Goodbye DirectTV

Finally shut off the DirecTV setup today with a switchover to Time-Warner HD Digital Cable. Was planning this for awhile but finally acted on it after our last windstorm which was pretty much straight out of TW's commercial knocking satellite TV.

Given that our dish had to site on a ten foot pole to get clearance over the roof next door, it's not quite the victory for cable that it might be. Generally we found the picture quality better on the satellite as compared with TW's digital cable. Most average storms had no effect on reception. Still, I didn't like the mounting on our roof (I half expect to find a square yard missing from the roof every time we have a heavy wind, at least until I get on the roof to take the disk down).

Since it cost nothing extra I went for the TW "High Definition" service. So far there's not much bang. With the exception of HBO, the other channels either broadcast loops or their standard 4:3 signal, except over HD. WNET (PBS) has a loop running all day. So, no loss by hooking this into the Tivo which doesn't support HD. Picture quality through the HD feed (R/G/B cables, not DVI) is nice, a bit clearer than the regular feed, even for non-HD channels.

blah blah blah

This «Ideology and Technology: Mode of Information as Critical Theory» is an ancient essay I wrote in 1991 that for absolutely no particular reason I converted to HTML and posted in my essays & articles section this morning.

The context was something like this: I was the lone "professional" student in a course studying Rhetoric and Post Modern Ideology. It was the Spring of 1991 and I just wanted to finish, leave, graduate, and get back to work in lovely Myers Corners, NY.

The gist of the paper (no, I didn't even re-read it before posting, probably a dumb move) as I recall was that electronic communication was changing the things people communicate in much the same way that writing did. Furthermore, the marxist notion of "mode of production" didn't necessarily imply a "mode of information" or the creation of an all-seeing entity.

Whatever. It as fun to write but I think it had/has some severe flaws (partly because the weeks leading up to finishing it involved me lying in bed fending off Mono for 1/4 of the semester).

Enjoy, or not. Yet another amazing thing one can do when you keep transferring stuff from one digital format to another.

Back to Iraq again

Christopher Allbritton is going back to Iraq. Earlier this year he raised money through his weblog to go to Iraq before/during the US invasion and posted articles without the aid of US censors or US media intermediaries. He's now planning to return in March 2004 for a longer stint covering the aftermath of the US invasion, again raising initial funds through his blog.