Unthinkability

Ever meet a fanboy of a particular brand of paperclip?  Or of a wire coat hanger company?  Unlikely, as these are ubiquitous commodities.  They are interchangeable, and their sales are driven by price and availability.  Sure, I have used some pretty nice paperclips before, but I have never gone out of my way to buy a certain brand.  I have never gotten into an argument about which brand of paperclip is better.

I realized that I am treating everything like a commodity now, and that even my iPhone has become just another generic hammer in my toolbox of “crap I use to do the job.”  I wrote this post as a deconstruction of Fanboyism and how I have seen its decline over the past 30 years.

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I feel like a convert, a reborn media consumer.  I feel like some kind of religious freak enthusiast who has just discovered the invisible truth that has been there all along.  I was blind, and now I can see.  I am driven to share my new-found knowledge.  I shall become insufferable!

No.  I won’t.

Marc Maron recently had a rant about this particular topic, wishing that everyone could just unplug for [a month?] and reset.  I don’t recall his exact quote, but it was along the lines of “How much of our angst and frenzy is self-inflicted, driven by the media that we are gladly jamming down our eye sockets and ear holes.  WTF!”

Two years ago, I would have thought that Marc was a knee-jerk praetorian.  Today, I am a believer.

I called the cable company yesterday to discontinue service.  The call center representative was very polite and did not try to change my mind.  These cancellation calls can be a pain, like when I originally dropped Vonage.  In contrast, the cable rep was quick and efficient while being friendly.  (I mean, really, could a stranger on the phone actually talk you out of disconnecting your service?)

They prorated our monthly bill, so we only owe about half of the usual amount even though the lineman won’t be out to disconnect the line for another couple weeks.  Our RF system is disconnected from the cable service inside the house, so it doesn’t really matter to us.

I double-checked with the call center rep to make sure that the work order included a note about not disrupting our internet service (on a separate account).  She even read the note back to me, but I am still a little worried that the lineman will do something to screw it up.  Perhaps I am too cynical, lack faith, and am blindly distrustful of strangers.  We’ll find out in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, the wife is enjoying the high-def shows like CSI and House and GMA, I am catching up with my old friends David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, and the kids are no longer missing the endless stream of pre-teen snot-nosed brat dialogue that had spewed from the Disney/Nickelodeon channels just 11 days ago. *Ahhhhh*

My wife came on board fully a few days ago, and she gave me the green light to disconnect the cable service.  I disconnected the physical cable yesterday, but I am waiting a couple of days before I call the cable company to terminate service; I want to ensure that our media systems will work well with the RF antenna. 

One day after completely disconnecting our house from the RF cable service (but keeping the internet service via the cable modem), everything is working and we are adjusting nicely. 

The kids had been getting used to the idea for the past week because I had disconnected the TVs from cable.  They filled their time with other things like DVDs and games, though my oldest daughter has asked a few times “when will we get to watch real TV again,” to which I had responded with a “we’ll have to see.”

My wife and I had a talk with the kids about it last night at dinner time, and we explained that we have lots of things to do in our house besides watching TV.  I told them that we will no longer pay the many, many times their allowance for us to watch the same shows over and over.

Reactions:

Our oldest daughter’s eyes welled up when she heard that she would not be able to watch her Disney shows 24 hours a day. 

I told her that Hannah Montana and Zach & Cody would record once a week on Saturday morning (courtesy of ABC), and that would be enough.  She recovered quickly, though I’m sure that this will be “one of those times” that she remembers forever.  Bummer.

Our other two daughters are perfectly cool with it; just more time to play Lego Indiana Jones, Marble Blast, and Guitar Hero… and My Little Pony.

Dictating Change

I suppose that this is an illustration that effective Parenthood requires a benevolent dictatorship.  (Yes, we are also stewards of our children, but stewardship does not sufficiently address the management of dissent.)  In the end, this is such a small change resulting in such great benefit to the children and the household that it would be irresponsible to not follow through.  I regret not doing it sooner, and that is my constant burden.

