Completing Our HD Transition

Posted September 13, 2008, 11:39 p.m.

So last week I talked about our new high-definition LCD television that has brought us kicking-and-screaming into television modernity. Getting our gaming systems—a Nintendo Wii and a rarely-used Sony PlayStation 2—set up was very easy with some of those new-fangled component cables we bought at the same time as the TV, but our DirecTV setup was not HD and our DVD player was an older model that didn’t support anything close to HD quality through its retro RCA cables.

So, the day after we bought the TV, we made another trip to Best Buy and picked up an upscaling DVD player (which plays DVDs at near-HD quality over a really new-fangled HDMI cable) and an HD receiver for DirecTV. Our DirecTV installer guy came out today, and now we’re totally hooked up: HD-capable satellite TV and an upscaling DVD player hooked into a 36″ LCD television with 720p resolution. Cool.

I have one fairly-minor disappointment: I’m paying an HD fee, but very few DirecTV channels are actually available in HD. Fox News Channel, for example, started broadcasting in HD in May but DirecTV only provides the non-HD version. TruTV began broadcasting in HD when it transitioned from being CourtTV in January but—again—DirecTV only provides the non-HD version. Fox News Channel and TruTV are each part of my DirecTV package, and since I’m paying the extra surcharge for HD content DirecTV should provide me with their HD versions since HD versions are available. The only ‘standard’ definition content I should have is content that is broadcast by its originators that way without an HD alternative. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.

If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion.

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.

It is not industry, but idleness, that is degrading.

Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.

As the sun shines on mud and hardens it, and shines on wax and softens it, so too this great miracle of Our Blessed Lord hardened some unto unbelief, and softened others unto belief.

Broadly speaking, short words are best, and the old words, when short, are best of all.

Now we are masters in respect of to act and not to act, to will and not to will.

It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.

Let him admonish, let him teach, let him forbid what is improper!—he will be beloved of the good, by the bad he will be hated.

As a rule, we can’t always tell the difference between the people who are far smarter than us and the people who are dumber. Both groups make choices we can’t understand.

Christianity . . . divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all.

Better a thousand times err on the side of over-readiness to fight, than to err on the side of tame submission to injury, or cold-blooded indifference to the misery of the oppressed.

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

What I have done I have done, because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it.

Each woman virtually summons every man to show cause why he doth not love her.

Nations are the wealth of mankind, its collective personalities; the very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a special facet of God’s design.

Men who don’t like girls with brains don’t like girls.

The great problem facing modern man is that, that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live.