Tubes and streets

[infrogmation]

Anyone else, especially Mac users, had problems with loading LJ pages while logged in since the switch to user subdomains the other day?

I'm probably going to be shopping for a new television set soon. My old one made it through the storm, but is getting green around the edges. That may be because its some 18 or so years old. I guess that's a sign I don't watch too much tv, if a cheap set gets me that many years. I notice it seems that from the tvs set out on curbs around town that pretty much everyone seems to have had a bigger, better, and newer set than I, even in the poor neighborhoods.

What are folks thoughts on if I need to be concerned about HDTV or digital compatiblity and such? Will buying a regular tv soon be something I'd regret, like buying a nice new AM radio right before FM broadcasts started?

On the mail front, today I got an invitation to an event on January 15th, yesterday I got the Dec 12 issue of the New Yorker, and earlier in the week I was encouraged by getting a letter mailed in town only 10 days earlier. The other night I was at a neighborhood meeting, and one of the city councilmen confirmed that they havn't been able to get the Post Office to acknowledge that there's any particular problem with the mail here.

It's still very much not normal times here. Driving around town I still find myself freshly aghast at some of the devastation. There's just so much of it. In the better functioning parts a drive can be more of a wacky adventure. The other day I was driving on Magazine in the Lower Garden District neighborhood of Uptown, and saw a pickup truck get caught on one of the numerous downed power or telephone lines that still litter the streets. The truck snaged the line while in motion and suddenly got yanked to a stop and backwards with a cartoonish "boink!"





Trying get the pickup desnagged from the fishhook



And we thought we had a pot hole problem BEFORE the storm...

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I was caught unawares once by the site forgetting my login cookie, but other than that, no big problems.

[asienieizi.livejournal.com]

Great photo of the Pot Hole that ate New Orleans! Your truck story reminds me of something like that around a month or so after the storm up here when we passed a car that had gotten the wheel/axle wrapped up in some downed power lines. We were going to stop but changed our mind when we saw someone approaching the problem with a chain saw...

[valiant-200.livejournal.com]

As for the TV dilemma, I suggest either going for broke and buying an full-blown HDTV receiver, or hedging your bet and picking up a reasonably low priced conventional TV. This is not a good time to invest a lot of money in a standard definition set. The current federal timetable calls for a conversion of all broadcast stations to HDTV by 2009. Whether that happens or not is a subject of debate, since the original deadline was this year but, regardless, that is the situation as of now.