kimi wei blog

Recently I was thinking about how much stress pensions cause to the social and economic systems in the United States. After looking at this issue for a while I concluded that pensions are a major contributor to social inequality, and they create unreasonable (and maybe unpayable) financial burdens on future generations of employees and citizens. Here’s how:

Promise now, others pay later

When I began talking to people about pensions I learned that they may also be unsustainable: that is, pensions are promised to employees by a generation of company execs and union bosses who aren’t going to be around the day pension payouts start to come due. This is the same sell-the-future-short ruse that politicians employ when they’re able to get public commendation for voting a law into being although they make no provisions to fund the law’s enactment. New Jersey’s Amistad Legislation which became law in 2002 but is still waiting for funding to bring a racially balanced historic perspective to classrooms across the state is a good example of this. The Racism in Higher Education paper sheds some light on this sujbect.

This public manipulation ploy allows for a generation of administrators and politicians to gain the admiration and support of constituents and employees by supporting a benefit they get behind freely (pun intended) – specifically because they never have to think about how they are going to pay for it. They leave this to future counterparts who will get saddled both with the burden of payment and answering to a public indignant for being made to pay for programs they didn’t ask to be created and which aren’t going to be useful to them any time soon.

The inequality

There are people who can expect to live comfortably as pensioneers of major corporations and government job. Other citizens need to hope that their children will be able – and will want to – take care of them better than the government run social services system does (or doesn’t do).

Phil Greenspun shares interesting thoughts on the pension issue

Smart modern companies don’t offer pensions because they’ve have figured out what should have been a simple fact: the only enterprises that should be offering to send people a check every year for the rest of their lives are insurance companies (if they write annuities and end up paying twice as much as planned because of an innovation that extends human life they will save a corresponding amount by not having to pay out life insurance claims) and ones that have a printing press for money (i.e., the federal government).

Cities and states have a tougher time escaping pension commitments and traditional bankruptcy protection may not be available to them. If every household in San Diego owes $6,000 for unfunded pension liabilities, property owners and residents will have to cough it up in the form of higher taxes. If the pension fund does poorly in the stock market, the households will have to pay again.

We the people share a lot of responsibility for bankrupting our own towns and states. We vote for politicians who promise the moon but don’t immediately tax away all of our income and wealth. A politician who promises $2 in benefits and $1 in taxes will win an election over one who promises benefits equal to taxes. The federal government respects voters wishes by running a visible deficit, borrowing or printing money to cover shortfalls. The Federal government can’t truly be bankrupted by its obligations because it can simply print money to pay everyone back.

My current hero is Paulo Coelho. If you want access to a positive and empowering perspective on life that can be easily adopted by anyone breathing, take a look at his website and learn more about what Paulo does and says. Paulo’s a Brazilian guy possessed of a mountain stream of beautiful wisdom and comments, for example

The moment we set off in search of love, it sets off in search of us.

You ask if love wins over anything. The answer is yes if you don’t try to possess the subject of your love.

Yes, I have money and success and friends. But my greatest conquest was to get this by doing what I wanted.

paulocoelho.com
Follow Paulo on Twitter
Follow me on Twitter

On October 28 present this coupon at Blue Moon Mexican Café in Englewood and 20% of your bill will be donated to Advance Housing, Inc. I’m an Advance Housing board member so I totally think you should treat all of your family members and work colleagues to a meal at Blue Moon in Englewood on the 28th!

Valid only in the Englewood location
Good for any food and drink
Anytime from 11:30am-11:00pm on October 29, 2009
Blue Moon Mexican Café
21 E. Palisades Avenue, Englewood, NJ 07631
201 541-0600

Download the donation coupon. Call Nancy Storey 201-498-9140 x 241 with questions or to make a donation directly to Advance Housing, Inc. to support its work in the mental health community.

Advance Housing, Inc. serves the community of mental health consumers by providing permanent, independent housing and supportive services to assist with life issues and recovery.

Background: Starbucks offers Starbucks cardholders two hours of free wifi every day through the AT&T network. A friend has a Starbuck’s card and registered it on the Starbucks site, but she can’t log in.

I checked with an AT&T support rep who said there are a couple of ways to register a Starbucks card on their website and not all of them will get you signed up for the free AT&T wifi service. Next I spoke with Starbucks wifi support. The information they gave me (along with a couple of things I know from experience that they didn’t) should hopefully get my friend connected.

