Month: June 2008

The old 27 inch JVC is hitting the skids… when you turn it on it gets a bright thin line across a dark screen. After you beat on it for 5 minutes, the picture will fire up, and last for the night. I didn’t think I would have to deal with this till February of 2009 (when the analog signal bites the dust).. but realized that I have cable and would be able to put off buying a new tv for ever.

Apparently, the time has come, and it brings with it nothing but problems…

First, I have this neat cherry cabinet the old tv sits in, with shelves for nick nacks and a shelf for vcr tapes (they’re still in there..). There doesn’t seem to be a tv for sale that fits in this hole.. unless you get something smaller than your computer monitor..

Then, down at best buy, they have setup fees (around 200 bucks), because you just can’t take them home and turn them on (like the old one). You have to do all this arcane setting of things so that the image will be viewable!

Then you have to upgrade your cable to get HD.. that ain’t cheap! (But obviously I am…)

Then you gotta upconvert your dvd player…

Then HDMI, what is that all about?

Maybe I can take this thing in to get fixed…?

One of the recent Space Shuttle Discovery’s missions was delivering a new toilet pump to the International Space Station, to fix its troublesome toilet. Watching the docking on Nasa TV http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/ was breathtaking!
It seems space stations have come a long way since the old Salyut and Spacelab days… For instance, the Salyut 6 had 90 sq meters of habital area, ran on 4kw of power, and could barely cram 3 guys inside it.

The present International Space Station, by contrast, has about 700 sq meters of area so far, with another 300 on the way, runs on 110 kw of power, and the new Japanese labs interior can strand an astranaut if he loses a handhold and drifts out into the middle of the room!

These space stations still have their problems tho. Recycling issues, radiation from space, and a lack of gravity still cause health woes…

And they still only have one toilet!

greg