Winter indoors

With the snow and ice keeping us mostly housebound these days, Tom has time to think about HDTV. By the time he has thoroughly researched the issue, I expect television will have moved on to hologram projections.

Meanwhile he has spent hours on the internet looking up data, opinions, wild speculation and such. We go shopping for anything and he gravitates to the electronics departments where he finds someone he hasn't talked to about this previously to discuss the details yet again. One good thing about this is I know where to look for him after I have wandered through the entire store.

Part of it is that it is not just a matter of all the questions to be asked about HDTV itself -- size of screen, plasma or LCD, viewing distance, brands, resolution, revolution, compression, depression, pixels, display aspect and pixel aspect and whatever. Where our television is now located there is a glare from the wall of glass doors and windows behind us when we sit on the sofa to watch it. This is not so much of an issue with the curved screen on the television the Carmelites gave me to overwhelm my little apartment in Chicago. But on a flat screen, apparently the glare may be more of an issue.

This leads to specific issues about screens with non-glare, matte and glossy surfaces.

But it also has led to a discussion about a mechanism to block the glare by putting something between the windows and the television. We have discussed hanging curtains or drapes or some such thing, putting up a screen behind the sofa, hanging a roll-up screen from a frame behind the sofa or from rods over the deck doors or ...

Tom is all energetic about getting this done, and, after all, it is his house and he will do any construction work involved in making frames or hanging screens. I think my feline dislike of change kicks in, though.

I have to get over that.

BTW, we have DirecTV, so we do not have to worry about the February 17 deadline.