer feeling like that was a good idea, so it must be studio execs using their status to influence program marketing, which, let’s be honest, how many executives have a clue how to be relevant to an audience?

Then again, if we want to watch something interesting, we usually watch OPB, our local PBS station. History Detectives, Nova, and Ask This Old House just to name a few of our favorites. I guess my point is that television simply doesn’t hold the same interest it once had for me. If any of the shows I mentioned were cancelled I wouldn’t mourn them because, honestly, some of them are barely pulling me in as it is.

Operation TV: Complete

Our television was finally on the brink of complete color wheel failure. So we broke down, ordered the part and fixed it.

It’s a safe bet that if it wasn’t for my Etsy shop, we wouldn’t have been able to fix the TV because I used the money I made from selling items to pay for the color wheel, a $100 part with $7 for shipping. It’s also a safe bet that if our TV died our main source of entertainment would die with it. Alas, we are addicted to the boob tube, albeit, not boobs… not that there’s anything wrong with them!

If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you’d know that we got rid of our cable television (we still have the internet, which thank God was fixed after the damn huge white semi-truck took out the overhead line!) This means that our channel lineup is whatever you get with bunny ears, which we literally have a pair on top of our TV. However, we watch a lot of movies, and occasionally play the Wii. I think my Mii will look sad, pathetic and drained of all energy if I put in the Wii Fit as it has been quite a few months since my last workout session. I’m almost afraid to try it for fear of what it says I weigh now!

So when the television screen started flickering a sequence of colors that would make you think you were tripping on something illegal, we decided it would be best to replace the part rather than wait for the glass color wheel to shatter into thousands of tiny pieces. I had just made a few sales in my Etsy shop so there was money in the account I use for that to pay for the part and so I got online and ordered it Monday evening. It arrived yesterday.

Performing the necessary surgery was really quite painless, as my partner began taking the back panel and parts that needed to be moved out of the way. When I read that it was like replacing an internal computer part I thought it would be similar, but it was exactly the same thing. Within half-an-hour the TV was up and running and looking as good as it did when we first bought it. My partner commented that the color wheel must have been bad for a while because not only did it start right up, it didn’t make a whirring sound like a hamster spinning in its wheel for a few seconds as if warming it up, a sound I’ve never heard due to my limited hearing.

And so with a fixed television, we watched our favorite evening game shows, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune then put in one of our Netflix movies, Avatar. We’d never seen the movie and I’m glad we waited until the color wheel was replaced. Of course, with it replaced and the shadows no longer green and magenta and the skin tones no longer looking like a poorly done Paint by Numbers kit, I’ve got a feeling we’ll be watching a few more movies in the near future.

Heat

I don’t do well in heat. Seriously, once the thermometer gets above eighty degrees I wilt like a pansy.

With yesterday’s temperatures here topping out at only ninety-five I had a day of doing nothing. Okay, so I watered all the vegetables, plants and flowers and went grocery shopping, but once home I was completely unmotivated to do anything. Something about hot weather causes me to shut down and drink a lot. All I could think about at one in the afternoon was making a frozen margarita but I fought the urge and I’m not exactly sure why, opting instead for copious amounts of water… and a Corona Light with a lime wedge with dinner.

I thought that maybe being trapped inside, because it was a whopping fifteen degrees cooler, I’d attempt some sewing or puppet making or even start working on the fondant flowers for my aunt’s wedding, but instead I opted to watch a movie because the act of doing nothing would keep me from overheating… or so I told myself. And so a half an hour into watching Little Ashes, a steamy biopic about the poet Federico García Lorca and artist Salvador Dalí, I noticed that our television’s color issues were back with a vengeance.