How to register and use Starbucks’ free wifi

1. Purchase a Starbucks card and charge it with $5 or more
2.  From home: Visit Starbucks.com/wifi
   
    At a Starbucks store: Try visiting any url using a browser and you’ll be taken to a landing page. In the right upper corner or your browser window click on the link that says “Sign up for free wifi.”
3. Click on green button “Get Started Now”
   
4. On next page click the orange “Sign Up” button on the bottom of the page
   
5. On next page click radio button “I need a Starbucks account”
   
6. Create your username, password and profile and click orange “Next” button
   
7. After account is created check your email
8. AT&T will send an email to verify your information. It needs to be verified before you login at a store.
9. When you try to use your browser at a store you will automatically be shown a login option.
10. To login, enter your username and password, select “ATT wifi” from the drop-down menu and click the box indicating that you agree with the terms of service. Then click log in (or – go online) and you’ll soon be logged in.

If this doesn’t get you logged in, call Starbucks card support at 800-782-7282 + option 6. Don’t press any key after that. Say the word “representative” and then just wait for a live representative to pick up the call.

The Starbucks representative will check your account to see if it’s set up right. If everything is right, they will check with an AT&T technical representative and assist you to get logged into the system.

I admit that my title is misleading. I wasn’t offered a million dollars for junking my car today, but relative to its cash value what one company did offer me seemed like almost that much.

I want to junk my Chrysler LeBaron 1992 auto, or sell it. Several junkyards including reputable places I’ve dealt with in the past offered me modest amounts of money – GI Salvage in Pine Brook, NJ will pay nothing if they come to tow it, Deb & Dot in North Bergen will pay $75 if they tow it or $125 if I drive it over there. A nice guy in Newark offered me $100 guaranteed and up to $150 if original catlytic converter and other features are present.

One Clifton company offered me $50 and a guy who found me through the Craigslist ad I posted to sell the car offered me $100. Then there was the doozy.

Then I called 888-899-5185 and a lady told me that she could buy my car for $50-$75. Or, if I wanted to donate it I would get

1. $500 gas card
2. $1000 tax deduction
3. $1000 in supermarket certificates, and
4. A 3-day free stay at a hotel which I could select from a list of many locations located across the nation.

Did I want to book my 3-day stay?

The lady asked me this about 4 times – she seemed so interested in booking the free vacation for me I immediately concluded she’d get a nice sales commission if I booked that trip.

I replied, “No, I don’t want to go to any hotel. And I’m not listening to any sales pitch to buy a time share either.” Because that is what this is all about. I’ve heard these offers before and they interest me not a little bit. People often have to pay what may be hefty travel expenses to get to one of these “free” vacation spots, and while installed there (and a captive audience) the place’s sales team takes up half of your promised vacation time attempting to harass you into purchasing one of their time share programs.

The booking lady seemed a lot less interested in talking to me after I disclosed my stand on listening to time share sales pitches. I had a question of my own to ask, though. I wanted to know where I could get verification of the other offers she had cited. I was told me to visit THElibraryproject.org on the internet and, “get more information there.” I asked if the website had “the” at the beginning or was just libraryproject.org and was told it was definitely THElibraryproject.org.

It turns out that there is no website THElibraryproject.org (no surprise there). There is a libraryproject.org website. I visited but couldn’t figure out what they do exactly. There certainly wasn’t any visible information on the site about giving $1500 worth of gas cards and supermarket certificates in exchange for the donation of a junk car.

I hope somebody buys my car so I don’t have to junk it. It’s a nice looking little thing – white – with excellent suspension, good tires, a new starter, and its been well maintained. Although it does have a bad transmission.

Today a revolution occurred both in the way millions of web users can receive news and news portals and bloggers can push information out to followers and the web. Dave Winer’s RSS Cloud feed makes the information exchange happen in realtime. Today Wordpress enabled all of its blogs with the technology.

With the installation of a simple plugin available in your Wordpress control panel, your blog can now push content out to the cloud and individual users as fast as you can click, “Post.” In fact, just as fast as Twitter messages go out. The technology used is the same simple RSS used by popular feed aggregators like googlereader, netnewswire and other over the web and computer-resident applications that gather news you’ve subscribed to receive through RSS feeds.

What has changed at this moment from old-style RSS feed mechanics are two elements:

1. The speed at which that content can be delivered to you, and
2. the fact that anyone now has the ability to push out posts at the speed of Twitter to followers without using Twitter. This technology is platform and company agnostic.

