Television...

Television (or better known as TV) has been a big part of the US culture for well over 60 years...

We have just passed the 60 year anniversary of the I Love Lucy show...

Shows before that may fade into memory...

I, believe it or not, was too young for the Howdy Doody show... However I do remember such shows as Sky King (already discussed), Beanie and Cecil (a kid with a propeller hat and a dragon type sidekick) along with The Thunderbirds (and other marionette variants)...

However the most dramatic change in my personal TV viewing came late one evening as my mother was watching a new show that was coming in on a UHF translator channel on our main black and white TV... It was snowy and had an interesting story happening where a creature was on the show unmoving yet fading in and out (even more so than the snowy UHF fringe signal we has) which gave it its own transcending and eerie-ness that caused the Sci-Fi in me to get hooked and want ever more... The show was Star Trek...

Of course this was all on the UHF translator channels (the ones number 14 thru 83) with the only television station in the town of Durango, Colorado being KREZ part of the XYZ television network... (An interesting side note how some names were assigned vanity letterings by the FCC... KREX - for Rex Howell in Grand Junction, with KREY Montrose and KREZ - Durango...) which had programming at the stations choices from all three major competing networks ABC, CBS and NBC... This caused time shifting and changes to when shows that competed were moved to other times that did not have much programming...

Then came along CABLE TV...

Oh what changes this caused... of course we had moved to New Mexico by then... and my dad had a different job and a company car... so he decided to splurge on Cable TV... with channels from Los Angeles, California... and to go along with this we even ended up with a Color TV... wow... the Olympics in 1972 were amazing in color compared to black and white... of course the snow was still white...

Then came PAY Channels on Cable TV... HBO, Cinemax, Showtime and The Movie Channel... along with good commercial free channels with older movies American Movie Classis (which evolved into AMC and then has commercials all thru the movie) and Turner Classic movies ... which are still commercial free...

And of course MTV - Music on Television... wow... the first Video was one called Video Killed the Radio Star... of course now MTV rarely plays Music Videos and Sirius Satellite Radio has come back strong with the same Jockeys that started out with MTV now being on Sirius channel 8 for Big 80's... but lets get back on track to TV...

Satellite TV... the big dish era... 6, 8 10, and even 12 foot dishes for Home Reception of TV off of satellite... originally for the distribution of the signal to the cable Company head end (main reception and distribution point for the cable TV companies) locations these were non-encrypted and capable of being received by anyone who wanted to put up a dish and point it at the various satellites to being in the same programming that the Cable Company wanted to charge for... it was determined (and fought for in court) that anything that came into your backyard (that you did not have to decrypt) was free for your watching... the few systems that were initially sold had no bearing on the market until the more complex however easier to use systems came about... Since the satellites were in "Geostationary Orbits" as predicted and written about by Aurthur C. Clarke (famous Sci-Fi writer) this meant that they would be in the same position rotating in orbit around the earth at the same speed as the earth rotated. This allowed them to be able to be found in the sky to allow reception and with the Polar Mount for the ground based dish, the dish would be able to move thru the arc where all of the satellites were located without getting out of alignment... All one had to do then was to correctly align the dish with the arc and when it moved from east to west it would be able to receive signals from each and every satellite in the arc... One satellite in particular (the name fails me now and is not listed as it would have been replaced years ago) had on transponder 1 (transponder is the word for channel on the satellite) had a religious program with a gentleman with a "pork-pie" hat on close-up view reading from the bible directly into the camera. This I used to find the initial alignment for the dishes that I installed... and from there  I was able to tweak in the arc...

Then came Videocypher... an encryption program where IF you purchased the de-cryption box and paid on a per channel basis you could receive the channels that now were encrypted (the HBO and Showtime Channels etc...) that not only slowed the growing home market but was aimed to stem the entrepreneurial types that were gathering the channels for free and starting their own mini- CATV (cable TV) or MATV (master antenna TV) systems and charging the end user for services that they had not paid for themselves... This system was based somewhat on honesty and reported counts of subscribers which still might have not been as accurate as it could have been... of course like anything computer related that has since changed and is corrected...

There was a scam (and I am sure there are others) where you could purchase a unlocked VideoCypher box that would give you all of the channels that you wanted... It of course worked... curiously it also died after the 3 month warranty ran out... It was later discovered that the box that was sold (from out of the USA) was a box that was activated or "turned on" for 3 months and sold to the consumer at a premium of more that the combined price of the activations and the original cost of the box itself... Caveat emptor (buyer beware...)...

Then we come to DBS - Direct Broadcast Satellite... Dish Network and Direct TV (the two main versions left after all the swallowing up of smaller ones) which I shall continue in the next installment...

i.. um..

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...

LOA's - Not to be confused with LOL etc...

LOA - List Of Acronyms

LOA - Letter Of Agency (for the telco to allow someone or comapny to represent the customer)

LOA - Leave Of Absence

LOL - Laugh Out Loud

LOL - Lots Of love (for the older than me generation...)

LMFAO - Music Group whose first release is "Party Rock Anthem"

LMFAO - Laugh My F#@<|"& A$$ Off ( in original relation to the internet and TextSpeak)

ROTFLMFAOWPMP - Well .. that one you need to figure out yourselves... I remember seeing it when a good joke was told...


