It has come to this
I am too cheap to get cable, and I really can only receive one broadcast channel. (This may be a problem with my TV or antenna; many of my neighbors can receive three or four channels.) Anyway, the one time I really miss having TV reception is during sports playoffs - of late, baseball. I am not really a big enough baseball fan to seek out watching a lot of games during the year, but during the playoffs I feel like I'm missing out if I don't watch a few.
A couple of nights ago, I rigged up my antenna so it was barely touching the adapter on the TV. That way, I could see visuals on the TV, but the audio still wouldn't come in. So I found an AM radio station that was playing the game, and turned it on. The only problem was that the radio station was faint, so the computer and the TV interfered with it and there was a lot of whining and popping involved.
All of this reminded me of stories my mom told me about her and my grandmother trying to get TV stations. My grandmother would go climb on the roof to adjust the antenna. During a rainstorm, sometimes they would pull in the odd station from Pittsburgh or Dallas. Usually if there was a picture, but no sound, or sound, but no picture, they would be satisfied just to have something. It was the 1940s in the Great Plains. And that was about the level of my technological solution the other night.
Well, tonight I fast-forwarded into the 21st century. I found out about P2P live TV streaming, and used it, by visiting websites registered generically in the European Union and Russia, to find a server out of Hong Kong which was streaming their version of ESPN, which was broadcasting TBS's coverage of the baseball game in Colorado. The reception was only so-so, but it was better than waiting for a thunderstorm to get the Dallas station again.
The best reception I have found so far is a Chinese channel broadcasting "best HDTV of the world." One minute it was "fashion TV," which started out on the catwalk but then seemed to be headed in the direction of softcore porn: music with a heavy beat, and alternating topless and topped models gyrating around with fashion-oriented backgrounds. Before long though it changed to a Discovery Channel program about praying mantises. I'm sure there are other things I would rather be watching, but the picture is so beautiful I think I'll leave it here for a while.
Ahem. Clearly I am suffering from a bit of difficulty getting going again post-bargaining. We've got a contract, and the experience of the last three weeks may be too intense to digest in blog format at right now, if at all. Politically, I thought we should have held out a bit longer; personally, in lots of ways I'm glad to be done, though there's also a bit of post-partum letdown having gotten done with something big and intense. In addition to that, there was a lot of political conflict and interpersonal nastiness. (Much of the former and some of the latter I had a role in; I don't want to give the impression that I'm some kind of innocent victim of something completely unexpected, just that both escalated in ways that have left a lot of bitterness among the principals.) I feel like I'm recovering, trying to reorient to being an academic again, and running up against the whole difficulty of giving myself structure in a position where there's not a lot of external structure I have to conform to immediately. This has always been a challenge for me, but now - more than a year removed from my last non-writing seminar, without even a writing group or anything to keep me focused, it is hard to avoid periods of wool-gathering. Anyway, perhaps I'll just chalk the last couple of weeks up to being a time of transition and hope that I can get focused soon.
Oh, if you want to check out the online TV, check out http://www.myp2p.eu/index.htm or http://livetv.ru/en/. The praying mantis program is over, so I think I should be going.
A couple of nights ago, I rigged up my antenna so it was barely touching the adapter on the TV. That way, I could see visuals on the TV, but the audio still wouldn't come in. So I found an AM radio station that was playing the game, and turned it on. The only problem was that the radio station was faint, so the computer and the TV interfered with it and there was a lot of whining and popping involved.
All of this reminded me of stories my mom told me about her and my grandmother trying to get TV stations. My grandmother would go climb on the roof to adjust the antenna. During a rainstorm, sometimes they would pull in the odd station from Pittsburgh or Dallas. Usually if there was a picture, but no sound, or sound, but no picture, they would be satisfied just to have something. It was the 1940s in the Great Plains. And that was about the level of my technological solution the other night.
Well, tonight I fast-forwarded into the 21st century. I found out about P2P live TV streaming, and used it, by visiting websites registered generically in the European Union and Russia, to find a server out of Hong Kong which was streaming their version of ESPN, which was broadcasting TBS's coverage of the baseball game in Colorado. The reception was only so-so, but it was better than waiting for a thunderstorm to get the Dallas station again.
The best reception I have found so far is a Chinese channel broadcasting "best HDTV of the world." One minute it was "fashion TV," which started out on the catwalk but then seemed to be headed in the direction of softcore porn: music with a heavy beat, and alternating topless and topped models gyrating around with fashion-oriented backgrounds. Before long though it changed to a Discovery Channel program about praying mantises. I'm sure there are other things I would rather be watching, but the picture is so beautiful I think I'll leave it here for a while.
Ahem. Clearly I am suffering from a bit of difficulty getting going again post-bargaining. We've got a contract, and the experience of the last three weeks may be too intense to digest in blog format at right now, if at all. Politically, I thought we should have held out a bit longer; personally, in lots of ways I'm glad to be done, though there's also a bit of post-partum letdown having gotten done with something big and intense. In addition to that, there was a lot of political conflict and interpersonal nastiness. (Much of the former and some of the latter I had a role in; I don't want to give the impression that I'm some kind of innocent victim of something completely unexpected, just that both escalated in ways that have left a lot of bitterness among the principals.) I feel like I'm recovering, trying to reorient to being an academic again, and running up against the whole difficulty of giving myself structure in a position where there's not a lot of external structure I have to conform to immediately. This has always been a challenge for me, but now - more than a year removed from my last non-writing seminar, without even a writing group or anything to keep me focused, it is hard to avoid periods of wool-gathering. Anyway, perhaps I'll just chalk the last couple of weeks up to being a time of transition and hope that I can get focused soon.
Oh, if you want to check out the online TV, check out http://www.myp2p.eu/index.htm or http://livetv.ru/en/. The praying mantis program is over, so I think I should be going.