Wow, revolutionary.

Now, you can read feeds in real time – Twitter fast

There’s another side to this – you can use River2 software right now to read RSS feeds in realtime. The procedure for installing the software that makes it possible to do this is still not very user friendly for non-geeks, and you’ll be reading feeds you subscribe to on the web at River2’s site – there aren’t any out of the box client side applications developed yet.

It seems pretty clear judging from the widespread interest this development has sparked overnight, though, that many major news aggregation platforms will be eagerly jumping on board to incorporate this revolution into their own applications really soon. After all, Wordpress has made a huge initial commitment to Dave’s newest technology and in doing so put RSS cloud feeds squarely on the map. We can probably expect several brilliant desktop apps to release cloud feed enabled versions, very shortly. I’m so looking forward to that.

INTERVIEW EXCERPTS

Here are excerpts from Dave Winer’s interview today with Jay Rosen about what this change is going to mean to internet users, along with some (clarifying) notes of my own.

What the RSS Cloud feed technology is

Dave: RSS Cloud is a bit of technology – wires that connect up differently to the software, it’s like plumbing. I got an email from Matt, they make Wordpress, and he wanted to meet for lunch. I expected I would be pitching him on supporting RSS Cloud but he said, “No, we’ve already decided on doing that.” What this means is all of the blogs hosted on Wordpress.com have this capability now. And any (privately hosted) Wordpress blog. This means all the blogs are real time (enabled).

It’s all part of what we call bootstrap (step by step advancement). A week ago 1100 used RSS Cloud feeds and now millions (are able to) use it. It supports RSS cloud on the aggregation side, like Googlereader, Tweetdeck and Seesmic. Gets the updates within a second. A feedreader can take up to an hour to get an update – feedreaders can only check (for new content) so often. But, this is like Twitter. It’s real time. I (checked for) a test post (right after it was made) and sure enough, there it was.

One of our developers, Jeremy Fuld, found out that CNN political wire is using RSS Cloud feed now. I subscribed to it and it worked. Now I’m getting news (instantly).

Used to be, you had RSS (with) no company in the middle and it was slow, or it could be fast but then there was a company in the middle. (RSS Cloud feed) gives you news fast with no company in the middle.

Jay: If I want to monitor lots of blogs and news sites, as a reader who wants to keep up with the news, (this is really important for me).

Dave: Are you using a cloud-aware reader? There will be others but right now there’s only River2.

Jay: Because it’s faster, that changes blogging how?

Dave: Makes it like Twitter.

How is it going to change the web experience

To get it to look and behave like Twitter, (look at) clients like Tweetdeck or Seesmic – instead of publishing Twitter (with these tools) you publish one of these feeds. (RSS Cloud feeds are) like Twitter, not different. Well, there is a big difference: there’s no fail whale in RSS. (There’s also no company in the middle between the reader and the content.)

Jay: I can get what I get in my twitter feed and not have to go through Twitter or any other company. And, not have to go through Twitter who now (tracks the links in my Twitter stream that I click on).

(Now we can) implement something like Twitter with just the internet. Don’t need more than the internet to do it. It’s OK to use a company at first to get something going.

(Until now, new services have been) held back because Twitter can’t (move fast enough to implement them). It’s inevitable that (the Twitter-style communication mechanism) get decentralized and that’s what happening here. Today might be the actual day that we look back on and say, “This was the turning point.” We won’t know for sure until later but it sure feels that way right now.

Jay: Doesn’t it all depend on users starting to pick up these tools – like River2? Just like with GoogleReader implementation.

Dave: Before GoogleReader there were two tools: myuserland.com and mynetscape.com were (early) news aggregators. I think Googlereader has to (implement RSS Cloud feed technology), by the way. “Has to” might be too strong a (phrase) for it. But I think they will.

Jay: Here’s how I would use it. I would love to assemble my own list of sources that I know I rely on to I send out information through my Twitter feed . . . a news source alert system. I would put readwriteweb in there, everything James Fallows writes, certain sections of the New York Times, Scripting News. I would keep it to smaller news sources that are likely to contain news that I want to distribute to the 25,000 people that now follow me on Twitter. It would be incredible useful to me because I don’t always remember to check what James Fallows has put up on his Atlantic blog. To have a hand built record of news flow . . . would be great.

What are the feeds going to look like?