We’ve been having problems with what we thought were the colors resetting themselves, causing dark areas to become muddled with green and purple and eventually make the picture look like a really low quality stream for some time now, even before the TV had its final service before the warranty expired. Understandably we assumed that issue was resolved when the repairman fixed it, but apparently this is an unrelated issue that has to do with the color wheel, a small glass wheel that spins in front of the light. My partner said he’s been hearing what he described as a whirring sound when the television tries to turn on and apparently that sound is the worn out gear that spins the color wheel at 9000 RPM when working properly. Fortunately research I did provided valuable information that this part is available for around a hundred dollars and if you’ve ever worked on a computer could replace it. Unfortunately this part costs a hundred dollars and I wish we would’ve known that was the problem when the repairman came out and replaced the digital board and light bulb, which he would have clearly seen any wear or damage to the color wheel since it is attached to the light box.

And so with today supposed to reach into triple digits, a television that is all wonky, and various animals to watch for heat exhaustion, I may, if I’m lucky survive. If not, I love you all. Well, most of you anyway.

Television: Over the Air Broadcasting

Over the Air television is not without its faults. Sometimes just the act of getting up off the sofa will cause it to glitch… especially if it is CBS, which thank goodness there is only one thing we rarely watch on that station, The Price is Right.

Upon installing the antenna, I was amazed that our high definition channels actually looked better than they did with cable, and the pixelization effect that often occurred through our cable provider had disappeared. Funny, they told us it was our television that caused that to happen.

“Oh look dear! Every time Clark Kent turns his head, it gets all boxy and looks like he’s turning into Bizarro!”

So everything looked great, the setup seemed to work out fantastic, it was just that our fifty inch DLP* widescreen television now had a very large set of bunny ears on it. Out of the twenty five channel lineup we now had, we regularly only use six channels, and three of those are from our local PBS** stations, OPB***. Oh my, all these acronyms, and here I am a member of the AAAA****!

Well, as luck would have it, everything was going too well, because a couple weeks after we threw away the packaging and the receipt, we started seeing green semi-transparent boxes all over the screen, which only showed up on the antenna, and not the Blu-Ray or Wii. This made me assume we got a crappy antenna and it needed to be returned for an exchange, until my internet research led me to believe there was something going on with the TV. When we bought our television, we had read that you want to buy the extended warranty for DLPs because of the light bulb replacement, which can be costly. So we got a four year warranty, figuring that if it never gets used, at least we had it. Of course, within a year, the mirror-box, aka, the thing that makes this type of television a television, was dying. Cost of new mirror-box? $1600. Cost with warranty? $0. Success! Warranty already paid for itself, and everything was fine, until right after the antenna installation, which happened to be one month before the warranty was to expire. My partner quickly called the company which had taken over the warranty since the store we purchase the TV at had gone out of business thanks to our wonderful economic situation we’ve been in for some time now, and set up a date to have a repairman come out to look at it and diagnose the problem. In the mean time, suddenly the Blu-Ray started acting up too, but not in the same way, and so did the Wii in yet another way. All three of these devices, the antenna, Blu-Ray and Wii are connected to the TV via different cables, and when the repairman looked at it, he knew right away, it was the box that all these devices connect to that was the culprit… and the bulb was on its way out, so he’d order one of those too while it was still under warranty! By the time the repairman returned to install the replacement parts three weeks later, the TVs green boxes had expanded to all colors of the rainbow and it was quite psychedelic. Anyway, long story short, it wasn’t the antenna, just our TV.

Okay, let me get back to where I was going with this. We have never been a member of OPB, but talk about it often, since we watch and listen to more programming on its stations, either on TV or radio, than any other, especially now that we don’t have cable. As many people know, pubic broadcasting relies on donations from viewers for a majority of its funding, and a few times each year, they have membership drives to support this effort. During the last drive, I thought to myself about donating something, as I do get a majority of my entertainment from OPB, but the thing about me is I have terrible follow-through. Last night, and I kid you not, as I was prepared to write something completely different this morning for the second part of yesterday’s blog, we were watching History Detectives, they finished one story and went to the familiar membership drive with a host or two and a bunch of people in the background waiting to take phone calls, and my partner says, “We should become members.” I agreed, and he pulled out his phone, called the number on the screen, and donated right then and there.

