30-I-2009.: Farewell to TV
There was an eclipse tonight, and this was the best I got. Didn't have the patience to do it on manual, try some standardized setting - the Moon is in full sunlight, its surface generally 1/8, i.e. three lens stops gray, so I could have done better, had I not dedicated just one smoke break to this. But I was writing the blog at the time, and published it at 1:27, which means I've sat by my keyboard, mouse and monitors until 2:00 as usual.
Been working on templates for merging answers to a questionnaire into something that can be pasted into a document... what they named "Ottawa style" after a similar feature which was once developed for a customer there. Don't know how much will this be used.
Bought "Gravity's rainbow" on Amazon. They don't say who's the author, and I don't remember. Stross, Vinge, Moriarty, Stephenson? [nope, Thomas Pynchon, and now looking at the plot, it's all unknown - perhaps it didn't arrive at all]
On UT, about windows security: "It's pretty much like airport security: stops just the most stupid ones, but annoys everybody.".
From mom and dad, some stories surrounding Tejka being in a coma for two months now - about her lazy drunk bum of a husband fighting her crazy sister over the ownership of the apartment. She isn't any better, reduced to skin and bone now, expected to die any day.
It's also 2 months since Ricardo started working at Microsoft (as a tester). He still owes Go between 10 and 20 grand, and keeps sending money to Jose every now and then (which doesn't help, he's probably losing the house). Dad also asked „it's two months now since Ricardo started the job. Is he satisfied with work position and salary. At least he stopped complaining since he started working. Really, did he try the brandy. The Go's one is about 5% stronger than the apricot, but the apricot is much more aromatic.“
I replied: „Did ask them, and they said they tried the quince, smacks really fine (if she recognized the quince at all... not quite sure they know them) and then they parked that for special occasions. I think they'll take it slow, just as our lasts. Here we still haven't bought our third bottle of whiskey (the first two didn't last a whole year), so we found some in a vodavoda** to greet ourselves. For next time my homework is to remember where I stashed what we brought in 2005, should be good now :)“.
About that whiskey... we started sipping it a couple of years ago, when we sort of understood we don't feel like drinking beer, specially not before hitting the hay, so we picked at random some Taylor cherry or some such, and would have a shot of it between the poor man's entertainment and sleep, i.e. once a week. Then I realized that after seven years and some in the US we never bought a bottle of whiskey, so let's. But this whiskey of theirs was somehow sour, this Kentucky bourbon. It was quite a mystery how could an irish-scottish drink be named after a french dynasty, but that's America. Later I found the recipe was named either after a street or a county (in Kentucky) named after the dynasty. So we drank that, same rhythm of one shot a week, and next time went for some canadian, counting on the south to believe the sour will quench thirst - why the pisco is sour, tequila being drunk with salt and lemon etc. Nope, the north kind is just as sour, they seem to change the recipe for this market. Well to 15:00 (v. house dictionary)... so this time we decided to give up on the continent, got a Ballantine's. Ow shit that's sour too. Just like Mohan said, even indian beer gets americanized. So there's no cultural transfer, the poor devils never know how's life on the outside, because whatever they see of it gets adjusted to their liking, or else it wouldn't sell if it were different.
And the bottles I hid in 2004 I did find later. The bottom, tall drawer in one of the kitchen cabinets is shorter, and there's room for some three bottles behind it.
Blog entry, titled "No TV":
As of five days ago, we are TV free. The set is still there - PS2 needs a screen - but the guy from the cable company came and did what we ordered: unplugged the cable. We still have the phone and internet from the same company, just no cable.
We used to have all sorts of arrangements over the last years. Had extended cable plus HBO - expecting to see movies, but then HBO went on showing those movies a dozen times (could have watched "You got mail" at least seven times if we wanted) and then started their own series (Sex & city didn't really impress us) and, surprise, boxing. WTF? Ah, yeah, these guys also have a box office. Do we want to pay the rental of a set top box plus the fee for two channels just to see three or four movies a month? Canceled that.
