Category: Life with Pratts

Work, Work, Work

Our son Eric, fine lad that he is, will soon be the age I was when I started working part-time in high school. Getting that job was the best thing I ever did. Besides finally having some money to spend, I did a lot of growing up during those two years.

In the 11th grade I worked at a restaurant, washing dishes for $1.60/hour. Then one of the cooks graduated from high school, quit, and left for college. To be sure he wouldn’t be drafted he attended McGill University in Canada. I was given his job, and I was a short-order cook until I graduated from high school.

With that bit of background, The Boston Globe has this news item about child labor in Massachusetts.

New provisions in the laws enacted last year bar 16- and 17-year-olds from working past 10 p.m. on school nights. They also cannot work past 8 p.m. without adult supervision, the attorney general’s office said.

I never worked past 10 when I was 16 and 17, but there was rarely an adult present after 8 pm. Just us high school kids. In fact, during my time as a cook I was often in charge of shutting down the kitchen. There were Saturdays when I worked from 8 in the morning until final clean up was done at 10 pm. Fourteen hours straight! A 25-hour work week was not uncommon, on top of school, homework, drama club, and volunteering at a teen hotline. And the Lutheran church! Let’s not forget about church. I loved my life during that time, but I can’t imagine ever allowing Eric to burn himself out like that.

Project: Projector

Da-Lite Projector StandWith disappointment I have abandoned the Sanus (that’s a lousy name for a company) shelf I was using for the Panasonic PT-AX200U video projector. A photo of the projector as it was is at this link. Click the small picture to enlarge and see how it now is, sitting on a Da-Lite projector stand. The Sanus TV shelf is a very good piece of inexpensive hardware that’s available at any Target store, but my mounting scheme didn’t hold up. It’s now going to be used to get the computer monitor off my desk, but this time it will be properly anchored with bolts to a wall stud.

The Panny 200U continues to amaze and delight. I’m especially pleased with being able to enlarge 4:3 material to fill up the screen, 80 inches diagonal. Looks super, man!

Photograph of Panasonic PT-AX200U projected image

But what are the projector’s faults? It must have some. Yes, it does. As I said before, two of them are common in projectors using 3LCD technology.

  • Color uniformity of bright white
  • Panel alignment

When there’s a large area of bright white — the ice of a hockey game, for example — the left edge is a bit reddish and the right edge has a green tint. As far as the alignment goes, with three separate LCD panels it isn’t perfect. I wouldn’t expect it to be, especially in a projector in this price range, but it isn’t a problem, because you have to make an effort with test patterns or the on-screen menu to see where the convergence is off. Neither of these minor issues is a reason to complain. In my life I’ve gone from black and white TV and vinyl records, to Dolby Digital and HDTV. Every technology has its strengths and weaknesses, and no product is perfect. I think this projector is a great deal for the money.

A major factor in favor of the Panasonic PT-AX200U is that it’s free of the screen door effect that plagues LCD projectors, like the 1024×768 3LCD Hitachi units I see at the office. Unlike minor panel misalignments, the screen door effect is very obvious. Eliminating it results in the 200U having an image that looks very much like watching a movie, which is what I want. Some projector fans may think the picture looks a bit soft, but my guess is their idea of image sharpness is actually due to seeing the outlines of the pixels. These are perhaps the same people who feel Clear Type (sub-pixel) fonts in Windows XP look fuzzy.

But somebody at Panasonic must have been worried about potential complaints about softness, because somewhere in the video processor there seems to be some edge enhancement. I really dislike edge enhancement. It appears only selectively, so it isn’t a simple always-on thing, like the old Scanning Velocity Modulation circuit in regular TV’s. Some of the better TV sets let you disable SVM, and I sure wish the PT-AX200U had a way to turn off its edge enhancement circuit.

Citizen Cane

Box of 40 Spangler Candy Canes

Click to enlargeBack just before Christmas, at this link I took the Spangler Candy Company of Bryan, OH to task for making their candy canes in Mexico. But now the intrepid investigator Dennis F. Rogers has turned up a startling piece of evidence. A box of Spangler candy canes made in the good ol’ U.S.A.! Click the thumbnail view to see the proof.

What’s different about this box is that the Mexico-sourced package had 12 full-size candy canes, and this one has 40 small ones. So what’s the deal here? Are only the larger candy canes made in Mexico? Was that batch outsourced, or are the small candy canes from an old batch, before production was moved out of the country? I don’t know, but for now the Spangler Candy Company has partially redeemed itself in my view.

Thanks For The View

Here I am going on about the video projector, without giving thanks to the men who made it possible for me to appreciate it. Dr. Mark Hughes and Dr. Brad Shingleton.

I am indebted to Dr. Hughes in particular. My admiration and appreciation of him are without limit. Hughes saved the vision in my left eye, after a retinal detachment eight years ago. I still see him every six to eight months, and he will most likely be performing a procedure on my right eye this year.

Before Hughes, a doctor in Worcester, Massachusetts botched a surgery to repair the detached retina. Immediately after the surgery I knew it hadn’t worked, yet he sent me home. A week later I found Dr. Hughes through my boss, whose wife worked at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Pratt Porch Project – P.S.

I’ll get back to posting something of interest once I’ve returned to work and have shaken off the holiday brain fog. But first, here are a couple of pictures of the remodeled porch as it looks now, after painting and the addition of some furniture. We’re still looking for a coffee table and side table.

If you click to look at the full-size picture with the TV, you’ll see it has an old-fashioned rabbit ear antenna. On February 17, 2009, analog broadcast television in the United States will cease. Long before then I plan to have a FiOS set top box installed. Or I could run a coaxial cable to the porch myself and use the analog signal provided over FiOS to watch the same local stations the antenna receives. I suppose it’s possible Verizon will shut off the analog service, although they’re under no requirement to do that.

P.S. According to this item, cable TV companies will keep their analog signals for local stations until 2012.

A Dream Defeated in HD?

Yikes! At the moment, the home team NE Patriots have fallen way behind the NY Giants, 28-16. Not good. The Pats are supposed to remain undefeated! But at least the game looks terrific in projected HDTV. Eric’s hand shows the size of the picture.

Pats in HDTV

P.S. Whew! They did it. Tom Brady may be a jerk for not marrying the mother of his child, but he’s sure good at his job.