More DTV woes…

HDTV Shakedown

I’ve already talked here about the pros and cons of the switchover to DTV. Here’s another aspect of it I wasn’t fully aware of: Royalties are adding about $30 to the cost of your Digital-ready TV.

I won’t belabor the point here. Just click on the logo above to read all about it.

TV thinks we are idiots

Kevin O'ConnellActually said by a weatherman tonight on a local TV station:

If you are going to be out driving tonight, be careful because we haven’t seen rain like this in a couple of days and it could get slick.

Wait a minute. We should be extra careful because of the possibility of RAIN?!?! Because we haven’t seen rain in the looooong time of a couple days? How condescending and patronizing can the TV talking heads get? They must think we are like stupid Turkeys, standing in our front yards, looking upwards at this strange phenomenon, rain. We must have forgotten all about it because our short attention spans don’t go back a mere couple of days. They must warn us to close our mouths so that we don’t drown!

I don’t really think it’s a matter of some contempt for their viewers IQ. I think mostly, when you’re getting paid to fill time talking about something, sometimes they say anything as long as it sounds sort of related to the topic at hand.

I mean, come on, this is Western New York. We drive through blizzards before breakfast here. (And weathermen have a canary about it.) A little rain shouldn’t even be worth mentioning.

The Warlocks, on the way to Atlanta

Article

As I write this, I’m in a hotel room in Knoxville TN. We’re driving to Atlanta for the National FIRST Robotics competition. It’s a long drive and a long weekend once we get into the competition, so I insisted on taking it easy on the drive down. Continue Reading…

First EME, now EVE

What’s EME? E-Me? And who is Eve? And where is Adam in all this?

Ham Radio operators in Germany have announced that they have successfully bounced a radio signal off of the planet Venus and received the echo back on Earth. The round-trip that the radio waves made took about 5 minutes, which would make it hard to carry on a casual conversation!

Most people not familiar with Ham Radio don’t realize that Hams have been communicating by bouncing their signals off the moon since the 60’s. Recent contributions by computer software and digital signal processing techniques have made this even easier.
Continue Reading…