Blog: Archive for March, 2003

Our TV died today. I was in the other room, but apparently it was fine and then it started displaying a wide horizontal white band. No sound, either.

M thought the TiVo had died, and tried switching channels to no avail. Tried the DVD player and VCR, too. Sigh.

Of course now probably isn't the best time to be buying a television. The government is pushing to force broadcasters to go digital, and broadcasters and manufacturers are dragging their heels. Most television is broadcast in the standard 4:3 ratio we all grew up with, but cool DVDs and HDTV use 16:9. Choosing now is kind of hopeless, although not quite as bad as buying a cellular telephone, as we're promised workarounds for everything now available to keep it all working once we're past the digital singularity.

We've been to a bunch of stores and done a ton of research online. There are damn few TVs worth having, from what I can tell, but strong in the running after our first night were a 32" Sony widescreen plasma TV ($4500), a 27" and 24" Sony tube TV ($400-600), a Samsung 30" widescreen ($1000), and a couple of others.

We live in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, which was all we could find when we first came down here from Vancouver to find a place to live in a week. It's not ideal, but we don't spend a huge amount of time there, and we haven't, so far, been bothered enough to actually leap into the void and do the house thing.

Anyway, with the size of our place we can't really have a big 4:3 TV. Not so much because of the screen size, although we would have to rearrange our furniture to get further away from a larger screen, but because of the depth of the set, which would put the front of the set even closer to where we sit. Even if we could, I don't think we'd want one. But a widescreen TV might be doable, as I don't think that it's quite as overwhelming as a huge 4:3 TV would be.

So I was really excited about getting a widescreen HDTV TV of some sort. We looked at a bunch of sets, and by the end of the night I was surprised to find that M was even seriously considering a plasma TV.

The problem, though, as we found after a bunch of tinkering with various sets, is that watching regular television on a widescreen TV is pretty lame—you've got huge black bars on either side and a pretty small picture (with a 30" 16:9 display, I think the effective size of a regular 4:3 image is equivalent to a much smaller regular TV). If you want to use the whole screen, you can zoom in on the image and lose the top and bottom, or you can stretch the image horizontally, and all the people look like they're four feet wide and weigh 2 tons.

Not only that, but it turns out that plasma TVs actually suck, anyway. They have a very noticeable grid effect that you can easily see from regular viewing distances, even with HDTV signals. (There was a hockey game playing with a lot of white ice and a lot of moving stuff.) So they don't really look much better than a tube TV, but cost four to eight times as much. (Their big advantage is that they're only a few inches deep, which would allow us to fit one into our apartment easily.)

The next best thing would be a large LCD, but those have their own problems, mostly to do with fast motion causing blurry images—the same things that people complain about when they talk about LCDs not being good enough for games. (My general impression from the LCD computer monitors I've been working with lately is that they're way better than they were. The LCD TVs, though, don't seem to have kept up as well.)

So back to tubes. There aren't very many widescreen tube TVs that are smaller than 32", which is too huge. In fact, I think there's one: a 30" Samsung. Unfortunately, that set turns out to only have one S-video input, cleverly located on the side near the front so that you can connect your camcorder or video games or something. Since we currently have three things we might want to drive the TV at their best possible output options—the Tivo, which has S-video; the DVD player, which has component video; and the VCR, which has composite video, the Samsungs are out.

So we started looking at 4:3 TVs again. After much web searching, M was pretty excited about a 27" HDTV-capable Philips set ($800), with lots of inputs and capable of doing something with the DVD player's progressive scan output. After a bit of poking around and discussion, she even managed to convince me that it was a pretty good choice, but after we got home she started backpedalling and talking about getting an ordinary 24" TV, which led to an argument and, finally, our just dropping the whole discussion for the last couple of days.

So at the moment my new computer is headless (and therefore fairly useless), and we're using my monitor for video and the stereo for sound. I don't know what we'll end up doing in the end.

Dave Hyatt on tabbed browsing. Interesting stuff, especially his discussion of the different ways that tabs can be (and have been) implemented.

When I first came across the idea of tabs, I thought they were ridiculous. After all, I had a reasonably large screen, and I could just open separate windows. But when you start looking at pages with multiple related links, or when you're browsing through documentation, it's really nice to be able to pop those links open in separate tabs within the same window, thereby giving you a bit of organization you wouldn't have otherwise.
Via Slashdot.

Expedia's site is confusing. When you're booking a flight, it presents you with a list of possible flights at different times and on different airlines, each with its own price. You choose one of those and go on to a page presenting similar information for your return flight, including the prices again. A naive user (*waves*) might be excused for believing that each leg of the flight has a separate charge, meaning that an estimate would be twice as high as the actual cost. (Going all the way through the selection process gives you the correct total, of course.)

Off to Seattle. By 'plane, always an enjoyable experience in our post-9/11 world.

