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Up Against The Wind
Jan. 24th, 2007 09:31 pmWell, we managed to miss this week's episode of "24", the first after the four-hour season premiere thing.
See, on Monday Nicole was so tired that I suggested that she go to bed early, rather than staying up to watch either "24" or "Heroes" at 10:00. But I never managed to set the VCR to tape "24" at 8:00, so we had to watch one of the 10:00 shows after all. We opted to watch "Heroes" and tape "24".
Now the 10:00 broadcast of "24" was on Fox, which is Channel 16. The 8:00 one was on Global, Channel 8. I set up the VCR to tape Channel 16 from 9:57 to 11:02 (I always like to leave a few minutes of leeway, since our clock isn't always synched up with the networks).
Our VCR has a little quirk, though. It's quite an old one, really, and it's almost amazing that it's still around and as functional as it is--which is pretty good, considering. It's old enough to remember the days when sometimes TVs weren't hooked up to cables, but had devices called "antennae" that tried to conjure TV signals out of thin air. For some reason, it has two modes, "TV" and "CATV". "TV" is the antenna mode, which is equipped to handle channels 2-13, which is all that the old-style TVs could deal with. "CATV" is the cable mode, which can handle all the way up to three digits.
When it's unplugged, it always, always reverts back to "TV" mode. In fact, we bought another VCR for a few years because the only way to set it back to "CATV" was via the remote, and when the remote got sucked into the couch (it turned out later) and we were desperate to tape "Babylon 5" on The Space Channel, we just got a new one. That one's dead; this one's still around.
But it got unplugged after Christmas, when my brother was using his laptop in the living room.
And "CATV" never got reset.
So all it taped on Channel 16 on Monday was a bunch of static. (Which our VCR always displayed as blue...which gives a whole new meaning to the William Gibson line about "the colour of TV tuned to a dead channel".)
Fox.com has the episode available for view on its Myspace page...for U.S. residents, which it was able to determine that we were not. Global only had a few highlights, so we watched that, for the lack of anything better.
We missed several episodes in Season 2, as I recall, and still managed to finish out the season. So we'll still go on with it. But it's still annoying. This kind of thing is one reason why I've been starting to set up the VCR to tape everything we watch, whether we plan to watch it live or not, because that way at least it's there.
Of course, we could always look at DVR's, too.
See, on Monday Nicole was so tired that I suggested that she go to bed early, rather than staying up to watch either "24" or "Heroes" at 10:00. But I never managed to set the VCR to tape "24" at 8:00, so we had to watch one of the 10:00 shows after all. We opted to watch "Heroes" and tape "24".
Now the 10:00 broadcast of "24" was on Fox, which is Channel 16. The 8:00 one was on Global, Channel 8. I set up the VCR to tape Channel 16 from 9:57 to 11:02 (I always like to leave a few minutes of leeway, since our clock isn't always synched up with the networks).
Our VCR has a little quirk, though. It's quite an old one, really, and it's almost amazing that it's still around and as functional as it is--which is pretty good, considering. It's old enough to remember the days when sometimes TVs weren't hooked up to cables, but had devices called "antennae" that tried to conjure TV signals out of thin air. For some reason, it has two modes, "TV" and "CATV". "TV" is the antenna mode, which is equipped to handle channels 2-13, which is all that the old-style TVs could deal with. "CATV" is the cable mode, which can handle all the way up to three digits.
When it's unplugged, it always, always reverts back to "TV" mode. In fact, we bought another VCR for a few years because the only way to set it back to "CATV" was via the remote, and when the remote got sucked into the couch (it turned out later) and we were desperate to tape "Babylon 5" on The Space Channel, we just got a new one. That one's dead; this one's still around.
But it got unplugged after Christmas, when my brother was using his laptop in the living room.
And "CATV" never got reset.
So all it taped on Channel 16 on Monday was a bunch of static. (Which our VCR always displayed as blue...which gives a whole new meaning to the William Gibson line about "the colour of TV tuned to a dead channel".)
Fox.com has the episode available for view on its Myspace page...for U.S. residents, which it was able to determine that we were not. Global only had a few highlights, so we watched that, for the lack of anything better.
We missed several episodes in Season 2, as I recall, and still managed to finish out the season. So we'll still go on with it. But it's still annoying. This kind of thing is one reason why I've been starting to set up the VCR to tape everything we watch, whether we plan to watch it live or not, because that way at least it's there.
Of course, we could always look at DVR's, too.
