{"id":544,"date":"2001-09-22T09:26:33","date_gmt":"2001-09-22T14:26:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/?p=544"},"modified":"2001-09-22T09:26:33","modified_gmt":"2001-09-22T14:26:33","slug":"the_horror_the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2001\/09\/22\/the_horror_the.html","title":{"rendered":"The horror!  The horror!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, not really.<\/p>\n<p>I think one of the things that helps humans be human is our ability to <i>lose <\/i>our focus on what&#8217;s really important now and again.  I mean, with War and Rumors of War, with the events of Red Tuesday still burning in our memories, what could possibly be worth worry and angst and anger than all of that?<\/p>\n<p>Well, how about the incredible inconvenience of our main remote control no longer operating the TV correctly.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve got several of the wretched beasties.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>The AT&#038;T Cable Box remote<\/b>:  This puppy is our main one.  It controls the cable box, but also (until the last week) controlled the TV and VCR, too.\n<li><b>The RCA TV remote<\/b>:  This guy controls the TV and the VCR, and can actually channel up\/down the cable box (though that&#8217;s not very useful).  It&#8217;s also critical for changing the TV input so that we can play the DVD.\n<li><b>The RCA VCR remote<\/b>:  This one controls the TV and VCR, too.  It&#8217;s also critical for programming the VCR.\n<li><b>The Sony DVD remote<\/b>:  This one controls the DVD (duh), but can also control the volume on the TV.\n<li><b>The Generic remote<\/b>:  We bought these (we ended up with two of them, for a variety of reasons) a long time ago.  They control the TV and VCR, but not anything else.  We took the batteries out of one of them and gave it to Katherine in a vain hope that she wouldn&#8217;t want to play with, eat, or lose the others.  Hah!<\/ul>\n<p>So if you&#8217;re good with matrix puzzles (&#8220;The remote which controls the DVD is not the one which is colored brown&#8221;) you can see that, in order to just watch TV, we now need two remotes &#8212; one to turn the TV on\/off and Volume high\/low, and one to control the cable box to Channel up\/down and to read the all-important Guide.<\/p>\n<p>This really sucks.  I mean, screw the war, to hell with the disaster, fuggedabout terrorists, <i>do you know how hard it is to keep one remote conveniently handy but out of Katherine&#8217;s reach?  Let alone two remotes?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Life can be really unfair sometimes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, not really. I think one of the things that helps humans be human is our ability to lose our focus on what&#8217;s really important now and again. I mean,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hi-tech","category-personal"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9127,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/02\/14\/remotely_possib.html","url_meta":{"origin":544,"position":0},"title":"Remotely possible","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 14-Feb-06 6:21am","format":false,"excerpt":"In this week's Open Question: \u201cHow many different remote controls do you have in your home? How many do you actually use? Do you have any remotes for for devices...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Hi-Tech&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Hi-Tech","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/hi-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4688,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/07\/21\/making_the_conn.html","url_meta":{"origin":544,"position":1},"title":"Making the connection","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 21-Jul-03 9:37am","format":false,"excerpt":"Okay, so RCA doesn't have an analogous system a tick up that has the built-in DVD (which we'd really like, because that removes a component from the stack). But, reading...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Hi-Tech&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Hi-Tech","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/hi-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4542,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/08\/09\/home_entertainm.html","url_meta":{"origin":544,"position":2},"title":"Home &#8220;Entertainment&#8221;","author":"***Dave","date":"Sat 9-Aug-03 8:35pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Rrg. And, also, argh. Spent about three hours this morning, working up schmatics of the new arrangement with the home entertainment system. Trying to match up the ports to the...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Hi-Tech&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Hi-Tech","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/hi-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7704,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/01\/16\/i_got_the_red_w.html","url_meta":{"origin":544,"position":3},"title":"I got the Red-White-Yellow Blues &#8230;","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 16-Jan-05 4:16pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Why is it that they can put a man on the Moon ... well, they used to be able to, how about, why is they can build PC components that...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Hi-Tech&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Hi-Tech","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/hi-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11998,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/12\/16\/and_now_in_stereo.html","url_meta":{"origin":544,"position":4},"title":"And now &#8230; in Stereo!","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 16-Dec-07 9:17pm","format":false,"excerpt":"So after an unexpectedly long journey to Costco and Best Buy (and major props to Margie and Katherine, especially with Margie giving advice in the face of my dithering, and...","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Hi-Tech&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Hi-Tech","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/hi-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/yamaha-rx-v461bl.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":14313,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/03\/24\/someday-well-find-it-the-hd-connection.html","url_meta":{"origin":544,"position":5},"title":"Someday we&#8217;ll find it, the HD connection &#8230;","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 24-Mar-09 7:41am","format":false,"excerpt":"I was not usually the kid who got to run the A\/V equipment at school, and that continues to haunt me today. Whenever we get a new piece of A\/V gadgetry at the house, I'm the one who gets to get things connected properly, which usually turns into a long\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;Hi-Tech&quot;","block_context":{"text":"Hi-Tech","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/hi-tech"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/tv-philco-predicta.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}