Jay: So tell me, how much do I get on an update from RSS cloud . . . a synopsis or 140 characters?

Dave: I give you the first 500 characters. In the case of the New York Times, 500 characters of their synopsis – which is pretty much the entire synopsis. I don’t write a news reader. I write a news skimmer because that reflects the way I subscribe to a huge number of sources. My brain is very good at skimming. People feel they have to read everything on a page but that’s not true. The human brain is capable of recognizing patterns in a lot less time than you that it is . . . if you try it.

I strip out all the html (of a post) and I truncate it at 500 characters and it works, it really works. I fully intend to make it a setting to play with so people can set (their feed) at 700 characters or whatever, but so far noone has asked for it. We’re going to give you a share button in River2.

Freedom to learn and grow

Jay: Yeah, Twitter is much slower . . . to get replies, incoming stream. Links I click on have to go to Twitter first before they go to my destination page.

Dave: Yeah, they want to create some metrics. Want to know which links you click on and tabulate that information. Google does that too – you can see on the bottom, connecting to Google. (That’s when they’re tracking your clicks.)

The wingnuts say I don’t want the government in health care. (What you really don’t want is) you don’t want all these companies involved in your free expression. We’re doing another corner turn and bringing the internet back into things. I think it’s bad that Twitter’s doing this but it’s good because it’s a teachable moment. (People can learn that we can do real-time and short message communication using just native internet technology and freely available tools, without any intermediary company involved in making this level of communication possible).

Jay: When you own your own you realize what freedom is.

Dave: Tradition is not a business model. More is more, there’s no such thing as too much information.

readwriteweb.com’s Marshall Kirkpatrick says

Real time updates could enable several things. Faster distribution of blog posts, more compelling conversations in real-time and a renewed timeliness for blogging vs. services like Twitter are all likely consequences. The list of possible technical developments on top of RSSCloud could be as open-ended as the developments enabled by the core of RSS.

A friend sent me this link to a fascinating and distressing op-ed piece in today’s New York Times on the increasing criminalization of poverty. An excerpt:

“The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.”

It seems to me that the present is an important moment for the Jewish community to speak publicly on the importance of charitable giving and gimilut hasadim (giving of loving kindness) in the Jewish religion as being of great value for both giver and recipient (more on this topic below). The Jewish community can enter the global and national conversations surrounding these topics and speak out on behalf of kindness and mercy. This may offset the harsh judgments being assessed against the needy and indigent in this time of widespread financial distress, homelessness and hunger. When poverty is allowed to become a crime in the public eye, all people may suffer for this judgment. As a people who believes in the sanctity and benefits of charity and kindness, shouldn’t we attempt to steer public opinion in a different direction?

The face of hunger and poverty in the United States

As of June 2009, less than 100 people have died of swine flu in the US.

However, over 37 million Americans, “lived in poverty in 2007. The number of people living in poverty has increased by almost 6 million since 2000.”

Millions more apply for help to feed their families

“Retail food prices remained stable over the last two decades. But in 2007, grocery prices rose 4.2 percent, the largest increase since 1990. Prices for milk, bread, flour, and eggs doubled in the last year.

Families seeking food assistance from SNAP (formerly the food stamp program) reached a record high in September 2008.

More than one in 10 Americans now receives food stamps.”

Is hunger really a problem in the United States?

When Americans think about hunger, we usually think in terms of mass starvation in far-away countries, but hunger too often lurks in our own backyards. In 2006, 35.5 million people, including 12.6 million children, in the United States did not have access to enough food for an active healthy life. Some of these individuals relied on emergency food sources and some experienced hunger.

Who is going hungry in the U.S.?

Although most people think of hungry people and homeless people as the same, the problem of hunger reaches far beyond homelessness. While the thought of 35.5 million people being hungry or at the risk of hunger may be surprising, it is the faces of those 35.5 million individuals that would probably most shock you.

The face of hunger is the older couple who has worked hard for their entire lives only to find their savings wiped out by unavoidable medical bills; or a single mother who has to choose whether the salary from her minimum wage job will go to buy food or pay rent; or a child who struggles to concentrate on his schoolwork because his family couldn’t afford dinner the night before. A December 2006 survey by the U.S. Conference of Mayors estimated that 48 percent of those requesting emergency food assistance were either children or their parents.

