In 1974, when we lived in Greymouth, there arrived a special surprise in the living room of the family house. It was a colour television -- a 26" Thorn the size of a small chest of drawers -- and it had been purchased so as to capture the glory of the Commonwealth Games. TVNZ will be hoping it can pull a similar trick with the launch of HDTV broadcasts for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
They've got me already, actually. We've been wondering about when to upgrade our present set, and July next year looks like it. But this could have a perverse effect on the uptake of Freeview in the short term: how many people will be willing to buy a Freeview SD satellite decoder now, and a DTT HD box in six months' time? My guess is that it's going to be hard to buy an HDTV set next year and leave the store without a bundled Freeview decoder.
We have a satellite decoder anyway -- people send these things to a chap in my line of work -- which, with Sunday's launch of TVNZ6 and Wednesday debut of Stratos -- I will now have to figure out how to have co-exist with our MySky box.
I've got tech happiness on the way today as well: finally, my new 24" iMac arrives -- along, fortunately, with the loan machine I've been using, which has been back with Renaissance since Tuesday last week after it suffered a sudden and catastrophic technical failure. It's all been very trying.
And, of course, all this is a but a signal for me to get back to actually earning to money to pay for it. So I'll be off.
But first: having been delivered Citizens and Ratepayers' Western Bays campaign leaflet this week, I have confirmed to myself that I won't be voting for any C&R candidates. It reads like a wingnut blog and is, in large part, highly misleading. I'd like to feel I have a choice in the local body elections, but it's now clear to me that I don't.
Also, here's the notorious guerrilla video of John Key's stage-managed visit to Porirua Market. I'm sure there is some unfair editing at work here, but really -- what's with sniffing all the vegetables?
And, finally, another lolcat featuring Colin, our cat. It is not flattering, but it is rather amusing:
