A dose of television slumber

Come slumber with long vision

Televisions determine where I sleep in my home and that has been the case for years and for a very long time.

A few months ago, my Philips combination television and video cassette recorder in my little bedroom just died, I believe it is the fuse that needs changing, even though I did study electrical/electronic engineering, the last time I looked in the back of a television or cathode ray tube type monitor was probably more than 20 years ago.

I follow the basic instruction that there are no user serviceable parts to play with and consider the matter of replacement whilst sending the old box to the recycling dump for scavenging in the unfortunate places where the material might well be considered valuable.

Sleeping rough at home

The loss of the television meant I moved to my living room where I had a self-inflating mattress for a bed for quite a few months – I sleep with my lights on and to the sound of the television – and though I did without all this in hospital and without television for more than a month after returning home, I am back to that habit and sense of comfort.

For months, I slept “rough” in my living room till I decided to sort out the poor signal to the cable television/Internet socket in the bedroom because the digital television decoder which I acquired almost a year ago could not maintain a connection.

Once I got the plug-in booster I also purchased a basic 24” LCD television with a built-in DVD player and connected up the whole deal only to find out that the digital television decoder had not been registered and enabled by my provider and that will take 72 hours to activate.

All for nothing almost

So, I defaulted to cable and soon found out that my new television could not read channel names off the discovered channels, so I had to rely on visual watermarks to rearrange the channels and I have not yet found out if I could manually label the channels with textual names.

After the 72 hours, I tried the digital television decoder again and it was still saying I was not subscribed to the channels despite the fact that I already had another decoder with digital video recording working in my living room.

As usual, I tried what I had been told before, disconnected the decoder because the smart guys who built it gave it no power switch, on reconnection, the thing had died, probably the fuse – so now, I have to return that decoder in exchange for a new one.

During that week, I resolved to begin to enjoy my home ago and that became my opportunity to move back into my small bedroom and onto my bed again.

Problems with the other television

Meanwhile, my other Sony television which is a cathode ray tube system that I brought over from the UK and then discovered that the PAL system was a group of incompatible systems between countries that I needed a Dutch video cassette recorder to refine the signal for my television, I soon found out that the decoder or even a DVD playback system could refine the signal (Whatever happened to those multi-system televisions of the 1980s that all NTSC, PAL and SECAM systems as default.)

I have had the television for over 10 years, in fact, I still have working gadgets of 16 years, my microwave oven and stereo set, but this morning, I switched on the television and there was a white line at the top of the screen – vertical scan collapse – I thought but why did channel numbers display properly.

All cables to the show

After moving some cables and connections around, I found the television was OK and the problem had to be with the decoder, but the decoder was indicating it could see the channels too.

Switching off the decoder and then switching it back on again meant that my living room has returned to life with a television and there was no need to send two decoders back.

Tomorrow morning I pick up my telephony equipment to connect to cable, I decided not to reconnect my original landline after the telephone company I had been a customer of for 9 and a half years cut my communication off completely – such unsympathetic and heartless businesses do not deserve my custom at all.

The grip television has on us and what really do we watch that is so compelling? You tell me.

Force-fed with Ones and Zeroes

Daytime parcels for night time delivery

Earlier in the week, I picked up a parcel notice from my mailbox. I am still surprised that courier and delivery firms have not cottoned on the fact that the working population in the Netherlands would probably not be at home between 9 to 5, at least the morning shift of 9 to 5 rather than the evening shift of 9 to 5.

I am still of the opinion that evening deliveries is a niche business proposition for any business that decides to get into that business. Basically, everyone with a landline which would be linked to an address can register with a simple code indicating they prefer late deliveries for the period between 20:00 to 22:30.

The information is then accessed by the courier/delivery company when a parcel arrives and for every evening delivery request there is aa annual subscription for the search and a charge for the delivery. The money people can sort out the best pricing model.

So, if anything as big as a thimble is addressed to me, I need to find time to go down to the main post/parcel point with my passport and the parcel notice, it cannot fit in my postbox.

Persons Unknown in silly databases

In the Netherlands, you can put two notices on your postbox latch, No to flyers and unsolicited mail and No to trash – a good deal of what I pick up invites my wife for a beauty treatment amongst other things. I have taken the stuff upstairs but I am yet to find my wife – they must know something I don’t – in my conscious life, I have never been married.

So, the day I got a cold call asking to speak to Mrs Yours Truly, I simply told the caller to stop trying to have an affair with my wife and never ever to call this number again. That serves 2 purposes, a salutary warning that would reverberate and the conscious effort to expunge my name from their databases at best or an annotation – crazy man, don’t call him.

Before my visit, I can check on the Internet to see if the parcel is on location or still in some delivery truck doing an Amsterdam tour from a postman’s perspective.

Big Parcel Big Surprise

So, after showing the post counter my parcel notice and passport the postman produced a rather huge box from UPC – my jaw scraped the ground – I stuttered in bewilderment – I never ordered that.

So, the postman said, UPC (the cable company that delivers my cable TV and Internet services) has been delivering digital media boxes to all addresses with the 6-month free offer which switches to an extra EUR 2 thereafter.

However, if I do not want the service they would return the box at no cost to me. Decision time – I agree to take the box, next problem how to ride back home with a box under one of my midget arms.

My television which is just under 10 years old, was purchased in the UK and it does not work in the Netherlands because the PAL system is really an array of subsystems that do not work together – the UK uses PAL I and the Netherlands uses PAL B/G.

I have always needed an intermediate Dutch VCR to convert the signal to one my television could show with picture and sound in sync. There was a time in the 80s when televisions had the ability to decode 7 systems, but we have gone backwards on that advancement.

The UPC MediaBox

Do the first thing I did, not knowing if the UPC MediaBox would do the signal decoding was to remove the cheap Dutch VCR which could not even do Long Play – I could not believe after I got the VCR back home that any VCR could leave a factory in the 21^st Century without Long Play – well, you learn.

So, I plug in the Media Box, connect the SCART cables and the RF Input from my cable socket and switch on TV and MediaBox.

All instructions appear in Dutch, I can read more than I have ever been able to speak, so I configured the system which threw up 106 or so channels and a good few radio stations (I eventually found the setting to switch to Engels [English in Dutch]). Within 15 minutes the pictures arrive and now I have to note the new locations of my favourite channels as well as find out about the new ones.

News Overload

As I have often been called a news junkie, I was on the hunt for the additional new channels – now I have BBC World (Balance), CNN (Propaganda), Sky News (General), Fox News (Yankee Tripe), Bloomberg (Staple for Creative Accountants), CNBC (Money talk in strange English) and Al Jazeera (The missing Middle East perspective) – These are my personal views which might not find true with my audience.

Then the Discovery Channel comes in four guises and my TV has been stuck on Discovery Channel – Civilisation feeding my fascination with the Second World War.

It appears you do not have a plasma, high-definition television with ambi-light to go digital – my trusty 28” Sony Television has just had another lease of life as Ones and Zeros get forced down our necks to move us all to Digital Television in the Netherlands.