Hold That Thought 2014-12-23

Aleister Crow · Post by **Aleister Crow** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 9:15 am

AnotherFairportfan wrote:
lake_wrangler wrote:I can't help but wonder if the sister chose that very moment to leave on purpose...
Does the sister, perhaps, also attend their school?

Do she and Nadette know each other?

Is it a ... plot?

Plot twist- things do not go as planned and Jacob falls for Nadette.

illiad · Post by **illiad** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 9:48 am

MerchManDan wrote:
illiad wrote:as for "getting into the Christmas spirit" , you don't watch TV??? getting difficult to find something *non-christmas* to watch...
If you mean me, I cancelled my cable TV a couple of months ago to reduce the monthly bill. Truly, if not for that I'd have been camped out on the futon for hours, several times over the past couple of weeks.

what, no free broadcasts over there??

y'know, needing an aerial, like in UK... :p

donoho · Post by **donoho** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 10:43 am

Clearly she was not sufficiently briefed on the power of the 8 Ball T. I'm thinking it's a bit overkill for their first encounter.

jwhouk · Post by **jwhouk** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 10:55 am

I'm smelling a setup. As in, Randi (who may be a seer as well - I mean, what a perfect name for someone who could see things, right?) and Nadette know each other.

Heck, I'm starting to thing Randi and Jacob might be fill-in-the-blank-morphs, like the twins.

lake_wrangler · Post by **lake_wrangler** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 11:29 am

illiad wrote:
MerchManDan wrote:
illiad wrote:as for "getting into the Christmas spirit" , you don't watch TV??? getting difficult to find something *non-christmas* to watch...
If you mean me, I cancelled my cable TV a couple of months ago to reduce the monthly bill. Truly, if not for that I'd have been camped out on the futon for hours, several times over the past couple of weeks.
what, no free broadcasts over there?? y'know, needing an aerial, like in UK... :p

Oh, those still exist, but now you need a special antenna, since the Digital Television Transition... Many people, my mom included, figured it was easier to just start getting digital cable, rather than bother with the special digital to analog converter box needed to still use an aerial...

AmriloJim · Post by **AmriloJim** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 12:14 pm

lake_wrangler wrote:
illiad wrote: what, no free broadcasts over there?? y'know, needing an aerial, like in UK... :p
Oh, those still exist, but now you need a special antenna, since the Digital Television Transition... Many people, my mom included, figured it was easier to just start getting digital cable, rather than bother with the special digital to analog converter box needed to still use an aerial...

You only need a D>A converter if you're using an analog receiver (usually with a 4:3 aspect screen). True digital receivers feature 16:9 aspect 'widescreen' displays. Analog antennas can work with digital signals, just not as efficiently. Digital over-the-air signals tend to require antennae aimed directly at the transmitter, which means rotating the antenna for optimal performance is the only way to avoid signal drops.
EDIT: Most cable systems still provide a basic analog tier for those who haven't acquired digital sets.

scantrontb · Post by **scantrontb** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 12:47 pm

illiad wrote:as for "getting into the Christmas spirit" , you don't watch TV??? getting difficult to find something *non-christmas* to watch...

that's what DVD's are for!!

MerchManDan wrote:If you mean me, I cancelled my cable TV a couple of months ago to reduce the monthly bill. Truly, if not for that I'd have been camped out on the futon for hours, several times over the past couple of weeks.

pretty much the same here. when i was in the Navy back in 98 and went on a deployment, my roommate realized he was sitting in front of the tube more and more each day, leaving less and less time to do his job (taxi driver) so he ended up cancelling it. we haven had cable, newspapers, or anything since then. Broadcast TV in our area sucks due to bad reception, and we just never felt the need to get a convertor box in the first place.... besides any kind of shows/ movies that we'd want to see are on DVD/BD. i know he likes to stream them on hulu? or whatever, to get them sooner than me, i don't think he does netflicks, but he might, I'm not sure.

that said, yes i remember the scene in question and yes, it does look like that

Thor · Post by **Thor** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 12:54 pm

Thor wrote:I'm still hoping that the one that stopped him in his tracks is Nadette, because that would just be too delicious.

Aleister Crow wrote:Plot twist- things do not go as planned and Jacob falls for Nadette.

Sigh.

meisdadoo · Post by **meisdadoo** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 1:19 pm

shadowinthelight wrote:Uh oh, they've both been stricken with whatever was making my computer at work crash repeatedly today.

you really should stay off of "those" websites. . .LOL ( I keed, I keed)

Yup their brains are trying to run "Intelligent friendly conversation" and just getting the 404, file not found, please wait. . . . .

kingklash · Post by **kingklash** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 2:53 pm

This conversation needs a side order of Pickle to get it rolling.

illiad · Post by **illiad** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 4:27 pm

AmriloJim wrote:
lake_wrangler wrote:
illiad wrote: what, no free broadcasts over there?? y'know, needing an aerial, like in UK... :p
Oh, those still exist, but now you need a special antenna, since the Digital Television Transition... Many people, my mom included, figured it was easier to just start getting digital cable, rather than bother with the special digital to analog converter box needed to still use an aerial...
You only need a D>A converter if you're using an analog receiver (usually with a 4:3 aspect screen). True digital receivers feature 16:9 aspect 'widescreen' displays. Analog antennas can work with digital signals, just not as efficiently. Digital over-the-air signals tend to require antennae aimed directly at the transmitter, which means rotating the antenna for optimal performance is the only way to avoid signal drops.
EDIT: Most cable systems still provide a basic analog tier for those who haven't acquired digital sets.

yeah.. don't believe the hype... In UK, there were many salesmen trying to sell 'digital aerials' ... A load of BS... I am just south of London, so I am still using the aerial that came with the house I bought 20 years ago!!
-- dont get a 'cheap' DA converter, even if it does get a good signal, it will mostly fail in a year!