As usual, the smaller airports are more paranoid than the big ones (presumably because they have fewer passengers, and can therefore devote more resources per passenger to harassment). This time, I was flagged because I was carrying—get this—nail clippers. I'd already taken my tiny Swiss Army knife and my metal nail file out of my purse and stowed them in my checked luggage. But nail clippers, I thought, were safe. Apparently not. At least, not if they were “too big”, because, apparently, some nail clippers have knives on them. As if I'd be dumb enough to try to carry something like that onto a 'plane.

But, still, they had to see the clippers for themselves. But I couldn't just get them out and show them to the inspector. No, I might pull them out and menace the entire airport with a knife that could be, oh, an inch long? So I had to stand on one side of a table while an inspector gingerly poked at my luggage, being rebuked every time I tried to help him get to their location. Oh, yes, and smile and be polite and thank him for searching my luggage.

Needless to say, there was no knife, so I was allowed to proceed, clippers and all, to the gate, where M and I sat and made snide remarks about the useless security as we watched other, more unfortunate passengers trying to get their shows back on, or threading their belts back through the belt loops of their pants.

After the usual interminable wait, we got on the plane, flew off to Seattle, arrived safely, got our rental car, drove it around the garage and back to its spot, traded it for an ever-so-slightly-smaller rental car, and headed off to B & J's house.

Off to Portland for a hockey game between B & J's beloved Seattle Thunderbirds and their main rivals, Portland's Winterhawks. The teams had played in Seattle on Friday, and Seattle had won. Feelings were running high, and B & J's Seattle jerseys drew some attention from the home team's fans. Luckily, we were sitting near lots of other Thunderbirds fans, so no one tried to attack them (or us).

Hockey is wacky. I hadn't seen a game since I was a really little kid, and remembered almost nothing about it. It's fast—the players are all whizzing around at high speed, skating full-out towards the puck, then backwards to keep an eye on things. The puck itself is tiny—about three inches in diameter—and devilishly hard to keep track of, especially at first.

After a late start, involving breakfast around two or three o'clock in the afternoon, M and I spent a long time wandering around this fantastic toy store a couple of blocks away from B & J's house. We were on our way into the nearby grocery store to fulfill our original mission—buying orange juice—when we realized we needed to get back immediately, lest B & J leave for the Thunderbirds game without us.

Luckily, they'd waited, and we tore along Seattle's streets, arriving at their favorite parking garage just in time to miss out on their preferred parking spot. Superstitious grumblings about doom for their team proved unfounded, as the Thunderbirds beat the Spokane team 6 to 1, with 5 goals in the first period. This game was a lot more exciting than the Portland game—I'm not sure whether that was because of our seats, which were much closer to the action (only five or six rows above the ice) or because the teams were more into it.

I still maintain that hockey would be more exciting if it was accompanied by seat-shaking dance music for the whole game, instead of just during the breaks while the teams lined up for a face off.

We hit downtown Seattle. My main goal is checking out the bags at the new Tom Bihn store; everything else is gravy.

I had been looking at the bags from Tom Bihn for a couple of years. Brian got himself a Brain Bag to carry around his laptop and a bunch of other equipment. I was in the market for a briefcase format bag to replace my Novell briefcase, which was pretty awkward, most notably because it didn't have a compartment you could pop a book into without opening the main flap, and because without the flap closed with at least one of the two clips, picking it up caused it to hang badly.

Anyway, I had been looking at the Empire Builder. I had some worries, though, as the FAQ warned about it being kind of large for people my size. Then came the ID, which was smaller, and also came in some interesting colors.

I probably would have bought one around Thanksgiving last year, but we ended up not going to Seattle after all. After getting back from the UK, I asked B to check the bags out in the Seattle store, which wasn't far from his office. He gave me some useful information, but I still wasn't sure. Then M suggested going to Seattle over spring break, and I decided that the most sensible thing to do was to check them out myself.

It turned out that the Empire Builder was pretty big—not its height and width so much as its depth: the bag has padding so that it stays a few inches deep even when unloaded. I suspect that if I ever filled it, I wouldn't be able to move it.

The ID, however, is small, and the colors turned out to be even more interesting then they looked on the website. (I got the one with the purple patch on the outside and the wasabi (gold/green) interior.)

And I got to meet that man himself—Tom Bihn was running the store that morning, and we spent about twenty minutes talking to him about the impending war and America's place in the world.

This day was one of the finest I've ever seen in my visits to Seattle—no rain! Sun! But still pleasantly cool. Definitely my favorite weather in months.

Needless to say, the fine weather made our visit to the Space Needle worthwhile. We could actually see for miles and miles, and M took a number of panoramas. B was asked to take pictures by several groups of people, despite his claims that he was a terrible photographer.

