0808.30
17:42:50
thirty-seven–zero–two
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Yes, there is a difference in the length of the above dashes. Read the Chicago Manual of Style. Deal with it.
So I’m about 75 percent moved in to my new house in Virginia at this point. Earlier in the week, I felt like I was much more settled than this, but going around the house today I realize how much stuff isn’t unpacked, and how many essential characteristics of living in a house are not yet set up. The city hasn’t supplied me with a garbage can for their self-loading garbage trucks, for example.
Oh, and dealings with the DSL side of AT&T have been hilarious. I finally just called up local loop maintenance and spoke with a person that’s not reading from a script in Bangalore. Local guy said that, contrary to my last script-reading subcontinental friend, they didn’t even have a work order for my outside line in their system (there’s static on the line; it’s not the crappy wiring in the house, and it prevents my DSL bridge from getting a lock on the DSLAM). But, he did a line check without any rigamarole; supposed to have a guy out here after Labor Day to make repairs. Dealing with the actual phone company people doing the sort of service from back when the phone company was really the phone company has always been a positive experience for me. It’s only these post-deregulation services (like the outsourced phone trees, and service like DSL or cell phones, though those guys have gotten better) that have such lackluster quality. If only T1 didn’t cost so much, you know I’d get some real nice personal attention if I had an SLA with those guys.
Oh with this and other utilities-dealings over the phones, I’ve had to use the word “zero” a lot since nobody seems to hear (or maybe seems to understand) the word “oh” to mean the digit one unit less than… one. Thirty-seven–oh–two? Oh, I have to repeat that. Thirty-seven–zero–two. I’ve decided to just go full bore hilarious and started pronouncing my name and address with the same sort of intonation the ground control officer does in 2001 after HAL reports the error in the … AE-135 unit. Well, except for the “niners”, that could just make things more confusing. Sometimes I find things the funniest when there’s no one else that could possibly appreciate them. This is one of those things.
School has been going well. I have an office (BAL 7027 – as Curt and I might say, the auspices are good) that I share with another grad assistant. I have Labor Day off for the first time in five years. I think I’ll spend it trying to clean up the house, or something.
So as the third paragraph implies, but doesn’t state explicitly, I lack a home connection to Al Gore’s greatest invention, or any other duplicates of such inventions whose existence has been previously implied by the current President. Further, my early 1980s clock radio / tv with it’s stunning 4-inch B&W screen only gets NBC, CBS, and PBS (it might get other things, but uh I don’t watch ABC or FOX, seriously) so I’ve been able to watch the stunning events of the past two weeks in glorious proto-NTSC. I’ve re-encountered such fabulous tibits of TV engineering such as variable overscan and fixed contrast bandwidth, as well as my old dear friend the v-hold.
Unsurprisingly, television isn’t really made with any allowances for its original format anymore. Text is overlayed on backgrounds that, while I’m sure are different hues and easily legible on a color tv, are exactly the same luminance value and thus are the same gray, making displays of text on lower thirds and sidebars completely unintelligible. Oh, and almost purely-white screens are not something my little panasonic is very happy with. The overscan goes nuts as does the contrast gamut and one of these or the other bleed on to the audio to make a nice loud crackling noise. Apple commercials are the worst offenders on these. There’s a reason why old commercials looked the way that they did, with the blue background for the last 10 seconds with the black-outlined text and large telephone number (most likely 1 800 441 twenty-four-hunnndreed): it’s imminently legible on a little crappy shadow-mask monochrome phosphor tube like I have.
PBS just has liked to rub it in every so often, though. Every night during the Democratic convention, they would have to switch their satellite feed or something, so the picture would black out for a second, and come back on with an old-school VTR-style overlay on the top describing the quality of the originating feed: 1080i 59.94Hz . This would give me a moment to ponder what the little photons bouncing Bill Clinton’s face had gone through to get to my eyeball.
First, after being emitted from some lamp in the convention hall, and subsequent reflection, they had travelled into some studio camera, focused by an optics package that likely costs about half as much as my car does. Then, they were captured by a high-def CCD that initially converted them into electrons which were then processed by the camera’s expensive electronics payload into ATSC 1080i, and sent up the cable to the switching truck sitting probably sitting in a parking lot. Lower thirds were added and Jim Lehrer’s ragtag crew’s “insightful” commentary was overdubbed. Maybe at this point the feed was compressed to MPEG II. Maybe not, I don’t know. Regardless, it was beamed into outer space on either C Band or KA Band (because that’s how they do these things, and only the new consumer direct-tv sats are using KU band) and after its brief residence on and retransmittance from a fabulous telecom satellite in geosynchronous orbit, WHRO here in Norfolk captured it, letterboxed and downconverted it to NTSC-U, and broadcast it from a UHF tower somewhere in this Hampton Roads. My little Panasonic, its extensible 3-foot baton antenna pointing generally southwest, collected the excited little* radio-photons, and began to process them with its little Nipponese solid-state electronics, discarding completely all of the chroma data, and varying the voltage on the electromagnets on its electron gun guidance package. That single beam (it’s B&W, remember) filtered through the shadow mask and hit the phosphor screen, where, because of the funny design of this little clock radio, the photons from the excited phosphors encountered a mirror and were redirected at 45 degree angle, right into my eyeballs, where biology kicked in and I stopped caring.