I dont know where you guys live, is it similar there??

Oh yeah, HULU and netflicks...

not available or too expensive over here...

Opus the Poet · Post by **Opus the Poet** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 4:52 pm

In the US the bandwidth that used to be used by TV was sold to the highest bidder(s) for other purposes, and old style antennae no longer pick up anything useful for watching TV even with a converter. The only type I have seen is a phased array flat panel that works like the old "rabbit ears" found on portable TVs back in the day.

illiad · Post by **illiad** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 4:58 pm

well that seems about it then ...

thing is I heard ages ago it was 'ad-break'ed to death, a bit like some channels here..

oldmanmickey · Post by **oldmanmickey** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 5:08 pm

Yall sounding more and more like me. Where i live in the good ole USA got no cable, dsl or anything like that available. I am forced to use a sat uplink for tv and internet, not the best of choices take my word for it.

Sidhekin · Post by **Sidhekin** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 5:26 pm

Sheesh. Who has time for TV?!

oldmanmickey · Post by **oldmanmickey** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 5:50 pm

retired, finally has time to catch up on tv shows and movies missed over last 58 years. lol

Warrl · Post by **Warrl** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 6:53 pm

oldmanmickey wrote:Yall sounding more and more like me. Where i live in the good ole USA got no cable, dsl or anything like that available. I am forced to use a sat uplink for tv and internet, not the best of choices take my word for it.

We used to see lots of ads from our cable company telling us all the horrible problems we'd have if we dropped them and went to satellite...

... thing is, we had all those problems with our cable company.

So we switched to satellite, and they stopped.

Of course, even then we had trouble with the cable company a few months later. For logistic reasons the cable from our satellite dish into our apartment ran nearly halfway around the apartment building. This included going past - not connecting to - some cable-company equipment on the end of the building. The cable company, in the course of an upgrade of THEIR equipment, cut OUR cable, put connectors on the ends, and locked the ends inside THEIR box. It took a few strongly-worded comments from the owner of the complex to get them to rush out and fix it. Comments like "Gee, maybe I should provide satellite-TV connections for the entire complex."

Post by **Dave** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 7:00 pm

Opus the Poet wrote:In the US the bandwidth that used to be used by TV was sold to the highest bidder(s) for other purposes, and old style antennae no longer pick up anything useful for watching TV even with a converter. The only type I have seen is a phased array flat panel that works like the old "rabbit ears" found on portable TVs back in the day.

In the U.S., the upper portion of the UHF band was sold off for other uses. And, most of the stations which were previously on the VHF channels (2-13) have moved up into the UHF band... even if their "channel numbers" are still in the lower range, the frequencies they use have changed. The lower VHF frequencies may be sold for other purposes at some point, but it hasn't happened yet (and since they're rather noise-prone they aren't terribly popular).

The old-style (big) "log-periodic" UHF/VHF antennas do still work here in the U.S., since the digital-TV transmissions are still taking place in a part of the spectrum that they were designed to cover. I have a big old ChannelMaster on my roof, and when properly aimed towards a transmitter it receives digital TV just fine... we get the San Francisco stations (40 miles) quite well. They tend to have only a limited amount of gain, though. And, a really old VHF-only (channels 2-13) antenna won't be very useful anywhere.

Digital-TV signals do tend to "fall off a cliff" when the signal deteriorates enough. With analog TV you'd often get a tolerable picture (with some "snow" and "ghosts") but the same station's digital-TV carrier just won't decode well enough to be receivable. Digital-TV decoders tend to have a difficult time with multipath reflection (which causes "ghosts" on analog signals), especially if the multipath is changing from moment to moment (due e.g. to planes flying by, trees moving in the wind, etc.). Omnidirectional antennas have no ability to reject multipath, and so often aren't a good choice.

So, having a highly-directional antenna, mounted up as high as you can manage, and aimed in the right direction (a remote-controlled antenna rotator can be a big help) is probably the best way to get a good digital-TV signal. In many areas of the country, where all of the stations are on UHF, you can often get by with either one of the small "bow-tie and flat metal-mesh reflector" antennas (often sold as "digital TV" antennas), or a fairly small log-periodic "beam" antenna. In a few areas of the country, where there are still a few stations transmitting on VHF, you need a bigger antenna with longer elements that can receive the lower frequencies. An old-style log-periodic still works fine for these if you aren't too far from the transmitter.

The Gray-Hoverman UHF antenna design is a pretty decent one, and it's one that a hobbyist can make quite easily. Lots of gain!

MerchManDan · Post by **MerchManDan** » Tue Dec 23, 2014 9:16 pm

kingklash wrote:This conversation needs a side order of Pickle to get it rolling.

Oh sure. I've always wanted to see if a webcomic character can actually die of embarrassment.

Yamara · Post by **Yamara** » Wed Dec 24, 2014 12:51 am

Otpu wrote:If extreme arousal causes paranormals to lose humaform
control maybe we get to see what Jacob's natural form is
tomorrow.

I'll bet he's a ginger.

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