network
Network is a movie from the late 1970s which, shockingly, I hadn't seen until very recently. It's shocking because it's the type of film that's right up my alley especially considering my college degree is in Video & Radio Communications. Come to think of it, I'm puzzled none of my professors ever mentioned Network, as it is a damned good movie that shows a lot of what happens in a live television news production studio.
The famous scene from Network that people refer to (for those that know the film) is the "Mad as Hell" rant by the character Howard Beale. When taken out of context and seen as only the scene without the storyline of the film, it can be lost in translation easily. It is fortunate however that even if you had seen that clip prior (as I had before watching it), nothing is spoiled. If anything, watching the flick fills in all the missing pieces as to why Beale ranted like he did in the first place.
Network holds a special place for me because it is set in the pre-cable era. Wide availability of Cable TV did not exist until the 1980s. For example, MTV did not exist until 1981.
Imagine for a moment that your only choice for television entertainment was over-the-air. Your choices were 12 channels on VHF, of which only 9 or 10 channels had broadcasting affiliate stations, or UHF which were non-affiliated local-yokels that gave you maybe 4 or 5 more. The combined total was around 15 channels. That was it. Of those 15, less than half of those had decent reception. What that means is that in reality you only had 7 channels, most if not all of which were in the 12-channel range of VHF.
And for those of you saying, "There were 13 channels on VHF!", no there weren't, because there wasn't a channel 1. Only 2 through 13, remember?
It's also important to note that home movie rentals on VHS and Betamax videocassette also didn't gain mass popularity until the 80s. In the 70s it was all about network affiliate broadcast television and literally nothing else when talking about the tube.
By the mid-70s, there were only three major affiliate broadcast television networks: ABC, CBS and NBC - all of which were media powerhouses, and as such all had gobs and gobs of cash. We're talking so much cash it was just plain obscene. Each network produced everything in-house, well before the days of freelance videographers. They had their own complete staff, studios, talent, you name it, they had it.
Today's national over-the-air networks are nothing but a shadow of what they used to be. Instead of The Big Three, it's now The Big Five. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and Ion. "The CW" is a joint venture between CBS, UPN and WB. In fact, "CW" literally means "CBS and Warner Bros". MyNetworkTV/MyTV/MyNet/MNTV, which you also may have heard about, is owned by Fox. Ion is what you used to know as PAX when it was formerly Paxson Communications, then Independent Television and finally Ion Television. And yes, they have the least viewers.
And, of course, there's still PBS. They're not commercial - but they do have the most viewers. PBS viewership is roughly 2 million more than NBC, its closest competitor. You'd never think they'd hold the top spot for the most viewers, but they do year after year.
What Network tries to do is let you know how evil major broadcast television can be. Evil in the respect that you will believe anything the glowing box tells you. Evil in the way parents raise their kids on it. Evil in the way that few if any people actually question what they see on said glowing box - or in this day and age, glowing slab. I think the movie pulls it off fairly well, however it's very obvious the movie is dated.
The dated nature of the flick comes into play for the fact cable television isn't in it at all because it didn't exist as we know it back then. And it goes without saying that nobody had Internet back in the 70s.
As crazy as this sounds, however, the message during several of Beale's rants do touch a nerve or two. He goes on about how the dollar is worthless and our country runs on oil. Sound familiar?
I do recommend watching the flick if for anything to see that history always repeats itself.
And for the fact seeing a 35-year-old Faye Dunaway is one of the hottest things you'll ever see in your life. When you see her, remember: No Photoshopping, no "enhancements", all woman. Knockout gorgeous.
Home is where it's hotter than...
I'm not a tattoo person, but these two are pretty frickin' awesome.
The first one is easy enough to figure out. Florida is hot. Very hot. In fact as I write this it's 90° F at 6:18pm. Yes, it's hot here.
The second one will take a bit to explain the significance. It says "FL DRIVERS NO SURVIVORS" with a shield for Interstate 4 in the middle.
I-4 is the lowest-numbered interstate in the USA and is a Florida-only east/west highway. When you see 4, that's Florida and nowhere else.
Interstate 4 has, put mildly, a tumultuous history to it.
Yes, I have driven I-4. It's the fastest and easiest way to get to Orlando from Tampa. However getting on I-4 in Tampa requires you to connect to it via what's known as Malfunction Junction where I-275 hooks up to I-4. Why is it called that? Because there are traffic jams there every day in all directions during any rush hour. Outside of rush hours it's actually quite civil, but during them, well.. you're gonna wait. A long time.
I'm pretty sure the reason the guy has the I-4 tattoo is due to the 70-car pileup that happened in January 2008. That's not an exaggeration by the way. How did it happen? It was from an approved burn by the Florida Wildlife Commission. The smoke mixed in with morning fog and made it so thick that it was near-zero visibility conditions, morning rush hour happened and all hell broke loose. Four people killed, 38 injured. Fifteen miles of I-4 were closed down almost the entire day.
The I-4 pileup certainly wasn't the worst (although this might be), but yeah I suppose it does warrant a tattoo if you're into that sort of thing.
There's something you have to remember about external hard drives...
This is a slightly embarrassing story considering how much I know about computers, but I'm sure it will help out a few people.
Over the course of the night the power went out temporarily and turned my PC off. I booted it back up and heard a rattling noise from one of the case fans, which means it needed a cleaning. I crack open the case, take out the fan and clean it up. To test the fan before screwing it back into the case, I disconnect the hard drive and power the PC up with the fan plugged in. I had to do this a few times to ensure the fan wouldn't start up its rattle-fest after I put the whole box back together.
