Year: 2004

Trying to Save the Season

One of the headlines I read yesterday said that professional hockey players have agreed to take a 24% reduction in salaries in order to end the current labor dispute in the NHL and save the hockey season after already missing 85 days of the season.

The bigger problem? I didn’t know that *any* games had been missed. It never even occurred to me that the hockey season should be underway right now.

Last year I remember reading that the NHL’s current TV contract was over and they were taking bids for a broadcaster to buy the rights. The problem was that nobody wanted the rights. The final price they were able to negotiate was $0 (but at least they will be on TV still, or would have been if they had any games). And the league is losing $250 million a year.

Fish Oil

Clio has been itching so much that I finally took her to the vet. They said she had fleas, but I thought that was impossible since I hadn’t seen any fleas on her and I was giving her monthly applications of flea medicine. They gave her some steroids to relieve the itching which worked but made her drink so much water that she wound up ruining the carpet in the Estonians’ room (forcing me to remove that carpet which was a good thing anyway).

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HDTV DVR

Even though I already bought a HDTV decoder box, Dish Network is now selling their HDTV Digital Video Recorder Model 921 for $550 whereas last year at this time it was $1000 if you could find it (it had just come out). Because the HDTV signal has 5 times as much information as a regular signal, recording HDTV programs takes much more disk space and processing power. The 921 has a 250 GB hard drive in it and it still only lets you store about 25 hours of HDTV programming (or 180 hours of regular programming; that’s more than 5 times, but satellite signals are compressed). Dish itself only broadcasts a limited number of HDTV stations because it takes up a lot of bandwidth on their satellites too. They have HD versions of Discovery, ESPN, and TNT as well as a HD movie channel and HDNet with various HD offerings for $10 a month. Broadcasting hundreds or thousands of local channels in HDTV would take so many satellites that it may never happen. So Dish made sure the 921 could receive HDTV signals through an antenna and record them.

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