Spare TV, anyone?

In the process of converting from analog to digital, I found some incredible deals for LCD TVs on eBay, and we are left with two spare TV’s that require converter boxes. 

Our babysitter is a college student, and we were able to ‘gift’ her one of our old analog-only TVs for $5.  The $5 was really just a formality because she would not accept it for “free.”  We need to find a good home for one more.

I disconnected the Media Center from the local cable provider, connected it to the over-the-air (OTA) antenna, and ran the setup process on the Media Center to find the digital channels.  I had a brief panic before I realized that I needed to connect the OTA cables to different connectors on the Hauppauge tuner cards.  That was followed by excitement when I saw the cards auto-find all of the local OTA channels.  The Media Center (the truly amazing bit of programming that it is), found our scheduled network shows in the new channel lineup and automatically updated the recording schedules to use the new channels.

The Coat Hanger Hoverman works better than I had ever expected, though I shouldn’t be surprised; many people are having good luck with it.  We’ll have to see how it will hold up in the wind, weather, etc.  I have a plastic bag over it at the moment to help shield it from the elements, and the bag does not seem to be diminishing the signal significantly;  the seven RF ‘drops’ in the house are all being serviced from that single antenna (and an RF amplifier) with brilliant digital signal.

As of noon on Saturday Jan 30th, 2010, this house is no longer using cable television.

Our TVs are disconnected from cable TV (though our Media Center is still recording shows from cable).  The kids have already adjusted to the change.

The kids are playing hide-and-seek, Guitar Hero, putting together puzzles, watching Harry Potter movies, playing their DS’s, reading books. 

We are sitting on the couch with the kids on Sunday watching U.S. Figure Skating on our local NBC broadcast affiliate in high-definition.  Pretty.  Dad is watching his Futurama on DVD while working at the computer, Mom is watching her Good Morning America in amazing hi-def clarity while getting ready for work.  She even commented on how clear the picture was.  Life is good.

Problem:  “Damages” is on tonight on FX (Cable).  We had not watched the previous seasons on cable, but we caught up on DVD.  Insanely-captivating show.  How will I convince my wife that it is OK to wait for it to come out on DVD?  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Why on earth do we pay the cableco $700/year to watch repeats when we have this media system in our house? I am on a mission to quit cable TV. The rest of the family is not too sure.

My wife likes several shows on several cable networks; Hoarders on A&E, Challenge on The Food Network, and the endless reruns of CSI:Whatever on whichever channels.  I also like the Futurama reruns on Comdey Central, and the Battlestar Galactica franschise on SyFy.  The startling revelation is: we can buy 20 seasons’ worth of DVDs for the price we pay for cable in a year ($700).

Sure these are tough economic times for everyone, but that is not my primary motivation.  My main goal is to get “Zach & Cody On Deck,” “iCarly,” “Hannah Montana,” and “Wizards of Waverly Place” out of my house.  The money savings is just a perk.

We have hundreds of books, broadband internet (via cable), an XBOX 360, Rock Band and Guitar Hero, two Ninetndo DS Lites, three laptops, a couple of Zunes, board games, Netflix, RedBox, and a Windows Media Center feeding this house.  Yet, I often find my kids staring agape at some rerun of some insipid Disney Channel show.  I am calling it.  The End!

I just built this antenna and put it up on our garage roof (mostly hidden from view).  It is a homemade UHF antenna for receiving over-the-air TV broadcasts. The Hoverman design is popular with the do-it-yourself crowd, and this simplified version is from www.makezine.com.  You can go full-blown if you want to, but the simple version is working for us at the moment.

I disconnected the cable from the main house feed 20 minutes ago.  I connected the Hoverman antenna to an RF amplifier, and connected the amp to the main house feed.  Viola!  (Note to self: there are two TVs in the house that are still analog, so they will be Media Center-only TVs, or I’ll need to get off-air converter boxes.)

