Saturday, January 22, 2005

Oh Hello, And You Are...

I know, I've been gone far too long, but the week's just been too bizarre. The kids ended up having the same stomach flu that floored me and JL, but luckily to a lesser extent of vomitus and poopitus. Still unpleasant as hell to have to deal with sick children, though. You never realize how vulnerable you are until you have sick children because there's so little you can do for them. Well, of course there's Pedialyte and fluids and plenty of rest, but you can't suck the viruses out of them and make them better instantly. You can't give them their appetite back. But they got better, and now this stomach flu has come full circle and finally hit my wife. A week later, she's feeling the same symptoms, and she had to come home from work sick today, which means that we have together lost 17 hours of work this week because of the flu. See the other thing about us is that if one of us is sick, the other has to stay home and take care of the babies, so it's not like we can even make it up. In fact, I was supposed to work my makeup shift tonight but since my wife was not feeling too well, I had to wrangle young'uns tonight.

Tonight my wife wanted to watch some baby videos, so I popped in a DVD and there it was, some kind of infinity effect because Alex, watching from his high chair, was watching himself on video, who was in turn watching himself on video crawling about the park. It boggles the brain.

Also, yes, we finally got Satellite TV installed, and I have to say I'm about 80 percent happy. The picture quality is either the same or actually, even a little worse than cable. I think the issue is that cable comes through as an analog signal, so there's that. The Satellite signal is digital, but I think the compression issue makes the picture seem a little... artifact-ish. My wife doesn't notice it, and I doubt that 90 percent of people would notice it. I do because I work with video, and I can spot if something's off. Also, changing channels produces a bit of a pause in surfing, meaning that once you change the channel, there's about a second of black screen before the channel pops up. People who've had cable boxes would remember that. A second doesn't seem like much, you think, but it does annoy me immensely because it would take me almost 3 or 4 seconds just to glance at a channel. And also, having to pay an additional 5 dollar fee per month for an additional receiver that I was trying not to do bugs me too. I'm working on that problem.

That said, I love the features a lot. On screen displays means that whenever you change the channels, it'll list the title of the show, and how much time is left for that show. That made my wife pretty happy. Also, perhaps to make up for the slow surfing, is a browsing feature. Basically, you can browse through other channels while still watching the current channel, through an on-screen display and with the aforementioned titles. If you find something else, like The Simpsons, you can even click on "info" to get the summary of that particular episode to see if you've seen it before. And then you can just go directly to The Simpsons. So, it's Channel surfing without the epileptic channel changing, which I suppose is neat. Also, there's an on-screen guide that lets you see all the shows that are on, and in the future. This is handy in between commercials too, because I can literally look around, find something else to watch once The Simpsons ends, and then set a timer. Once Simpsons ends, the TV will automatically switch to that channel. It is that cool. And of course, DVR, which is like Tivo. I haven't used it in a practical sense quite yet, just once. But it's neat because I got to watch a show that played at 7 am, and also recorded a bunch of other stuff I don't stay up late enough to watch, for later.

But that's all, really. Just getting sick, taking care of sick people, and watching TV. Life is exciting! Called on a Production Assistant position today, but it didn't pan out because it was a volunteer position. Just don't have the time for something like that if it doesn't pay...

I feel a baby post coming on.

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