James's Weblog

On CableCARD impressions:

• It’s been suggested to me that CableCARDs might seem to have a high defect rate because the process self-selects defective cards. If a customer has issues with one, the cable company probably can’t tell if the card is actually faulty, so it likely throws the card back into the pool of available ones rather than returning it to the manufacturer. This means that if a cable company gives you an unboxed card, it’s probably one that someone else already returned.
• After trying a Comcast set-top box at relatives’ houses, I think as annoying as it is for the TiVo HD to list channels I don’t receive, I’m grateful that I at least can hide them manually. Comcast set-top boxes don’t offer even that. (I’m not sure if they can hide the adult programming channels from appearing in the guide either.)

On Government bureaucracy in action:

• And almost exactly a year after the last jury summons, my dad received another one. At least he didn’t receive an absentee ballot this time.

On Exit excitement:

• I’ve recently discovered that the answer is: no, I haven’t.

• I have no idea why CableCARD has such weird capitalization.
• It’s surprising how CableCARDs—solid state PCMCIA devices—seemingly can have such a defect rate. Most people I know who’ve tried to set up a CableCARD have had to exchange them at least once. Also, since CableCARDs must be paired with the device they’re connected to, it’s hard for Comcast to test them beforehand, and it’s easy for them to shift blame to the device manufacturer.
• I think it’s funny that the Fremont Comcast office has a wall of televisions in its customer service lobby, but they’re all standard-definition CRTs. There’s not a single high-definition television in sight.
• Comcast’s website is really confusing, and they do an awful job of explaining the differences between different plans.
• The non-local HD channels that Comcast carries seemingly are from Eastern feeds and aren’t time-delayed for Pacific time. What the heck? On one hand, I guess it (sort of) increases the available choices of what to watch when, but on the other, I think it’s confusing. It’s not like this is the Central time zone, which is accustomed to being the Eastern time zone’s gimp.
• It’s annoying that the TiVo HD lists hundreds of channels I don’t actually get; can’t the CableCARD figure that out? Or maybe Comcast intentionally wants to show people all the channels they could be getting if they signed up for a more expensive plan.
• TBS’s stretch-o-vision is lame. I don’t know how people stand it. Their argument about not confusing viewers with pillarboxing would hold more water if every HD channel did the same thing, but luckily most channels aren’t that stupid. So instead people end up with a mixture of pillarboxed 4:3 content on some channels and distorted 4:3 content on others, which is more confusing. If they want to avoid complaints about black bars, they could do what ESPN sometimes does and show big station logos on the sides. I’d even prefer (non-animated) banner ads.

I never really spent much time watching the Olympics, but this year I watched it every day, partly because it happened to be in China, partly because only recently have I been able to watch HDTV programming, so watching everything in high definition still seems novel.

• The opening ceremony was very impressive, but why did China have to taint it with the digital doctoring?
• The new gymnastics scoring system is totally broken. Laypeople can’t relate to the scores and have no idea what’s good or bad. This was even worse for the team and all-around competitions since not all gymnasts performed the same exercise at the same time and each exercise had its own baseline for difficulty scores. I also think the difficulty scores get way too much weight. And, of course, the tie-breaking system is a joke.
• The outfits that the U.S. women’s gymnastics team wore made them look like Coca-Cola cans with blond ponytails.
• The linesmen who run up to the javelins and shot-put balls as they’re landing are nuts.
• I think I liked it better when the Summer and Winter Olympics were in the same year. I think having Olympic games every other year is too frequent and takes some of the magic out of it; I remember the 1984 and 1988 games seeming more special. (Of course, that might be because they happened to be the first two that I have any recollection of, and the competition between the two sides of the Iron Curtain heightened some of the drama.) Plus, they got to distract everyone from all the presidential politicking.
• Isn’t this a perfect opportunity for NBC affiliates to do something useful with their other digital subchannels instead of showing around-the-clock HD weather reports?
• Why were events shown live in the Eastern Time Zone (and presumably in the Central Time Zone) but not for the rest of the U.S.? Meanwhile people on the west coast had three extra hours for various newscasters and websites to spoil results for them.

I swear, someone on NBC’s Heroes must have the power to make everyone stupid.

(Some spoilers are below.)

The season had some hints of grand designs, but unfortunately the writers’ strike obviously made the later episodes rushed and a bit incohesive and made the finale totally anticlimactic. It was missing much of the excitement from the first season, I guess partly because there weren’t any compelling villains: Adam just didn’t seem very threatening, Sylar was impotent, the Nightmare Man was a big loser, and the Company was in shambles. One would think that Adam would have accumulated at least as much power, knowledge, and influence as Linderman over the years.

I wonder how long they’re going to milk the “I went to the future and saw the apocalypse, now we need to stop it” pattern.