6/25/08

Okay man, it was funny at first, but now it's getting weird. Every day I wake up and browse the headlines to find another one of my ideas being adopted. Now Senator McCain says we'll be free of foreign energy by 2025. I know I keep referring back to my pro-bono consulting work, but this was posted almost a month ago. Now, after forty years of buffoonery by our elected leaders, suddenly my strategy (with a few tweaks) starts showing up in a presidential campaign, piece by piece, day by day. Sure, I say by 2021 we're down to North America and by 2035 we don't import oil. McCain just splits the difference and says 2025. Obviously he's not using my plan without attribution. Yeah... obviously.

So I spent the day lounging around for the most part. That's kinda what I do. I stopped by and visited with a friend of mine for a while, then we headed out to dinner. His parents are 98 and 95 years old. His mother, being the older one, has trouble hearing. As such, we rigged a system several years ago to help her to watch television. Running RCA cables from the TV's A/V output, then cutting the cables and splicing them with speaker wire, we were able to link external speakers to the volume of the television set. It is something of a low budget setup, but it worked perfectly. Using a receiver and a surround sound system wasn't really an option, as the extra layers of things to power on and additional remote controls would defeat the purpose. The beauty was in the simplicity.

My friend recently bought a new LCD television. It has a slightly bigger screen and a nice sharp picture, so the old folks can see it a little better. When he plugged in the speaker cord, however, he found that our old setup no longer worked. Everybody at the electronics store told him that it still should work, but no sound comes from the speakers. So we find ourselves in Dearborn tonight, having dinner. I suggested that he might be able to find a pair of wireless speakers for around sixty or seventy bucks. The powered nature of the wireless transmitter, as opposed to the powerless setup that we used previously, may be the thing that would make the difference. If so, the folks would have speakers back close to their ears with independent volume knobs right on the speakers. They still wouldn't have to tune in through a receiver and everything should be fairly simple. We headed over to Best Buy. They had one set for $200. No. So then we hopped over to Circuit City. They had one outdoor system, with a single speaker, for $100. No. Radio Shack. Nothing even close.

We were resigned to the fact that we wouldn't have any luck, so I suggested that we stop by my parents' house and use their computer for a minute. My friend being 75 years old, he hasn't really felt the need to get internet access at his house. My parents live only a few blocks away from him, so I figured we might as well take one shot before I drove him back home. We headed in and I fired up my mother's computer. Within two minutes we found exactly what we were seeking. A pair of wireless hi-fi speakers with a 2.4GHz transmitter was only $56. Hopefully they'll do the trick. And that, in a nutshell, is why I don't shop in stores anymore.

My father was watching the ballgame and I don't have cable at home, so I swung back by after dropping off my friend. The game was all tied when it started to rain. After hanging around for an hour or so, they still had the tarp on the field so I headed home. It wound up being about a two-hour delay. The game turned out to be well worth the wait though, even if I did have to catch it on the radio. Some ninth innning heroics and we gain one more game on Chicago.

I think I'm going to head down to the ballpark for Thursday afternoon's game.