I don’t watch a lot of television, tho I’m sort of fascinated by them. I’ve actually owned a lot of televisions over the years, and nearly all of them I got for free – people upgrading, getting rid of broken (relatively easily fixed) sets, even a few that I’ve found sitting next to dumpsters that worked perfectly well – yay, obtainium! For a while I’ve had a “Tower of Television” (idea courtesy of Mikemikemike) with a stack of them, all running and connected to cable. But at the moment I only really have one (well, okay, two, but the other is a little tiny 13″ in the bedroom), a 32″ Sony I got from my brother-in-law, which had a fine tube but a transistor (or something) out somewhere; for $100 repair, it’s been a great set, though it’s heavy as hell any time I need to move it.
I haven’t been connected to cable for over two years, actually, and I’m sure I haven’t missed it. I do subscribe to Netflix (fheald at obtainium dot org if you want to add to my “friends” list) and I even rent dvds of series – Deadwood, Carnivale, even Lost – which I imagine is a lot better without commercials.
In any case, in the process of creating our living room, we decided we needed a TV armoire. So I popped onto Craiglist and (after a few days) found a nice one – real wood furniture, good drawers, etc. Measured it and the TV, figured it would be a tight fit but should work. We u-hauled it home, dragged it into place. Then tried to hoist the TV into place and…it didn’t fit. Measure again – TV 28″ tall, armoire just over 28″ tall. Try again, no joy. Apparently the TV was just slightly large enough to not quite fit.
But we liked the armoire better than the TV, so darn it all I had to buy a new one. Out to Best Buy, old-fashioned tubes aren’t very expensive. I was going to buy a Sony, just because. Becke liked the Toshiba, but I’ve got this feeling that Sony is a little better quality. But then as I was walking to checkout, I got to thinking about what Sony does with their DRM and proprietary stuff – the latest squabble involving CDs with rootkit code is just typical of their conflict of interest between content and devices. Sony’s always made really great devices with good ergonomics and visual appeal, but lately they’re always crippling them in the intrests of protecting the content and maintaining their revenue stream. Their boomboxes are nice but they don’t have a place to plug in my iPod, their cameras use a proprietary memory chip, and they keep trying to foist off ATRAC and minidiscs. Even their Palm series used special sync software that didn’t work with Mac. The TV of course had none of these, and had all the connections of a regular TV. But I decided, F- ’em. Got the Toshiba. Sony doesn’t care about me or my money, but at least I won’t have to look at the thing and think I’m financing their empire.