Projo Subterranean Homepage News

I'm on vacation, living the timeless life. These caught my eye:

TV picture is bad: What happens after TV's mainframe era ends next February? Linux Journal Senior Editor Doc Searls calls the reassuring government messages about the switch to digital transmission "propaganda," and says "For many viewers, the digital signals aren't going to be there, no matter what the viewer does (other than hunt them down on cable or satellite)."

If you have an HDTV and live within sight of New York TV station transmitters on the Empire State Building, you can probably pick them up over an antenna on your set or your roof. In fact, a loop or bowtie antenna will do. So will length of wire about 5 inches long, attached to the center conductor of your coaxial connection on the back of your set.

But if you live farther away, good luck. Your old VHF TV station not only won't have the range it did on VHF, but will probably not have the same range as an old analog signal on the same UHF frequency. It certainly won't have the same behavior. The signals tend to be either there or not-there. They don't degrade gracefully with increasing "snow", as analog signals did. They break up into a plaid-like pattern, or disappear entirely.

This is not good news, nor good timing. Economizing families might drop cable or satellite subscriptions only to find their TV reception poorer than ever before.

Fear of food: Salmonella signs point to peppers -- Jonathan Rockoff of the Baltimore Sun reports news that might make a tomato-grower sick. After all the hoopla, it might have been the jalapenos in the salsa, not tomatoes at all, that caused the salmonella outbreaks that kept tomatoes off restaurant menus recently.

After putting tomato-growers on the ropes, they're now switching the big guns on the pepper growers? One vegetable at a time, till we're all afraid to eat anything but canned Spam?

Here's a bigger question: The CDC estimates there are 1.4 million cases of salmonella every year in the U.S.; 7/100 of 1 percent die. Why the over-the-top alarms on this one?

Is it something I did?: Down for everyone or just me? is the place to go when you can't get into a site and you don't know if it's your fault or theirs.

See bottom: Transparent Canoe. It's beautiful in clear water but, as one commenter notes,

You're going to get hit by a motor boat. Those drunken boaters can't see you on a good day and now you want Wonder Woman's canoe? What's next an invisible car?

Clouds in his coffee: Drip by drip, Starbucks lost what made it shine. I was never in Love with Starbucks, but Tom Mullaney was. It's over now.

Today those memories are like bitter, stale grounds.

A beginning about endings: Jane Gross started her Caring for Elderly Parents - The New Old Age blog at the Times July 1, and was greeted with an outpouring of comments.

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