Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather." -- John Ruskin

[May the particular types of good weather for the next week be the kinds that don't pose problems for my friends observing Sukkot!]

Some days my body works better than other days. Today isn't one of the great days. Pain meds made me more mobile than I was earlier this afternoon, but even the not-very-loud cars passing by are making my ears hurt, so I'm going to see about maybe taking a nap with earplugs in.

After six days with "Pucelete" stuck in my head, it's been replaced by "Tourdion". This even after listing to a MIDI of madfilkentist's nifty fugue on "Hope Eyrie" (which I'll listen to again when my ears are less wonky).

Twice now the DTV converter has somehow gotten switched to 'mute' and I've not noticed until trying to watch three hours of recorded shows the next day. (This despite keeping the remotes emitter-end-down in a cardboard box to avoid having Perrine change channels by stepping on the buttons.) Some shows are easier to watch with the sound off and just the captioning than others. And some networks provide absolutely useless captioning. My assessment from a few months ago stands: the DTV conversion has degraded my television-watching experience by multiplying not only the number of things that can go wrong, but the number of things that regularly do go wrong (as well as limiting me -- because I couldn't afford an extra, un-subsidized converter[*] -- to recording two channels at once even though I've got three recorders). Getting the second channel of MPT and the almost-all-movies 'ThisTV' channel haven't quite made up for that.

(I know the point wasn't to make television better, but rather to free up frequencies NTSC-TV had been using. Still, the fact that it was pitched so hard to the viewing public in "will make television so much better" terms before the changeover, left a really bad taste in my mouth. Then again, it also took me ages to get over the "CDs can be made soooo much more cheaply than LPs!" hype and the way CDs turned out to cost more than LPs at retail anyhow. So I'm not going to be the most easygoing consumer here.)

Here's hoping I manage to record Dollhouse tonight, unlike Castle earlier in the week.

At some point enough people who got DTV converters will upgrade all the televisions/recorders in their homes to DTV-ready units and spare DTV converters will start becoming available as hand-me-downs. It's way too early for that for a while.

[*] Not to mention that many DTV converters don't have event timers in 'em to schedule channel-changes for when you're not home, and having two of the same brand in the same room would be a problem because they'd both respond to the same remote. One of the ones I got -- the one that often forgets what I've programmed -- only stores five events rather than the eight that most VCRs cam store. So even when friends start having extras to get rid of in a few years, some won't have event timers at all, and the few that do will probably have to be set up in different rooms.