Televison Signals

You can probably tell your age by how you remember receiving television signals(or not). Today, we made a change that made me reflect on how old I am in terms of television signals. We no longer get a signal over the air rather through the telephone line. I remember not having any television signal in the '40's. Then we got our first black and white television in the early '50's. The screen was small, very snowy and had a lot of ghosts. There were only two VHF stations in our reception area. Then in the '60's we got our first UHF channel and color broadcast. Also, about this time, I read science fiction about communication satellites in geosynchronous orbits.



Not much changed until the early '80's when we got our first C Band satellite dish that received it signal from those geosynchronous satellites. The dish rotated across the "Clark Belt" from one "bird" to the next. They had names like Galaxy1, Satcom4, Anik2, etc. This was the best time of television for me. It was before signal "scrambling" when you only had to invest in the reception equipment. We received all kinds of channels and rarely had any reception issues. Then came scrambling. We went through several iterations. Then we got Ku band which ushered in smaller dishes.



This allowed a stationary dish to get programmimg from more than one nearby satellite and brought in the age of Dish network and Direct TV as competitors of the cable companies.
Now, I am watching digital High Definition Television over telephone wires. The bandwidth of Hog Wallow Switch #2 is increasing. Occasionally, I even watch TV on the internet. As TV signals have evolved, so have the costs. However, the programming hasn't improved as much as the signal that carries it.

Gong Xi Fa Cai

Jan. 26 ushers in the Chinese Lunar New Year, beginning with the new moon and ending 15 days later with the full moon. According to the 12-year animal cycle, we are entering the Year of the Ox. In Vietnam Tet celebrated the Lunar New Year with the same 12 year cycle as the Chinese and the same animal symbols. Some of the most deadly periods of the Vietnam War were during the "tet offensives".
This is year 4707 which means the Chinese have been celebrating the Lunar New Year over two and half millennium before Christ. So, "Gong Xi Fa Cai" which translates as "wishing you to be prosperous in the coming year."

Stump Flower Pot

While I was sitting around looking at seed catalogs and thinking about Spring (less than 2 months calendar time), I decided to get out and try to get a few things ready. I decided to hollow out a couple of stumps with the chain saw and use them for flower pots. I hollowed then down about 10 inches as shown. The problem when you are going below the ground line is that you might hit dirt as I did the second one (circled in red). If you have used a chain saw any at all, you know that once you get in the dirt, you will have to sharpen or change chains, since they won't cut anything after being in the dirt.
I'll update the flower pots in early summer to see what they look like. This should make the stumps rot faster and put a pretty clump of flowers in place of an unsightly stump.

Cabin Fever Diabetic Cake

When you're all cooped up in the winter, sometimes it's difficult to do the right thing. For a diabetic, baking a cake should not be on the "to do" list. However, here is my cabin fever cake. Actually it sounds worse than it is. You start with a Pillsbury Reduced Sugar Cake Mix. I like the devils food. Make it in 4 layers. Ice the layers with sugar free chocolate pudding and then ice the outside with sugar free cool whip. It is delicious, very low sugar and carbs, and helps fight cabin fever. I can have a slice while I look at the seed catalogs and dream of the vegetables to be.

Inaugaration Day

If you're not sure about the poster, Here's the video.



Only time can tell what will be.
I am optimistic.

My Vietnam Magic Carpet Ride

This is an extract that I pulled from a website that I had back in the mid '90s (how time flies). Not many people were into Chaos Theory back then which this article puts a social spin on, but I thought the message was still good today. The original website played a midi version of Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride , but I added the youtube version below.



Chaos Theory says there is a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. In a dynamic (non-linear) system you can expect different outcomes over the same period of time, if you had different initial conditions.
My realities are rooted in the '60s. In this period of American culture we began to realize that there were more questions than answers. As television changed from black and white to color, so did our perceptions of reality. The "black and white" values and norms that had migrated from the agricultural society and pervaded the industrial age, began to take on different hues and tints.
Most of us young males got drafted into military service. Although a few evaded the draft, you could never be sure of any of our motives. Some of us blindly followed the leaders of our country - some relunctantly and some convincingly, while some of us evaded the draft - as shirkers, out of fear, or on higher moral principles. We were all wounded in the process. If you look closely, you can see the scars.
The scars of the '60s include 50,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial, they include a generation that we vowed to raise differently than we were (we weren't sure how to do this and it shows), and now grandchildren that have inherited more of our sins than our blessings.
We were and are a necessary catalyst in the human experience that introduced our species to the societal dimensions of Chaos Theory. For some aspects of this, I feel that I should apologize. It was mentally and emotionally easier to live in the "black and white" linear domain of the past where answers were absolute. However, I also beleive that the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end to the cold war, the increasing environmental awareness, and the World Wide Web that is creating more global awareness are also the result of the different inital conditions we created in the '60s.