Category Archives: Curmudgeonly Kvetches

Woo hoo, Those Exciting Digital TV Converter Box Coupons

(Posted here rather than in my TryingTechnology.com blog, since this isn’t quite about technology. I’ll add a cross-post (or whatever the blogspeak term is) for it over there.)

While we have cable TV at our house, going to the 5+ year old non-flat TV upstairs, the dunno-how-old from-the-street junker downstairs still isn’t hooked up. That one is used primarily for watching DVDs and videotapes), episodically (no pun intended) used for watching PBS.

So, several months (and also to be prepared in case of a cable outage), I ordered my Converter Box Coupons (at https://www.dtv2009.gov/), to be prepared for the exciting upcoming Farewell To Non-Digital Television Broadcast Signals slated for February 2009.

My coupons arrived in a timely fashion… and semi-promptly got buried in a pile of other papers. (Easy to happen, as anyone who’s seen my home office knows.)

A month and some weeks later, I learned that THESE COUPONS EXPIRE IN 90 DAYS!

Go [expletive deleted] figure.

I found the coupons, but by the time I was able to get to a store that had converter boxes, THEY HAD EXPIRED TWO DAYS AGO.

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Some Explaining To Do – What A Book’s About

Over the past several years, between my one morning a week as a volunteer literacy tutor (I work with third graders), my grandparental , and other stuff, I’ve gotten to read (or have read to me) a fair number and range of books for three-to-ten year olds, ranging from way old (classic or just plain old) to fairly recent.

And I’ve come to conclusion that, aside from other issues outside this post’s topic, a lot of them — particularly many of the new ones — haven’t done their job well enough in being accessible to their audience… often, where a sentence or two, even a few words, would have made a big difference. Continue reading