Michigander in Mass

In an earlier blog, I expressed my deep concern with the future viability of our voting system (see "E-Voting for the Revolution" a third of the way down the page).

I have continued to read the stories and study this, and my concern deepens.

I urge all citizens to study the issues and demand change. One place to start is an FAQ on the "voter-verifiable audit trail" written by the folks at the Verified Voting Foundation.

If this makes sense, endorse the resolution they've written, join, and donate.

I was all set to post a rave review of the new Photo Stamps service from Stamps.com (photo.stamps.com). All set, that is, until one of my photos was rejected.

So lemme get this strait. I can't get them to print a silly picture of my wife, but The Smoking Gun can get Stamps.com to print pictures of Monica Lewinsky's black dress (the one splattered with Bill Clinton's DNA), Linda Tripp, deposed Yugoslavian ethnic cleanser/war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, MIA labor racketeer Jimmy Hoffa, executed Romanian dictator/Communist oppressor Nicolae Ceaucescu, New Jersey Governor James McGreevey and alleged gay lover Golan Cipel, and high school and college yearbook photos of Ted Kaczynski (who used the postal service to deliver his homemade bombs).

You gotta love it.

Am I the only one who thinks that digital cable sucks? Apparently not. tcp1, racial slur aside, nailed the issue on the head in the last (first) post in this thread.

Before you blow a wad of cash on a new HDTV-ready plasma TV, digital cable box, TiVO DVR, etc., consider this (!= means "does not equal" for my non-nerd friends):

Digital Cable != HDTV
Digital Cable != High Quality A/V Signals

Some of the nicest, most expensive televisions out there will display the crappiest digital video signals you've seen since you retired the bunny ears in favor of cable TV.

The problem is, in order to cram more channels into a bandwidth only slightly larger than that allocated for analog signals, you need to compress the video as it's transmitted over the cable system. Any programmer knows the basic principle of GIGA--garbage in, garbage out. When you compress an already limited analog TV signal (NTSC signals are piss-poor to start with), you get a crappy signal when your TV's video processor decompresses it.

And, partly because the original signal was not designed for digital television, you get noticeable distortions in the video, especially when there is a lot of motion or poor contrast in the signal, when the compression technology begins to get taxed. On a regular TV, you may not notice it as much (though I certainly can). On a wide-screen plasma HDTV-ready set, these "artifacts" are painfully obvious.

You won't notice this when you're watching all five or six of the HDTV channels you can get.

However, even your wonderful DVD collection doesn't quite meet the standards of these new displays. You see, DVDs, while certainly a few notches better than NTSC (720x480 vs 500x480), still don't come close to the 1920x1080 pixels supported by the HDTV standard. That means you might be a little disappointed with the DVDs you play--I'm certainly not impressed.

And of course, the industry is embattled over which HD-DVD standard to support. Can you say Beta vs. VHS? DVD-R vs. DVD+R? I knew you could...

And of course, super high-definition television is right around the corner, meaning that--as with buying a new car--the value of your investment will drop as soon as you drive off of Best Buy's lot.

This average Joe will not be keeping up with the Jonses, at least not unless he wins the lottery sometime soon. When we figure out the new DVD standard--just in time for SHD to render it yesterday's technology, then maybe I'll spend the big bucks on my home entertainment center upgrade. Until then, my DVDs still look best on my big, cluncky old Sony Trinitron CRT TV.

And as much as I'd like 15 channels of children's programming (I am a kid at heart, but don't have any of my own yet), I'll stick with my crappy old analog cable service, at least until I can get my favorite history, technology, cartoon, sci-fi and news channels a la carte from digital cable.

At least I did away with my POTS--I'm not a total tech troglodyte.