Monthly Archives: April 2012

TV Time…

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I had a good plan. No, seriously. I really did have a good plan. The 42 inch TV currently in the living room was going to the basement “media room”. This new venue should be more conducive to reducing glare and cutting my cooling bill this summer. Hiding in the basement when it’s a gagillion degrees in July and August just seems to make more sense than running the 18,000 BTU window unit flat out for weeks on end. Moving the TV was easy enough and I had a small TV packed away that would be more than sufficient for background noise when I happened to be in the kitchen or fiddling around upstairs. What I didn’t account for was that nice little TV having only a single set of old school standard component cable connections, so I can plug in the cable box or the DVD player, but not both at the same time. And forget plugging in anything fancy like Apple TV or XBox. Apparently, this TV has been in storage for a while. I didn’t even know they made flat panels without HDMI ports.

This leaves me in a bit of a dilema. I can leave things as they are, with the TV in the basement and nothing in the upstairs living room. I can plug in the baby TV in the living room and try using it as what’s basically a radio with moving pictures. Or I can bight the bullet and head over to Delaware this afternoon and try finding a new TV that doesn’t send me screaming to the poor house.

The part of me that loves shiny new toys really wants to put the 42 inch TV back in the living room and bring home a 50 inch screen for the basement. The part of me that just finished paying the bill for moving here really, really wants to avoid doing that. The compromise might have to be finding a no-frills (read: cheap) 32 inch model for the living room and letting things in the basement be for the time being. It can’t hurt to stop in at Best Buy and have a look, right? I mean, since I have to go to Petsmart and pick up dog food anyway, it only makes sense to look around a bit.

Only one?

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I’m not sure I can fully embrace any religion that only endorses only one Good Friday per calendar year. As far as I’m concerned personally, there are 52 of them and they’re all equally Good. Blasphemy or not, that’s just the way it is.

Maybe it’s time to strike out and set up my own Church of the Good Fridays and enjoy all the tax advantages of being designated a religious organization. Then again, that sounds like it could involve more work than I’d really be willing to put into it. Good Fridays are most assuredly not about working hard, so it seems that would be the central conflict within the church. Before long, those who wanted to work hard on Fridays would splinter off and set up their own practices and then where would we be? I’m in no humor to deal with a Reformation over the weekend, so perhaps it’s best if we just observe our Good Fridays individually as the spirit moves us.

Personally, I’ll be observing my own weekly celebration of surviving 40 hours of salaried captivity by making dinner, possibly having several tasty adult beverages, and then promptly falling asleep on the couch. My church clearly wouldn’t be one that stands much on ceremony.

So from me to you, Happy Easter weekend… and try to keep all your Fridays good.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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What Annoys Jeff this Week?

1. Wi-Fi. If you’re going to go to the trouble of installing building-wide wi-fi connectivity, it might be a good idea to actually let people in the building know what the password is. Otherwise you’re just beaming radiation at us all day long for no apparent reason. Mmmkay?

2. Assumptions. Just because I’m sitting in class typing something on my laptop, doesn’t mean that I’m not paying attention to whatever you’re saying up there in the front of the room. You’re just going to have to trust me on that one. Calling on me to give an opinion on whatever topic you’re discussing isn’t really going to give me much trouble. That’s not a critique of your skills as an instructor so much as it is a function of having covered this material half a dozen times in other classes.

3. Laundry. How can one guy generate four full loads of laundry a week? And before anyone asks, no, that’s not “separated”. That’s four filled to the brim loads of whatever I can cram into the machine to avoid having a fifth load magically appear. There simply has to be a better way to spend your life than just wandering around picking up after yourself.

Detail orientation…

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I spend a lot of time around here calling out people for doing dumb shit. In the interests of full disclosure, I need to make this confession. As it turns out, I’m not always the most detail oriented person in the room. I was reminded of this last night when I went to the basement to install a few A/V components before the Comcast guy came by this weekend with my new cable box. As you might expect, there’s a back story here just waiting to be told.

I was very pleased with myself last weekend because I’d finally managed to rearranged everything in the basement and haul out a truckload of trash and sundry useless crap I’ve moved all over the country. After almost a year of trying to figure out exactly what to do with the 1/3 of the house that’s below grade, I’d managed to set up what would pass for a media room in most 1200 square foot rentals.

It seems I’ve neglected one small, but important detail about setting up a TV, DVR, blueray player, and Apple TV. As it turns out, they all require electricity. Sadly, the wall I’ve decided to build my home media center around is lacking in that one particular feature. Even though the coax is right there poking through the wall, the closest electrical outlet is about 12 feet away… and in another room. Clearly, I’d lost the trees for the forest.

I’m not about to cut into the wall and put in an outlet. This dump is a rental after all. Instead, I ordered the surge protector with the longest power cord I could find (Special thanks to Belkin for the 10 foot cord option). With that, and hopefully some slack in the individual component power cables, I might, just might, be able to rig something up without dragging the orange extension cord in from the shed.

This should be ghetto fabulous. Then again, this is Cecil County so there’s a fair chance no one will notice.

Primary colors…

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When I voted for the first time, I was so excited that I could hardly contain myself. Low, this decade and a half later, I’m beginning to notice a slightly disturbing trend. Not only do I get less enthused about every passing election, but for as long as I can remember, my Primary track record has been adorned exclusively by losers. That’s not a personal attack or a judgment statement. I’ve voted for an eventual loser of the Republican nomination in every primary election since 1996. Don’t try to figure out if that says more about me or the party. It says plenty about both of us.

Still, out of some misbegotten sense of having a voice in the process, I schlepped to the polling place today after work, stood in line for a few minutes, and then cast my vote for a guy who’s sure to be well out of the race by the end of the month. It’s my own little tradition… Like fireworks on the 4th of July or dreams of a white Christmas… If it’s primary day, I’m off to go vote for a guy who will probably never be on another ballot in either of our lifetimes. On the bright side, at least the ballot is full of people for state and local office that I’ve never heard of before. With me, anything below the POTUS nominee race is pretty much a role of the dice based on what information I can scavenge up a day or so before walking into the booth. It’s the only part of primary day that’s even remotely interesting (and I use “interesting” in a very general kind of way).

We’ve been doing this for more or less 226 years. You’d think by now we’d have come up with a better process. Quaint as it is, it’s probably time for our election system to wander out of the 18th century and in the general direction of the 21st. Seriously, why isn’t there an app for this?

Listening in…

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As a rule, if you’re sitting in a 700-seat auditorium, you probably shouldn’t think of your conversations as privileged in any way. In fact I was doing my best to ignore everyone around me, as is my way. Sadly, some things are just too stupid not to stick with you long after you’ve punched out at the end of the day.

One of the distinctive features of the room we happened to be in this afternoon is a display of all 50 state flags. The guy sitting directly behind me casually mentioned to his friend that he didn’t understand the display as it must have “every flag every flown.”

“No dumbass, it’s the state flags of the country we’re, you know, sitting in right now,” I mumbled under my breath.

“That one must be UNC,” he said, I assume gesturing towards the powder blue flag of the State of South Dakota. By this point, I’m tempted to bash my head against the seat back in front of me. I’m pretty sure at some point, he was trying to figure out why Maryland’s flag included a “checkers board” motif.

Thank God for prompt start times, because the last thing I heard was a question about why we had the Australian flag in stage.

“And that would be Hawaii,” I muttered with enough oomph to make sure he heard me.

I know there’s now law about being utterly ignorant about the country you call home, but that doesn’t mean you should open your mouth and confirm to the world that you’ve been wasting oxygen for all these years.