I'll have what she's having...

[zootsaxismyaxe]

Today I went to get my digital television converter (hooray for random government handouts in a time of financial crisis) and the girl at the store asked if I was Jim Halpert (http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0009722/).  Either she'd been drinking as much as I wish I had today or I've found someone with even worse tv reception than myself :)

In other

Comments

[tskirvin]

You should have sold her some office supplies.

[zootsaxismyaxe]

Sadly, I couldn't find a camera to mug to...

[reskusic]

Don't worry, the converter box subsidy was very much outweighed by the cash the FCC made selling the old TV broadcast frequencies to industry.

[zootsaxismyaxe]

While I hadn't lost much sleep over it in any case, I hadn't thought about that.

I am curious if it would have been cheaper for them to just give me a free box in the mail or something. They mailed me a credit card with $40 on it and then directed me to a store to buy a $42.99 box. I guess the local government gets the sales tax, but it seems like a lot of effort for a <$4 transaction.

Ah well, the moral of the story is that I'll still be able to watch television in a few months time when the conversion is made.

[reskusic]

I think the FCC does not really want to build a supply chain for one-time use. For that matter, being free-marketeers in their current incarnation, they probably don't want to single-source the boxes. Also, with a $40 unit price, the consumer electronics vendors are probably not falling over themselves to be that single source.

[zootsaxismyaxe]

I would have thought there might be some small-time outfit looking to score an "in" for a government contract, but the payout probably isn't that high. Wikipedia says it initial money granted to these coupons was $890M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DTV_transition_in_the_United_States#Coupon_program), but I have no idea how much a system like this would cost to implement above and beyond that.

Ah well, at least I got my converter. Hopefully it works...