Of Misconnections

We bought a new TV to go into our house. It's a Vizio 32", can do 1080p and has gotten good/bad reviews -- the good: it has good picture quality for the price. The bad: it has a rep for poor reliability. Knowing that, we bought it from Costco because they take stuff back.

We're not really interested in paying a lot for cable/satellite TV so we're viewing OTA (over the air) transmissions and need an antenna. I had a small indoor one that appears to not have survived the move, or it has acquired a special kind of Maxwell's demon: it can only pick up Christian TV stations (really). That's all well and good (pun intended) but I wanted my PBS, too.

We had an old Radio Shack outdoor antenna I had in the attic of our old house, so I set it up in the family room and aimed it about where I thought the transmitting towers were, and suddenly we had 33 channels -- PBS included. Now that we had some variety, I needed to get that huge antenna out of the way. Our new attic is filled with heater and ventilation ducts, plus it's just plain HOT up there right now, so for temporary I thought I would use one of the upstairs bedrooms for the antenna. They all have a UHF cable as part of the low-voltage house wiring, so I had this bright idea of connecting the antenna there, then going to our distribution box and connecting the family room cable to the bedroom cable (thru a splitter, because I also needed a male/female adapter). So I made the connections and -- no signal to the TV. What's this all about??? So I put on my Failure Analysis hat, got my ohmmeter out, and started checking connections. Fortunately for me, the TV, splitter and antenna all have transformer inputs or outputs, so cables that are connected to them look like a low resistance. Check this one, check that one....no connection. Hmm. So I started randomly checking the other cables and quickly discovered that they were (mostly) mislabeled. I made a guess that the installers thought the area next to the Kitchen was the Living Room (not the Family room) and connected that to one of the outputs of the splitter. The input came from the other cable that ohmed out (it was the other bedroom). And suddenly the TV came alive again.

Now, in cases where everything is used in the expected fashion -- all cables connected to a distribution box and a known "live" input to it-- this wouldn't matter, because the signals don't care what the labels on the cable are. And I figure that the phone/ethernet labels probably are screwed up, too: but the same argument applies, so who would know. It's when you use something in an unexpected way that interesting discoveries are sometimes made.

Even so, I thing I will let our builder know, in order to provide feedback regarding the quality of the install.

First Week

There are boxes scattered everywhere, but we are (mostly) moved into our new house! We're in the process of figuring out how our new stuff works. Here are a few discoveries so far....

The wood floors are dark enough that they show dirt pretty quickly. We're in the process of figuring out how to clean them without scratching them. Any dirt embedded in the brooms will leave scratch marks.

The stove, a 30" DCS gas top/oven works very well. I'm surprised just how differently the gas cooktop works compared to our electric (in a good way). Pans heat up much faster, and the heat is very even. The simmer setting is perfect for cooking hot cereal, and Low is just right for cooking up a batch of chicken stock.

Our phone/internet took (is taking) some time to set up. We wanted to keep our old phone number, which worked out when we moved from the old house to our temporary digs; but trying to go back apparently wouldn't work out. We found the reason was that our phone company was trying to set us up with Fiber, not copper-based phone/internet....and the Fiber comes from a different exchange. Even though they're the "same" company, for some reason they couldn't give us our old copper-based phone number??!!! So we told them we wanted copper, not fiber. After a lot of phone calls, they showed up, ready to put in a copper line for the phone and fiber for the internet...pretty strange. The installers were scratching their heads, wondering why the heck we would want to do that (we didn't). But in the process of setting up the account for copper, we got our old phone number back. And then we told the phone company to just install the fiber line (it actually costs a little less than the copper phone service). So now we have our old phone number and fiber phone/internet. The games you gotta play sometimes.

A new set of tasks

Here it is, our permit to live in the house we built. It's been a long time coming. But now we have a new set of tasks -- moving in, decorating, working on the landscaping. The next set of photos start to show the canvas we have to work with....

The view from the front.

Our pile of rocks (one of several). We will use a lot of these for the bones of the landscaping we will do.

Moving on to the interior. This is sort of a self-portrait, along with showing the master bath.

The cook top. If you look closely you can see that the center burner is on. According to the user manual, each burner should be turned on for 20-30 minutes to burn off all the manufacturing oils prior to using it to cook with. The same goes for the oven and broiler.

The two gas fireplaces have a similar "break in", so I fired both of them up. They surprised us by making quite a stink. We had opened the house up anyway to air it out so it wasn't a big deal. We were outside working on the garden.

A viewpoint that has been used any number of times, to show the kitchen...

..and family room...

...and our bright upstairs bathroom.