Peter Armstrong

Rage Against the Mighty Machines (Day #9 of no TV)

Posted by Peter Armstrong Mon, 09 Oct 2006 05:24:00 GMT

This wouldn't be a proper blog if I didn't go into long rambling tangent-filled posts with no real point at all. Let's fix that now.

It's been 9 days since I cancelled cable TV!

Caroline and I moved the TV from the living room to my office and covered it with a duvet (so that Evan, our 2 year old son, doesn't see it if he looks in my office). We moved a couch in front of where the TV used to be (sunk into an open cabinet built into the wall) and put an old headboard behind the couch, thus blocking off the hole where the TV used to be. The design goal here is safety not aesthetics: we don't want Evan climbing into the cabinet where the TV was. However, it has the bonus side effect of giving the impression (to a 2 year old anyway) that the TV is still behind it, just inaccessible.

The first two days Evan tried to look behind/beside/over the couch + headboard combination. No such luck.

By day #3 it had mostly faded from his memory, and now he doesn't even appear to think about it.

Now, when we come home from the beach or from shopping he goes for his trucks or trains and starts playing, instead of going for the TV and wanting to watch "Mighty Machines" or "Max and Ruby". (I'm not knocking either show: both are great shows for a 2 year old--no violence, etc.)

However, it's so easy (for me anyway, since I'm weak) to slide down the slippery slope from half an hour of TV per day allowed, to an hour, etc. Especially after a long day coding and there is dinner to help with and there is a very unhappy little person desperately signing his version of "again" and saying "ah-geh".

At this point, you learn the true meaning of guilt: not that you feel guilty about saying no, but that he is so wrapped up in it. You're not Daddy, you're the enemy for taking TV away.

"You're 2. You should be playing."

Now, I've never been a perfect parent, and I'm not kidding myself that I'm starting now. We have a portable DVD player which we have resorted to on a few occasions since cancelling cable. (Yes, we went and bought "Mighty Machines" and "Max and Ruby" DVDs, of course. I like to think of this as the TV equivalent of methadone.)

That said, it's been 9 days and probably about 5 hours of portable DVD player viewing. Some days none at all, other days 20 minutes, etc.

The great thing about the portable DVD player is the "out of sight, out of mind" aspect of it: The TV existing in the living room existed as a constant option--Evan would be playing happily and then suddenly stop playing and walk over to the TV and turn it on. So even if you put your Good Parent hat on and turn it off, you've gone from him having fun playing to a struggle of wills about TV.

This is much better. There are enough times when you simply must impose rules; having a TV just creates a whole other class of problems. Rules about watching it are the equivalent of hack workarounds--not a proper solution. Removing the TV just removed a whole class of problems in one shot.

TV had turned from a feature into a bug.

Talk about a refactoring!

Simplification.

Yikes, I've gone all 37signals.

Actually, yes and no.

I simplified a bit more, in fact: I also took my PS2 and my 8 games and took them to EB Games and turned them into a $110 gift card. I'm too busy to do the ebay thing with them. In some senses $110 is pretty bad considering what I spent to buy the games, but I realized that I hadn't played a PS2 game in about a year! The PS2 had turned into a DVD player--a really, really bad DVD player. (I remember a Japanese TV commercial I think I saw linked to a long time ago from GMSV where a guy in an office cafeteria is talking about Kill Bill and he's acting out a fight scene but freezing and restarting (the implication is that his DVD player he watched it on was freezing) etc. Anyway, the PS2 was like that, but worse--about a third of all DVDs I'd rent wouldn't make it all the way through without issues.)

But I then bought a proper DVD player. Luxury!

Furthermore, the gift card is going to get used for part of a Wii of course. Eventually. Who am I kidding--I'm sure I'll be preordering or I'll be there on launch day. However, Wii or no Wii, the TV will be staying in my office, covered with the duvet until after Evan goes to sleep. And if/when I get a Wii, it will be in my office too, covered with the duvet until Evan is asleep.

Having just gone down one slippery slope and back again, wii certainly don't want to go down another. Wii would have a big problem on our hands.

(There, I did it. Like everyone else on the planet, I gave in and made a bad pun about the Wii. Nintendo's marketing is absolutely brilliant--every hack writer in the world has hundreds of puns in them about the Wii, begging to come out. It gets to the point that you have to write an article just get it out of your system. Once you start talking or thinking about it, it's only a matter of time before it comes out. You can only hold it for so long. And I've just made another. Must. Stop. Now.)

Anyway, I hope this concludes my cycle of TV in my life:

1. TV with No Cable
2. Cable TV
3. Digital Cable
4. Digital Cable + HD
5. Digital Cable + HD + HD PVR (worked well for about a month before having issues and getting returned)
6. Digital Cable
7. No TV

It's really a different feeling being in a living room with no TV in it. It's kind of like going to one of those resorts on Vancouver Island with no TV, phone, etc.--there is a sense of quiet and calm. You can sit and read a book or talk without getting turned into a channel-surfing slug.

That said, I do miss Fox Sports World report and especially the 1 hour highlight show of Premiership matches.

And worst of all, Chelsea plays Barcelona in less than two weeks. I'll need to find an alternate way of seeing that :-)