The Dawgs Ramblings

The Remote

One of this site's comments produced the following link - http://www.smarthome.com/8167.html.

This my friends is the answer to keeping hot sauce off of the remote control. Anyone with an LCD TV want to try this out and let us know how it goes? (It was also brought to my attention that I did not care about hot sauce and remote controls at one time.) Point taken, some maturity has set in.

Alas though, the world gained and lost a lot with digital cable. Sure, we have more channels and better resolution but let’s not forget what we gave up, the analog remote control changer. Remember the days when you could flip back and forth between two channels without waiting for the digital feed to load? The channel change was instantaneous. Now, it can take a few seconds to load and worst case has actually rebooted my box on me during the culmination of a few games.

Not only could you flip back and forth quickly but you could go up and down. For example, I could be watching three games, one on CBS (channel 4), one on ABC (channel 5) and one on ESPN (channel 25). I could go back and forth between either 4 or 5 and 25. When you did not use the last channel button (just using up and down) it would return to channel 25 regardless if you switched there from channel 4 or 5. The remote did not regard changing between channels 4 and 5 as a 'Last Channel' operation. The last channel operation remained in memory and you could flip to channel 25 at any moment. Nowadays though, when you change from 4 to 5, it sees that as a last channel operation. The 3 games that you want to be watching are now subject to constantly being entered manually.

Where the speed of loading a channel really comes into play is if you misfire. If I hit 28 instead of 25, now you have to wait for that channel to load and come up before you can quickly right the ship and return it to 25. This is all very critical when you are watching multiple games concurrently. One false move can cost you precious game time and big game changing plays. This matters. Last year, after what should have coroneted Matt Ryan as BC's starter with his comeback against Wake Forest, I returned home with my buddy Simons to catch the Penn St-Michigan and USC-Notre Dame games. Those games literally needed to be watched play by play and were within seconds of each other. Complete and utter attention to the remote control needed to be heeded. One false move and the Bush push might have been seen as just a replay.

posted by oceanjay @ 10:05 AM