We also spent a fair amount of time in Pike Place Market. We ate lunch at the Pike Pub, then wandered around the Market. We looked at reproduction and original posters in one shop, pen and ink drawings in another, and cloisonne jewelry in another.

We also hit REI, a cooperative based in Seattle that sells equipment for camping, rock and mountain climbing, skiing, bicycling, kayaking, and so forth. I had joined years ago, but hadn't kept my address up to date with them. After some searching around, they actually found my records under my Canadian address.

I had been hoping to get a fleece I could keep in my office, but everything I looked at was either a pullover (hard to slip on and off) or, well, a bit too sporty. The best example of the latter category was a jacket in an interesting pinky-purple color. Alas, when worn it bore a startling resemblance to a uniform from a recent vintage Star Trek.

Off to the new Washington State Historical Museum in Tacoma. The museum itself was okay—a bit heavy on the “white folks killed the Indians” guilt trip—but it had some interesting exhibits about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and a surprising amount of material about Hanford's nuclear work.

Back from Seattle!

We did the Seattle Underground tour, which was both fun and interesting. Having read about Seattle's crazy history, I never quite understood how things worked; the tour helped a lot.

Despite being built on a mudflat, Seattle, it seems, burned down. Business owners wanted to rebuild immediately in stone and steel to prevent future fires from wiping them out. The city council and engineer, however, saw the fire as a great opportunity to completely remake the city by pushing the hills down to the city's site, raising the city's core, along with much more land, above sea level so that flooding wouldn't be a problem in the future.

Both sides did what they wanted—the merchants built their shops and hotels of stone, and the city went ahead with the regrading. Walls were built a few feet away from the buildings' walls, and the space between them was filled in to form the street, a dozen feet or more above the sidewalks—and the first floors of the buildings!

After a number of people had died (from “involuntary suicide”), they decided it was time to cover the original sidewalks with new sidewalks at the same level as the streets. The main entrances moved up to the second floors of the buildings, but the original first floors and sidewalks were still used, especially during the Yukon gold rush (during which, apparently, Seattle fleeced every miner it could). In the early twentieth century the underground was closed (because of fears of bubonic plague), but it was “rediscovered” when Bill Spiedel started tours to help get Seattlites interested in getting Pioneer Square on the historic preservation rolls.

Less fun was the trip to the airport. We wanted to be sure to get gas before returning the rental car (lest we pay $5 a gallon—European gas prices!), which led M to suggest going via 99 instead of 5. Alas, we were a block from the only downtown onramp, and turned the wrong way from the garage. After a frustrating and unpleasant tour of Harbor Island, we ended up back downtown, on the 99, and on our way. Part of the confusion came from the fact that Seattle has two large airports located fairly close together—Boeing Field and SeaTac. As we were using a map that had been refolded to expose two panels at a time, all I could see was Boeing Field, which I took to be our destination. Only when I unfolded the map a bit more did I realize my mistake.

Needless to say, we made it to the airport, checked in the car, and rushed to the check in desk. We were able to get seats together (in the last row), and then went through security to wait by the gate. Every television in the airport (and there were a lot) was tuned to news of the war, which was about to start. Correspondents excitedly reeled off lists of weapon systems they expected to be used during the opening days of the war.

Once on the plane, we had a bit more insight into the true effectiveness of airport security. Being in the back of the plane, near the flight attendants' seats, we got to hear both sides of a little situation—it seems that two men had been assigned the same seat. After questioning them, the flight attendants figured out that one of them had checked in first; the other had checked in with the touch screens, then gone to the counter to try to switch his seat. One was named “Barton”; one “Braton” (or something like that). Apparently the counter person picked the wrong name, assigned the second guy to the first guy's seat, and issued a boarding pass with the wrong name on it. Despite a number of ID checks before boarding the plane, the guy with the mismatched ID and boarding pass had never been questioned, let alone stopped.

Oh, well. As long as things look secure, right?

Saw one of the Goodyear blimps doing crazy maneuvers—diving and climbing and making sharp turns—over Cable Field. My guess is that they're training a new pilot. I'm jealous.

I've never seen a blimp maneuvering like that—usually they're just puttering along sedately. I had seen a television program showing the controls and the blimp's reactions, however, so I could tell what was going on. It's still pretty amazing to see a blimp pointing downwards at about 45 degrees and powering down toward the ground.

Our new TV, a Philips, was delivered today. It's amazingly better than the Sony—images are smooth and clear where the Sony had very visible horizontal lines and tended to look a bit “flashy”. M's theory is that the Sony tube was designed to work well with digital signals, where it wouldn't have to deal with interlacing, and thus uses a phosphor coating that fades more quickly. (DVDs looked pretty good on the Sony, but regular TV looked terrible.)

The Philips even has a pretty good set of speakers. Maybe not quite as nice as the Sony's, but still very adequate.