Changed cable providers, changed cities, saw more and more shopping channels introduced into the extended package. Took the current bundle (web, phone, TV) which included digital cable... and paid for it for several months without trying it - the house being remodeled, the splitter box was behind a ton of stuff. Once the way became clear, put it all together and saw what's the stuff we paid for but missed: nothing. The repeat of the same channels we had in the extended package, plus more shopping channels. And, ah, yes - the dozens of channels where we could watch the same trailer about what these channels would show us if we... paid extra. Wait, wait - I'm already paying extra! There's the fee for digital cable, plus the rental of the computer which communicates with the servers... so, I was actually paying extra to see the same things twice, plus ads for stuff which I could pay even more? Returned the box and canceled digital the next day.
Then we started watching local news for a while, until we saw the illusion: there aren't any. About 60% of airtime in those 30 minutes is either paid advertising, or self-advertising (where I count 50 seconds spent to announce the main news item, which then turns out to be 30 seconds long, the "visit our website", "coming up next" and "in the morning news" plus all the jingles). The remaining 12 minutes were evenly spent among local fires, police and military stuff, traffic, weather and sports. Maybe once in a blue moon something important and meaningful would sneak through, but it was still below 1% of total time. Stopped watching that.
Then they added more sales channels - even one for cars and real estate, plus the completely irrelevant stuff like golf channel, food channel (twenty people doing spontaneous standing ov(ul)ations every time Emeril says "and then I add some... garlic!" is as stupid as it gets, IMO - couldn't get myself to stay on that channel more than a minute, ever), real estate sales channel, car sales channel... c'mon! The few good things which were out there, like Red Green, would vanish after a short time, or would disintegrate into ads and spinoffs - like it happened with "While you were out". After a while they just didn't care how blatant the product placement was.
So we canceled the extended too. Watched only CSI. Watched numb3rs for a while, but they've run out of steam by season 3. Even though scientifically they weren't too far off the mark (well, most of the time), there's only so many ways you can apply maths to crime solving; sooner or later you will have to reuse a theory, and your script goes down - you have to start messing with your primary characters instead... which is why we don't watch CSI Miami either - they seem to be entangled internally forever, just like "Friends" (which I didn't watch, know it just from blurbs) where the only internal relationships left unexplored would involve pets. "Without a trace" also became a no-show after the third or fourth time the plot was closely related to one of the team.
Stopped watching NCIS after it turned into open commercial for "we can look away from the law when it gets really tough and the script says we should look nice doing that" and for a secret service of a friendly country - without any chance that other friendly countries will ever get their chance, no matter how long they stay queued.
And then, there's the whole month of december (not the week of december, year of december, coat of december or road of december, just to be clear), when there's not an hour of program[me] (not programming - programming is what I do, you broadcast!) when I'm not reminded that this is not for me. This is for Christians only. There are only two colors and five songs allowed, everything else is... for other months, aka months of something else.
Not to be forgotten: they say, in this country, "put your money where your mouth is". Well, cable won't let me. I may have liked, say, SF channel (until recently), but I can't put my money there, without at least some of that money going to Disney and Fox. I'm actually ashamed that I gave them any, even this way. There's always a choice. I'd prefer if they offered a la carte - no matter at what price, the market would even that out - or offer ALL the channels and charge by the hour - and measure the ratings by what's actually watched. They can do that already for digital cable channels; the set top communication computer is talking to the server both ways, so the data ARE there. I'd just add that they should also count the muted (i.e. sound off) separately. Might be interesting.
Come mid-january, we realized we didn't turn the TV on since... whenever the last new episode of CSI NY ran, probably around 19th of December*. So we let our cable subscription die a natural death. Netflix is better. Web is better. TV is dead.
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* close enough, it was on 17th, and guess what - the plot was around something christmassy. So they can't leave it alone even inside unrelated content. Really.
** a brand of water, literally „waterwater“, with elegant square bottles with cut corners, the best bottles for smuggling drinks, the cork is airtight and they don't roll when laid down.
Mentions: Gorana Sredljević (Go), house dictionary, Jose Bariero, Mohan Merchant, Ricardo Manuel Bariero (Ricardo), Slavica Tejin (Tejka), in serbian