If you think that I am brave, you need to know that I am cheating.  My wife is not all-the-way on board with the plan, but she agreed to try it with the kids for a while.  The Media Center is still connected to the cable company, and it will still record shows from the cableco;  I have not cancelled our cable service yet.  She’ll still be able to watch her shows if she sets the Media Center to record them.

So, the saga continues.  The next step is to live without cable on the televisions for a week or two and see how it goes.  I need to find answers to my wife’s concerns (Hoarders, Challenge, etc), and need to find a converter box for her laundry room TV.  After that, I hope to completely cut the cord on the CableTV and cancel our cable (though we’ll continue to use and pay for business broadband internet service).

My stance: Our house cannot function without paper towels.  Everything else is negotiable.

Sharing the joy of “media binge-fests” means sharing the knowledge of media distribution networks.  It’s like having a ‘media refrigerator’ in every room, allowing you to snack on new “30 Rock” episodes and old 80’s movies on Netflix Streaming, anytime and in any room.  Kids can watch recorded Dora The Explorer downstairs while mom hides in the bedroom watching episode after episode of NCIS, CSI, and SVU.

Our house is wired with a 10-drop house-wide CAT5 network and 802.11b wireless.  With the home-run cable network in my house and the RF modulator that I installed, I can watch our Windows Media Center on any regular TV in the house by tuning to channel 3.  I also have an XBOX 360 as a media extender connected to the ‘big screen’ in the living room.  I can also access the recorded content from any of the laptops and PCs in the house. 

So we can watch recorded TV, Netflix, DVDs on any TV in the house.  You can do it, too.  I created a diagram of the one that I built for my home back in 2005.  It would be helpful if you had an RF meter to work out the cable TV signal strength levels, but you might be able to “eyeball” it and get lucky.  (If you run into cable signal problems, you’ll need a cable TV RF signal level meter and some knowledge to work it out.  Those RF meters cost over $1,000 and are not commonly-found at rental places, but maybe you can buy your local cable guy a few beers and have him help you out.)

We’re considering getting rid of our cable and reverting back to off-air HD broadcasts for our new content, and continuing our Netflix and Hulu/Fancast for the older stuff.  Considering that would save us $700 a year, it seems like a no brainer.  Our home media network makes it an even more obvious move.

Enjoy!

My wife and I watched Ben Stein’s documentary “Expelled” a few days ago.  It is a conversation-starter, for sure.  After the [often manipulative and partisan] movie was over, my wife and I had our first discussion in 15 years about religion.  It was good to have a discussion about “how did life start,” and to not confuse that with “how did life evolve.” 

Natural Selection is an all-but-indisputable fact, but it does not adequately answer “how did life start.”  The world would be a better place if we could all get this through our thick skulls.

Natural Selection fully describes and predicts variations within species, as well as the emergence of new species over time.  Period.  The end.  My favorite two examples of how ’selection’ matters: 

"You don’t have to be faster than the bear; you just have to be faster than the other guy."

–and–

“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”

I upgraded my iPhone 3G to the new firmware version 3.0, and [after a 20-minute upgrade process and a subsequent 60-minute backup procedure] I am the proud operator of a nifty phone.

One of the simplest, yet most-welcome additions to the new iPhone firmware is the built-in Voice Memo recorder application.  Click to start, click to stop, click to e-mail the file.  Simple.

I stuck my Plantronics Voyager Pro bluetooth headset in my ear and prepared to record my first monologue for posterity, but I discovered that the Voice Memo Recorder does not work with bluetooth.  Not even the almighty Jawbone Prime.

Here’s the poop from the Apple support webpage Apple – iPhone – Learn how to use Voice Memo.

NOTE: External microphones must be designed to work with the iPhone headset jack or Dock Connector, such as Apple-branded earbuds or authorized third-party accessories marked with the Apple “Works with iPhone” logo.

I am still bummed.  Had it worked, I might have even posted a new and final podcast.  The world may never know what noise might have come out of my pie hole.