Like I’m sure you, dear readers, did two or three paragraphs ago.
So I’m about 75 percent moved in to my new house in Virginia at this point. Earlier in the week, I felt like I was much more settled than this, but going around the house today I realize how much stuff isn’t unpacked, and how many essential characteristics of living in a house are not yet set up. The city hasn’t supplied me with a garbage can for their self-loading garbage trucks, for example.
Oh, and dealings with the DSL side of AT&T have been hilarious. I finally just called up local loop maintenance and spoke with a person that’s not reading from a script in Bangalore. Local guy said that, contrary to my last script-reading subcontinental friend, they didn’t even have a work order for my outside line in their system (there’s static on the line; it’s not the crappy wiring in the house, and it prevents my DSL bridge from getting a lock on the DSLAM). But, he did a line check without any rigamarole; supposed to have a guy out here after Labor Day to make repairs. Dealing with the actual phone company people doing the sort of service from back when the phone company was really the phone company has always been a positive experience for me. It’s only these post-deregulation services (like the outsourced phone trees, and service like DSL or cell phones, though those guys have gotten better) that have such lackluster quality. If only T1 didn’t cost so much, you know I’d get some real nice personal attention if I had an SLA with those guys.
Oh with this and other utilities-dealings over the phones, I’ve had to use the word “zero” a lot since nobody seems to hear (or maybe seems to understand) the word “oh” to mean the digit one unit less than… one. Thirty-seven–oh–two? Oh, I have to repeat that. Thirty-seven–zero–two. I’ve decided to just go full bore hilarious and started pronouncing my name and address with the same sort of intonation the ground control officer does in 2001 after HAL reports the error in the … AE-135 unit. Well, except for the “niners”, that could just make things more confusing. Sometimes I find things the funniest when there’s no one else that could possibly appreciate them. This is one of those things.
School has been going well. I have an office (BAL 7027 – as Curt and I might say, the auspices are good) that I share with another grad assistant. I have Labor Day off for the first time in five years. I think I’ll spend it trying to clean up the house, or something.
So as the third paragraph implies, but doesn’t state explicitly, I lack a home connection to Al Gore’s greatest invention, or any other duplicates of such inventions whose existence has been previously implied by the current President. Further, my early 1980s clock radio / tv with it’s stunning 4-inch B&W screen only gets NBC, CBS, and PBS (it might get other things, but uh I don’t watch ABC or FOX, seriously) so I’ve been able to watch the stunning events of the past two weeks in glorious proto-NTSC. I’ve re-encountered such fabulous tibits of TV engineering such as variable overscan and fixed contrast bandwidth, as well as my old dear friend the v-hold.
Unsurprisingly, television isn’t really made with any allowances for its original format anymore. Text is overlayed on backgrounds that, while I’m sure are different hues and easily legible on a color tv, are exactly the same luminance value and thus are the same gray, making displays of text on lower thirds and sidebars completely unintelligible. Oh, and almost purely-white screens are not something my little panasonic is very happy with. The overscan goes nuts as does the contrast gamut and one of these or the other bleed on to the audio to make a nice loud crackling noise. Apple commercials are the worst offenders on these. There’s a reason why old commercials looked the way that they did, with the blue background for the last 10 seconds with the black-outlined text and large telephone number (most likely 1 800 441 twenty-four-hunnndreed): it’s imminently legible on a little crappy shadow-mask monochrome phosphor tube like I have.
PBS just has liked to rub it in every so often, though. Every night during the Democratic convention, they would have to switch their satellite feed or something, so the picture would black out for a second, and come back on with an old-school VTR-style overlay on the top describing the quality of the originating feed: 1080i 59.94Hz . This would give me a moment to ponder what the little photons bouncing Bill Clinton’s face had gone through to get to my eyeball.