Poor Families Live on the Brink of Disaster

Families in poverty feel like they are always perched on the brink of disaster. . One small thing is all it takes to be blown away. One car accident. One medical emergency. One burst pipe. One robbery. One small piece of bad luck. . It takes stamina to live on the edge and keep going regardless of how exhausted you feel.

Kindness and Charity are Obligations in the Jewish Religion

Tzedakah is derived from (tzedek) – meaning righteousness, justice, or fairness, but has come to mean charity in English.

The words justice and charity have different meanings in English. How is it that in Hebrew, one word, tzedakah, has been translated to mean both justice and charity?

This translation is consistent with Jewish thought as Judaism considers charity to be an act of justice. Judaism holds that people in need have a legal right to food, clothing and shelter that must be honored by more fortunate people. According to Judaism, it is unjust and even illegal for Jews to not give charity to those in need.

Thus, giving charity in Jewish law and tradition is viewed as obligatory self-taxation, rather than voluntary donation.

Giving charity is an obligation in Judaism (Leviticus 25:35-38, Deuteronomy 19:20-24). This obligation means providing charity to both Jew and non-Jew. In many homes one will find a tzedakah box – a box or other container where coins are dropped in and collected for charity. It is a tradition for Jews to give tzedakah on Yom Kippur, Shemini Atzeret, Pesach, Shavuot, and Purim as well as during other celebratory events such as weddings.

[O]ne who helps fulfill the poor person has a letter added to Tzedek, and it becomes “tzedakah (‘charity’).” This is the secret of, “The merciful man does good to his own soul” (Mishlei 11:17). Acts of kindness show that one is under Judgment but has perfected it with Chesed. Then it turns into Mercy.

View expanded text of this essay

America has been transformed by marketing magic and a steady trend away from traditional values (a connection with the land, communities where people know and take an interest in their neighbors, respect for wildlife). We’ve assassinated deer populations and replaced their woodland homes with grass-lawned housing developments named Deer Run and Deerfield.

Many of us think of such wordly trends as being inevitable moves due to some nameless, shapeless “progress”. Doesn’t it bear pondering, though, that many of the most formative progressions of modern times have been merely a result of artificially engineered marketing strategies designed to give us the experiences that will make it easiest for corporations to separate the American people from our money and give up our senses of independence, creation and adventure?

I often think about bits of this National Geographic article on Disneyworld and Orlando. It reveals with completey accessible language and examples the far-reaching propaganda genius behind the Disneyworld empire and shows us how their marketing machine has worked both from within and without to create an America which doesn’t actually exist but which so many millions of people believe in.

A Jewish Orthodox rabbi we know recently commented – “When I was a kid, the people of the United States were citizens and community members. Now, just a few years later, we’ve suddenly become just consumers. How did we get to this point. More importantly, how do we fix ourselves and retrieve our autonomy?

The first step in the fix is understanding. The article is enlightening and its content, worrisome. Here are a few excerpts to pique your interest.

Thanks to a sweetheart deal with the state legislature, the lands Disney purchased were detached from the rest of Florida to form a Magic Kingdom, above and outside the law. Even now, Disney World’s rides are exempt from state safety inspections. Democratic process is excluded, too. Power remains in the hands of a board of supervisors composed of Disney allies. However much you pay for a time-share condo in Disney World, you cannot buy property outright, and therefore establish official residence, and therefore vote for the board. Celebration, Disney’s residential community themed to evoke pre-1940s small-town America, has a city hall but no actual municipal government.

. . . a place whose specialty is detaching experience from context, extracting form from substance, and then selling tickets to it.

Here life is truly a style: You don’t want to live in a mass-produced, instant “community”? No problem. Orlando’s developers, like the producers of instant coffee, offer you a variety of flavors, including one called Tradition. Structurally it may seem identical to all the others. Only instead of vaguely Mediterranean ornamental details, the condos at Tradition have old colonial finishes. . . . lofts are brand-new buildings constructed for those who want the postindustrial lifestyle in a place that never was industrial.

Orlando . . . leads in the . . . transformation of the exotic into the familiar. . . It is growth built on consumption, not production; a society founded not on natural resources, but upon the dissipation of capital accumulated elsewhere; a place of infinite possibilities, somehow held together, to the extent it is held together at all, by a shared recognition of highway signs, brand names, TV shows, and personalities, rather than any shared history. Nowhere else is the juxtaposition of what America actually is and the conventional idea of what America should be more vivid and revealing.

Welcome to the theme-park nation.

