Category: link

I am old enough to remember helping my father adjust the directions of the television antenna in order to achieve the clearest picture when watching broadcast television. I remember the large brown box with the giant dial on which he carefully marked the direction the antenna should be facing to receive a particular station’s signal. At the time, there were three broadcasters – CBS, NBC, and ABC – in the VHF spectrum and just one in the UHF, the nascent PBS. As some people who continue to receive broadcast television “over the air” know, reception was free. It was the advertising that paid for what you watched.

At some point in the seventies, most homes changed over to cable reception. While you paid for the service, in return you got a constant, clear signal and you also got additional channels – I think is when the idea of “channels” emerged? – which became known as “super stations” and later became the basis for broadcasters like TBS. (There was a station out of Chicago, but I don’t remember what it was called and I don’t know what became of it.) In the era of cable television, we both paid for television and still got served advertising. We understood that cable was a middle man, a broker if you will, and some of what we were paying for was not only reception but the additional channels. (This is when ESPN got its start?)

And then along came the internet revolution and a lot of us became “cable cutters,” with the idea that we would subscribe directly to broadcasters, who were now reborn as “content providers.” This new model promised an era of better television because the audience would pay for it and we would fewer “suits” mucking about on the content creation side. These new providers, which now included Netflix and Amazon, were going to act like studios, which are themselves a kind of broker, acting as a hinge point between actual content creators and their audiences.

It was a splendid moment. But the suits were not going to stay away for long, and soon they overbought and overbuilt and their “costs” went up and the subscriptions most of us had agreed to were no longer enough and, sigh, that ended in the return of advertising. So, like in the era of cable, we pay to have access to content which is additionally monetized through advertising. And this is true except for Apple TV+ and Disney+, which may be one reason to subscribe to one or the other. (A little pricey to subscribe to both.)

Each service offers a way to “opt out” of receiving ads by paying for a Plus or Premium version of the service, which in the case of PeacockTV, for example, is a 50% increase.

So what? That’s how business works. True. And what that means is that our little household now does what other households do: we sign up, watch what we know we want to watch (and purposeful watching rather than grazing is probably better for us) and then we cancel the subscription, perhaps changing to another subscription in the process.

“Hello there” is a variation on Hello, world, the traditional first bit of code one writes, as in: print ("Hello world."). Hello there acknowledges that bit of history and includes a bit of my own personal history, with a reference to that moment in the original Star Wars film that we see Obi-Wan Kenobi for the first time.

With these preternatural, because they seem so premature, hints of autumn hitting us, it turned my mind to the fact that there are a variety of house projects in need of, hmm, completion. Almost all of them involve simply painting and affixing wood molding. In the case of the bathroom, both floor and ceiling need some molding, as does the top of the tub enclosure. The kitchen needs toe kicks beneath the cabinets and new crown molding where we installed the new window.

All of this because the promise of cool weather means I won’t mind spending a weekend painting and sawing wood trim on the carport. And painting. And sawing.

As my mind lingered on wood trim and I sat, as I am now, in the study, I realized that the book cases I built for Yung could use some attention. They are functional, but not finished. They could use some layering of finished millwork to dress them up a bit. To do that and to make everything work right, I needed to slip an additional piece of one by eight between the current side of the book case and the frame of the door that leads to the living room:

It’s not readily apparent, but the house is just out of plumb enough that the seven foot fall from the top of the frame to the bottom results in a narrowing of the gap between the book case and the door frame by about a quarter of an inch or so. When I first installed the cases, I was very focused on their being plumb. Only later, after they were already loaded with books did I realize that simply matching the extant, and sufficiently, plumb line of the door frame was the better idea. I had largely overlooked the discrepancy both because I didn’t feel like unloading the shelves in order to hammer on the bottom of the cases to shift them a quarter of an inch and because really, no one ever noticed. (I hate admitting that I actually used that as a reason.)

But now I, as I considered finishing out the cases, not only did I have a practical reason for setting things if not straight then parallel but it was a detail that kept nagging at me each time I passed through the door. But I was stuck with the reluctance of not wanting to unload 54 feet of shelving (2-foot shelves x 27 shelves).

I thought about a hammer. The standard hammers in my tool bag were simply too small. I would make a lot of noise and not get much movement.

So I thought about a bigger hammer: I could borrow a sledge from Gerard or someone else. But would I have enough room to swing it in the span of the 32-inch doorway?

Hmmm.

I decided to try a low-tech approach. I sat on the floor, put my back against the wall, and pushed with my feet against the book cases.

Nah ah.

But something about the idea of pushing like that stuck in my head and as I walked away to consider my next option, it dawned on me: use one of the jacks from our cars and let the efficient, and relatively easy, transfer of power achieved by the turning of a screw do the work.

But would it work?

What you see in the photo is the jack from my truck. 2 x 8s at each end spread the pressure out so that I don’t leave a mark on any surface. A 2 x 4 completes the span and two miscellaneous pieces of 2 x materials keep the jack and the 2 x 4 aligned. And, yes, I did realize that the two by four my jump up from the pressure, which is why I stood on it while I turned the jack. The result?