More to come as this post is in its ultimate infancy... This is noteven the tip of the iceberg...

After this post gets a few more lines written (at least a week from now) when 8 October 2011 arrives then additions will be accepted...

Trying to help with sparks flying and then echoes of a splash...

A story that is true is not really a story but a telling of facts ... so it is better to tell the truth as a story and enjoy it as it flows...

Take the child and the inquisitive mind .... place them in a secluded attic with a power cord for a fan and a common clothing wire hanger...

If you all have noticed (well some of you might not have...) at the plug on the end of a 2 prong power cord the prongs each have a hole just a wee bit bigger than your standard wire hanger...

OK some of you are ahead of me... so here is what happened...

All the time you as a young child are told to not pull on the cord to unplug something ... but instead to pull on the plug itself... then your observation of the plug comes into play ... and with the hanger you look at the plug and realize that if you place the hanger wire thru the holes in the prongs you would have a better way to unplug the plug from the receptacle (outlet...) thus not having damaged the cord...

However... it never came to mind that this would also cause a short circuit of electricity between the prongs using the hanger to make the circuit complete... This caused a flash (almost blinding...) and a not burning sensation to my buttocks but a sense that the spanking I just recieved was definitely earned ... and not in a good way... Luckily there was a fuse (the old screw in kind that I remember seeing on a TV show called Sky King where it was shown that it was not a good idea to defeat the blown fuse by placing a penny behind it... because it caused the barn to burn down when the wires overheated...) that blew... which did annoy my father and caused him to show his determination to assist me in knowing that the use of the hanger to remove the plug from the receptacle was worse than grabbing the cord... and of course that is when my spanking occured...

Another time comes in Eureka, Kansas.... after we had lived at the house for a couple of years my father along with another person were digging up the household sewer drain at the side of the garage due to it having been found to be blocked by something that the roto-rooter machine could not get past...

This again led to my father showing me the errors of my ways when it became known to him (see something that was kept secret but was later revealed...) that a couple of years earlier when we had moved into the house I had found this neat pipe in the ground... and when I dropped a brick down it there was made a neat and echoing splash... so showing off to my friend we dropped another brick down the pipe... but this time the only sound we heard was a dull thud... probably from hitting the other brick... well time to move on... that neat pipe was not as fun anymore... and of course a few years later the seat of my pants were warmed up immensely after my father had finished digging up the pipe and finding not one but two bricks at the bottom of the pipe blocking all the flushing from the house...

All in all I did learn a couple of valuable lessons... electricity can burn two ways ... and even though it might have been a neat noise (the splash) the cost that came after far exceded the enjoyment of the neat noise...

On a related note comes the time I have been informed when I was even younger (1 or 2) and my mother had called my father at work to inform him the TV would not come on (she was already using it as a baby sitter of sorts for me and my sister that was 1 year older) so in his haste my father called the TV repairman to come and take a look... after that my mother learned to look and make sure the TV was plugged in and that one of us kids had not unplugged it... early troubleshooting it might be ... but a check for power first can either clear the trouble or allow you to check other items once it has been established that proper power was applied...

The start....

A long time ago, well ok ... somewhere around a half century ago... I started doing things that I remember now... I remember my dads blue Jeep with the black soft top as he picked me up from kindergarten... I remember the wooden toy train set at kindergarten and tripping over something (I tended to trip over many things thruout my life so far...) and crashing into the corner of the table (that had the train set on it) with the side of my head... Maybe that is what caused the neurons in my head to become so active...

I remember the thrils of visiting with my grandfather in his ham shack and toying with the items that he had accumulated (in fact I have a morse key that came from his ham shack as a momento...) as a ham and as a line engineer for Kansas Gas and Electric...

I remember the items that my father had in his ham shack... the radios with the dials ... the noises of people talking around the world coming thru the air to chat with us to while away the time ... talking about their XYL's and the signal strength and to work the airwaves and find new "friends" from anywhere in the world... and mailing postcard QSO cards to each other to keep as a way to remember and establish how well you were able to communicate...

Times have changed.... and I have continued in communications .. telecommunications... in almost all its capabilities and variables...

With this blog I plan to leave information for others to accumulate and use ... some might be nonsensical ... some might be lighthearted and comical... yet other comments and annecdotes will be thought provoking (I hope) and cause others to explore the "greatest computer game ever" as I have been known to call it... even though it has no fancy GUI or WYSIWYG or even CGA... It has what drives the imagination and causes the person (the Teck-ni-shian) to become immersed in it and work with it and learn from it to continue to carry on and be able to accomplish what they can do as I have done...

There will be historical items... some with no need for explanation and others where without some explanation would be considered as out there...

There will be some items that have been revealed to others but were secrets for a long time... some of these will not involve telecommunications in the slightest... but will be there to support the rest of the story as a whole....

As it has been written elsewhere "Get in, sit down, buckle up and enjoy the ride..." Please feel free to comment and if there are items that need correction (unless while in the story they get corrected) then by all means please do comment with the correction...

For now I leave you with thinking back yourselves to remember from whence you came (I tend to attempt to use the vocabulary that I have grown so fond of discovering) and let us enjoy what will be lessons learned...