Defunct attractions like Splendid China, which featured a miniature Great Wall, went bankrupt because they were too realistic. They failed to provide what all successful theme parks must: fantasies conforming exactly to what the paying public expects to get.

The growth of Orlando’s Hispanic population itself was touched off by a marketing decision. Back in the 1990s, when a real estate company was having trouble selling property in a development called Buenaventura Lakes, their marketing department decided to advertise in Spanish in the major newspapers in Puerto Rico. Suddenly Puerto Ricans were flowing into the Orlando area—creating an alternative to predominantly Cuban Miami for Hispanics in Florida.

Jump to full text of National Geographic Orlando Article

It seems my family is just one of many with much less access to television since the switch to digital. Bush’s government kept telling us that all we needed to do to continue to watch TV after the switch to digital was buy a converter box with the free government coupon. Well, this wasn’t any more true than some of Mr. Bush’s other stories.

Thanks to President Obama postponing the switch date my family and many others were able to get a digitial converter box in time but that’s the end of the good news in this story.

The reception problem lies with the nature of digital signals. They are weaker and more directed than analog signals, so there’s less chance of a signal reaching your TV or antennae. When a signal does get to you, if it’s weak or coming in at the wrong angle, your equipment may have trouble picking it up. When the signal doesn’t come in well you won’t get a bad or snowy picture as you did with analog transmission – you’ll get a picture that freezes or none at all.

Unfortunately, a converter box makes it possible for a TV to get digital signals when they’re available but it doesn’t help the digital signals get to our TVs. Neither does a brand new (indoor) antenna with 4-foot ears (we’ve tried). Many people are experiencing loss of signal including Tom Allibone of teletruth.org. Jessica Almond of the FCCgave an interview the day before the switch and confirmed that many people might need to spend hundreds of dollars on antennae and connections in order to continue seeing TV programs after the switch to digital.

Test your signal strength

Find out what kind of antennae you’re going to need to get the channels available in your area at the FTC site or at antennaweb.org.

Why your old antennae doesn’t work now

None of the announcements we read or heard in the months leading up to the switch said anything about this: it’s true that just about everyone who needs a converter box will also need an antenna. And, any old antenna might not do the trick. Standard rabbit-ears indoor antenna probably don’t provide strong enough reception any more. New, box-type antennae sold as “digital” might not provide any reception as some don’t receive uhf signals at all. Many stations just happened to abandon vhf broadcasting in favor or uhf transmission when the switch to digital took place.

Signal boosters often don’t work, so think carefully before spending money on them. Here are some government guidelines to help withselecting an antenna that will work for you.

An outdoor (roof) antenna is almost certain to work if it’s new and has been properly installed. You need someone willing and able to work on your roof to install it. With professional installation plan on spending about $600 including equipment. If you own your own single family home, an outdoor antennae will probably solve your reception woes. But if you live in an apartment, like my family does, your condo association or landlord may not grant you permission to mount one. In which case you’ll have to decide whether to watch (a lot less) TV or buy FIOS or cable service.

The FCC says: try “double rescanning”

According to the Huffington Post, “double rescanning” may get you more channels.

the FCC put out a new advisory Monday recommending “double rescanning.” That involves disconnecting the antenna from the box or TV, rescanning, turning off the box or TV, then turning it back on, connecting the antenna and scanning one more time. The procedure can clear the box or TV’s memory of saved channel information that is now incorrect, the commission said.

Oh, and check your cables!

There’s one more element that can affect your digital TV reception that I haven’t finished researching yet – the black cables used to connect the pieces of your viewing system. Those cables used to be RG-59 but the new standard is RG6 and apparently you need the newer cables in order to get the best crack at reception. I haven’t yet located information telling me how to figure out which type of cable I have so if you know how, please don’t hesitate to share.

So, the other day a cable guy came buy offering me cable service. When I said I wasn’t interested he assumed I was a FIOS customer and started offering to by out my FIOS contract and switch me over to them. But I don’t have FIOS either. I just don’t want to pay to be able to watch TV and I told the guy this. Next, he asked me a question that put me off a bit. “Are you saying you’d rather have nothing?” Clearly reception isn’t available in our neighborhood and his company is sweeping in the sign-ups from the families who just can’t make it without TV service. My answer is “Yes, I’ll do without TV reception,” and I’m comfortable with this, but my kids aren’t loving this change.

No entry fee to visit National Parks the weekend of August 15th-16th. Find a park in your state here. More information