First, after being emitted from some lamp in the convention hall, and subsequent reflection, they had travelled into some studio camera, focused by an optics package that likely costs about half as much as my car does. Then, they were captured by a high-def CCD that initially converted them into electrons which were then processed by the camera’s expensive electronics payload into ATSC 1080i, and sent up the cable to the switching truck sitting probably sitting in a parking lot. Lower thirds were added and Jim Lehrer’s ragtag crew’s “insightful” commentary was overdubbed. Maybe at this point the feed was compressed to MPEG II. Maybe not, I don’t know. Regardless, it was beamed into outer space on either C Band or KA Band (because that’s how they do these things, and only the new consumer direct-tv sats are using KU band) and after its brief residence on and retransmittance from a fabulous telecom satellite in geosynchronous orbit, WHRO here in Norfolk captured it, letterboxed and downconverted it to NTSC-U, and broadcast it from a UHF tower somewhere in this Hampton Roads. My little Panasonic, its extensible 3-foot baton antenna pointing generally southwest, collected the excited little* radio-photons, and began to process them with its little Nipponese solid-state electronics, discarding completely all of the chroma data, and varying the voltage on the electromagnets on its electron gun guidance package. That single beam (it’s B&W, remember) filtered through the shadow mask and hit the phosphor screen, where, because of the funny design of this little clock radio, the photons from the excited phosphors encountered a mirror and were redirected at 45 degree angle, right into my eyeballs, where biology kicked in and I stopped caring.
Like I’m sure you, dear readers, did two or three paragraphs ago.
5 Comments
GMT-0500 10:30:43 0808.31 (Sun)
You sured wrong!
(Why stop with nouns when I can verb select adjectives?)
Anyway, it was a fun read. As a school paper it was certainly schizoid and would have confused any professor trying to locate a unifying theme (though I do love the thought of explaining to Shipdawg the correlation between a discussion of O’s / zeroes [binary] and television broadcast signals); but as a blog update, it provided readers with no less than 3 well-written, entertaining updates on: 1) your move, 2) one of your complaints with the current state of American megacorporate customer relations and more specifically the service hotlines that they provide in this country [or rather no longer in this country], and 3) your views on the complexity of modern telefeed having finally reached a point where non-compliance with the older (I hesitate to say “oldest”) television sets is essentially required else we lock ourselves into an telecommunicative Dark Ages. (“Telecommunicative”? “Telecommunicational”?)
I enjoyed it. I’ll admit that had you not been my close friend and instead some e-stranger I might not have even attempted it due to its length, but having in fact read it all I can say that anyone who does pass it over or give up halfway is missing out. Especially that part on overseas hotlines: you really got me thinking that if market forces were truly in full force in the cable and cellular telephone markets (rather than monopolies [cable] and duopolies [cell phones] we tend to see), one way in which an upstart competitor could steal customers and make a positive name for itself would be to pay for a small but well-educated, polite, and above all else NATIVE staff of customer service phone representatives. The customer base would grow exponentially: it would take months, perhaps as long as half a year to a year for word-of-mouth from a few especially verbose fans to get around and make the first few hundred, then thousand, then ten thousand converts; but once the regional (or national) public awareness was penetrated, we would see either a) customers considering the switch in droves or b) the competition reacting prophylactically with revamped customer service employment of their own. Either way the consumer wins.
Because I’ll tell you, I hate talking to these overseas customer service representatives about local issues. I don’t mind too much for, say, calling Microsoft. I mind it much more for situations like yours — where you want to know what the status is for the local branch of a national phone company, cable company, electric company, etc. coming to your property. I experienced this problem most recently with Comcast. I’m getting a bit long, but read on if you’re interested.
The Nazz’s Story About Cable Internet Customer Support (LONG!)
GMT-0500 20:17:46 0808.31 (Sun)
I wanted to clarify that the line “a small but well-educated, polite, and above all else NATIVE staff of customer service phone representatives” refers to a grievance neither with ethnicity nor with accent but instead with the overseas representatives’ inability to provide answers to the sorts of questions that only the office which directly employs the cableman* can provide. That is to say, I could be talking with a thick-accented Indian who has lived in America for 35 years and is the assistant manager of Lafayette’s cable company and have no problem; similarly, I could be talking with an Englishman in Surrey and be just as unhappy then as I am with status quo now.
* cableman, power company switch-flipper man, telephone company hooker-upper, etc.
GMT-0500 12:50:31 0809.3 (Wed)
There sure were a lot of acronyms in this post!
GMT-0500 12:54:47 0809.3 (Wed)
Also, it’s weird to think that I really haven’t seen one of those blue-background things at the end of any obnoxious commercials recently. I never thought about that until I read this.
GMT-0500 09:50:01 0810.16 (Thu)
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