I finish up, put everything back together and boot. The boot message states GRUB is trying to load and the system halts.
GRUB, as you know, is a Linux thing and not a Windows thing - and I don't have Linux installed at all.
At this point I start to freak out a bit, because how in the hell did GRUB get on my primary hard drive? Was my primary drive borked somehow?
I run into the BIOS and check the boot order. Everything seems in check there, but then I notice something. There are two hard drives listed.
My BIOS defaulted to the external USB drive and was trying to boot from that. At one point I did have Linux on that drive and never bothered removing the boot loader.
I reset the BIOS to boot from the SATA, and ta-da, everything booted up normally after that.
What happened was that when I disconnected the SATA drive and booted a few times to test the fan, the BIOS saw the external USB drive - which was still plugged in - and set itself to boot from that since the SATA didn't exist as far as the BIOS was concerned.
Yeah, I felt pretty dopey because of that. Granted, I fixed it and everything went back to normal, but I totally forgot that you can boot from USB external drives, and when the SATA is disconnected, the BIOS will seek out the first available boot media it can find, use that and keep that setting until you manually set it back to the way it was.
Oh, and as far as removing GRUB is concerned:
There are three ways to do it concerning an external USB HDD.
- Physically disconnect SATA HDD, boot from DOS/Win95/Win98 CD, run fdisk /mbr.
- Physically disconnect SATA HDD, boot from Windows XP CD, launch recovery console, run fixmbr.
- Use Partition Wizard. The home version is free, and allows you to get rid of a GRUB boot loader from an external USB HDD without having to do any extra crapola. Works quite nicely.
gmc canyon repair, fixing the crappy ground
I mentioned before (which does list the parts) the issue on GMC Canyon/Chevrolet Colorado trucks where the HVAC fans completely stop working for no reason while running. Today I fixed it myself at my father's place because he had the tools I needed. The job took about a half-hour to complete.
The fix for the buggy HVAC fans in a Canyon is to fix the ground connection, which is oh-so crappy from the factory. This not only improves the connection but also prevents the blower resistor from failing again, again and again.
Short description of fix:
- Remove bolt from passenger side fender under the hood holding splice pack.
- Sand off paint where the splice pack strap met the fender.
- Sand off coating on splice pack strap where strap met the fender.
- Sand off coating on splice pack strap where bolt washer meets strap.
- Reattach, seal.
Long description of fix:
The splice pack is a small black box directly to the left of the air filter. You need to remove the air filter cover and air filter itself in order to get to it, so the first thing I did was pop off the three clips holding the air filter cover, removed cover, put to the side, then removed the air filter so I could get easy access to this little box bolted into the fender.
The bolt is a 10mm, so I used a ratchet to remove that.
After that I decided to tackle removing the coating off the strap first. The bolt thread side was easy. I used a very small cone-shaped sand drum on a Dremel and sanded that down until it was shiny.
The other side however was a pain in the ass. Since the bolt will NOT come out of the strap no matter what you do, and the fact there's a bolt washer there, I had to manually sand that by folding some sandpaper, wedge it between the bolt washer and strap and sand that down as best I could.
Once that was completed I sanded off a ring of paint surrounding the hole where the bolt goes. This was the easiest part of the job.
The bolt was then reattached, and I used some RTV silicone sealant to seal it up so it wouldn't rust. To help me out I used a small modelers brush to get into the tight spots.
The directions on the sealant said to let it cure for at least 30 minutes, so I left the hood open for that long to let the sealant do its thing. After that I shut the hood and it was a done deal.
Result of fix:
The first obvious thing was that the chirping noise the blower motor made at low speeds decreased significantly, almost to the point where I no longer hear it. This strongly indicates that that motor may have been arcing ever so slightly when it was in use with the original crappy ground.
The second thing I noticed is that my A/C now blows colder. Nice side effect, especially in Florida.
The third is that the truck is much more "civilized" when driving her. She seems a lot more tame in a real good way. From acceleration curve to highway manners and just about everything in between, she's just an all around better driver now. Maybe it's all in my head, but it was something I noticed. On the highway in particular, I thought, "Wait a sec.. she's driving a lot more smoothly..?" Yeah, she was.
Does fixing a crappy ground connection really make that much of a difference? Evidently it does.
florida is in the land of make believe
I discovered this song today, and yes I actually like it.
The song is The Land of Make Believe by Bucks Fizz.
Why do I like this? Several reasons.
Decidedly 80s
Guys with tiger/leopard cut-off sleeve shirts, girls wearing next to nothing with big hair (awesome), lots of shiny bits that people wear and an extremely over-processed sound as far as the song goes, but that's fine because it fits.
The set is frappin' huge
Look at how many PEOPLE are there all dancing around. Look at the fact there's a POOL in the middle of the set which is deep enough to DIVE in (you see a dude actually do it late in the video). Heck, in some scenes you can see a BOAT in the water.
Come to sunny Florida
Right before the 3-minute mark you see a giant backdrop with "Come to sunny Florida". No explanation for this. They just threw it in the video, and it's only there for a few seconds. It makes absolutely NO SENSE AT ALL as to why it's there in The Land of Make Believe. It's like the director said, "Okay, we need to have a shot of a hot girl in a bikini.. how can we fit this in?", someone replied with, "Hey! We have this BIG-ASS FLORIDA BACKDROP, let's use that!", and the director replied with, "Yep, that'll work!"
This is a UK group by the way, so it's very likely the video shoot was in the UK. That being the case, why was a big-ass Florida backdrop even there?
I guess we'll never know.