So, I guess the point I am trying to get across is, are you getting your money’s worth out of the cable programming you are watching, or is a majority of it wasted? If you are, that’s great, as it is working for you, but if you aren’t, why continue to pay for it? There is so much programming from our local channels for free, and maybe that money could go to a better use. For us, we’ve been putting the money we’re saving back to our church, and recently, to the stations of OPB.

*DLP: Digital Light Processing
**PBS: Public Broadcasting Service
***OPB: Oregon Public Broadcasting
****AAAA: Anti-Acronym Association of America

Television: Ditching Cable for an Antenna

For a long time, we had cable TV, and it was good. Then, the price got too much and the content got too thin. Bye-bye, cable TV.

For some people, spending over seventy dollars a month for television is nothing. Mind you, the only perk was that we were able to not only pick up all the local channels in High Definition, but also about twenty other channels, such as Food Network and HGTV, as well as the hundreds of other channels we never watched. And so, the decision was made to get rid of cable TV, and so I went down to the office just down the street, returned the equipment, and had it shut off. We still get our internet through this cable company, but that is all… actually, they lowered our rate because we said we were looking into cheaper alternatives, which knocked almost twenty bucks a month off of that bill rather quickly. It never ceases to amaze me how existing customers can get the introductory rates simply by threatening to leave! Try it.

So, without any picture coming from our rather large television now sitting in the living room just waiting for us to pop a DVD or Blu-Ray in, or maybe even play the Wii, I decided to see if the TV had a built-in antenna. Turned it on, hit Channel Search, and waited. Nothing. So, I got online and checked out what I needed to make this work, found that it had a built-in digital tuner and came across some video of a woman making her own antenna out of a tin can, a nail, a coax cable with one end stripped and some duct tape. I had all these materials and decided, what the heck, I’d give it a try. And wouldn’t you know it, it worked. Yes it was ghetto, but if I pointed it in one direction, I got four channels, and if I pointed it just a couple inches in a different direction, I got three other channels. I went into the garage, grabbed about a foot of copper electrical wire we just happen to have a box of from installing grounded outlets in the office, formed it into a circle, and attached it. Success! Other channels!

This set up was good for about a week, until we decided to break down and buy a real antenna. So, back onto the internets went I to research indoor antennas, ranges, reliability, and most importantly, price. Once I found one that I liked, with customer feedback that was mostly positive for people in our situation anyway (about ten miles from the signals), and at a price I could justify, I went to the store to make the purchase. As luck would have it, there was only one of the model I was looking at, so I picked it up and held onto it as I looked at the others and compared, since it was the only model that was both on their website and in-store. One was cheap and ugly and had no power, and the other was expensive and ugly and did practically the same thing. Pleased with my selection, I purchased it and went home to install.

After plugging a coax cable into the antenna from the TV and plugging the power cord into the surge protector with the rest of the television components, I hit Channel Search, first without extending the rabbit ears, and picked up about ten channels. So far, it worked just as well as my ghetto antenna. Now, extending the rabbit ears all the way, I hit channel search again, but this time, twenty-five channels popped up, which is all of our local digital channels, plus two analogs that are still broadcasting. Yeah, we have TV again!

Now, for some reason or another, I got it in my head that our smaller twenty-inch TV we had in the bedroom also had a digital tuner built-in, and so I hooked up the old ghetto antenna to test it out, but the only channels it got, and with a lot of noise at that, were the two analog channels, which means that it doesn’t have a digital tuner, and those can be spendy for those of us who didn’t take advantage of the government coupons because we didn’t have the foresight that we were going to ditch our pay-service for free-service. Oh well, it is big and bulky anyway, and really, we don’t need a TV in the bedroom anyway. Besides, I’ve noticed we sleep better without it.

Tomorrow I will talk about the pros and cons of Over The Air Television.