Comcast Prepping Big Media Buy? Investors concerned the company is hoarding cash for an acquisition in the same vein as its 2004 attempt to purchase Disney. (Reuters)

Q&A With Boxee Investors; Bijan Sabet and Neil Sequeira discuss why they put money into the company (and talk about Boxee’s business model). (VideoNuze)

CBSNews.com Launches The Tomorrow Show; Mo Rocca hosts this weekly show about the future of technology, pop culture, food and the environment. (CBSNews)

Watch CBS Videos Online

3-D Viewing Coming Towards the TV; challenges such as cost, formats and those silly glasses still need to be overcome. (The Wall Street Journal)

Brands Line Up for Mad Men Integration; London Fog and Stolichnaya are just some of the recognizable products in the show, some of which pay for placement; others do not. (The Hollywood Reporter)

TiVo Charges Transfer Fee; $150 to transfer lifetime service from one unit to a different one during repair. (Consumerist)

Its been no secret that the last few weeks of my life have left me in a fairly foul mood, what with the letdown and disappointment of a low turnout for our first show of 2009 and then the aches and sniffles that accompanied the illness that followed. All of this on top of the fact that I am in my 8th week of being laid off from my main graphic design gig and RUNNING. OUT. OF. MONEY. Seriously. Its been quite a toughie.

But wouldn’t you know, as soon as I start to get comfortable with the idea of sharpening razor blades or climbing out onto a very high ledge, something decent happens and I’m forced to table my discontent to make room for feeling blessed for a change.

My band played at The Steve Allen Theater tonight as the musical guest for The Tomorrow Show hosted by Ron Lynch and Margaret Cho. Pretty cool eh? You betcha!

The night started off with a last minute brush up rehearsal at my studio in Hollywood. We needed to solidify a few fussy arrangements of a couple of new songs that we intended to play at tonight’s show. The rehearsal went well and we then loaded up our gear and headed down the street to the venue. We arrived with plenty of time to set up and the sound guy was an absolute angel of a man who took good care of us. After a pleasant sound check, we took some promo pics of the group on the stage and then relaxed for about 40 minutes while waiting for the audience to arrive.

I wasn’t expecting much. Even with a famous comic like Margaret Cho in the mix…I figured, this is LA…people won’t come out at midnight, especially in the rain. Right? WRONG. People turned up in droves. The house was starting to get pretty packed. It was time for the band and I to head backstage. I ran into the very nice, and very accommodating Ron Lynch who introduced me to the lovely and very down to earth Margaret Cho. We spoke briefly and she asked me if I would tune her guitar for her. I agreed and we chatted some more while I tuned her Guild. I admitted that I was a fan and we chatted about Northern California a little bit. Once her guitar was taken care of The Brian Travis Band got into our position. We were introduced by Ron Lynch and began to play behind a screen that lifted to reveal us jamming away to our first song, ‘My Dad is Better Than Your Dad.’

This was our first time playing this song live in front of people…and they LOVED it! Seriously. They ATE IT UP. There were laughs and chuckles and bursts of applause in the middle of the song…and we totally rocked it with mad authority. We launched into “I Think Your Mom And Dad Have Been Replaced By Aliens” which was probably our weakest performance of the short 20 min set, but it was by no means a downer…we rocked that song too, I just wasn’t at my best vocally on that one…but you should really cut me some slack…I am getting over a bad cold! “Girls Aren’t Allowed In Forts” was next. It went over like gangbusters! Then we closed the set with “Stacy, The Trailer Park Girl” and brought down the house. What a good time we had! What a great audience! Margaret Cho watched our set with a big smile on her face from the wings of the stage and congratulated us on such a good set.

Later on that night I gave Margaret one of our 3 song demo CD’s and she was pleased enough to put it in her guitar case. Q: How cool is that? A: Ice cold.

After the set we were congratulated many times by many people and Ron Lynch asked us back anytime. Finally, a good gig in LA! About 100 new ears heard my band tonight. The hands of strangers clapped along to my songs and enjoyed our set and told me so afterward. It was rewarding and thrilling. I guess I can come back in from off the ledge now.

I am currently in bed, knocked down from a virus that has been tiptoeing around my world since a few weeks prior to my Molly Malones set on Jan 29th.  My body and my brain often make deals regarding the appropriate time for an illness to take hold.  When I have a show coming up my brain goes into deep negotiations with my body extolling the importance of not being sick for a live show.  My body usually offers up a trade…going something like this, “You can have a 100% healthy body for another 2 weeks, but 3 days after your gig, I’m taking you DOWN!”

My brain agrees emphasizing one last time how important it is for me to NOT be sick during my show, and then the deal is ink’d and my fate is sealed.

This time however illness did not set in right away…I thought perhaps my body had given me a reprieve.  A get-outta-jail-free card?…a blanket pardon?…but no, my body did indeed make good on our pact and about a week after the last guitar chords of the show were struck, I began to feel the beginnings of a cold. At first it was just a general malaise but soon that malaise began to grow, until finally it began to conduct an all-out search for ‘The Weather’ with the specific intention of getting under it…

So here I am with my head feeling 10 times its normal size, coughing and sneezing and feeling miserable. This is day 3 of being too sick to leave my room. I’ve been spending the hours half-watching / half-ignoring episodes I thru IV of Star Wars while finishing up a model of The Millennium Falcon.

I admit that I let my inner Star Wars geek run rampant when I feel awful…not sure why, it must comfort me somehow, but I think the modeling glue fumes and the Testors paints are slowly giving me a headache…Soon I will hop aboard the Nyquil express to get the sleep I desperately need.

The goal is to get better by Saturday since the group and I have a show to play at The Steve Allen Theater. We are the musical guest for The Tomorrow Show hosted by Ron Lynch and Brendon Small with special guest host: Margaret Cho. The fact that Margaret Cho is guest hosting means there could be some influential people there so we’ve gotta bring the ‘A’ game.

…so here I am resting up and not leaving the house until the gig trying to strike another bargain with my fatigued, and ill-striken body, who has the upper hand at the moment.

(TV image from webtvwire.com)

“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat, there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits.”

That was the advice viewers heard at the beginning of each episode of “The Outer Limits“, a sci-fi TV series originally broadcast from 1963 to 1965. Now, 45 years later, Americans are getting some new advice, and yes, those same scary people are still “controlling transmission”. This time, however, there IS something wrong with your television set… the problem is that it’s analog, not digital.

When the clock strikes Midnight on February 17, 2009 (six months from this writing), your decrepit, old analog television sets will become electronic boat anchors, and you will be dragged into the brave new world of digital TV, whether you like it or not. You can enter the digital realm by replacing your beloved boat anchor with one of those shiny new digital HDTVs. Or, you can give your analog friend a reprieve by adding a set-top converter box which will allow your analog TV to pick up those new-fangled ATSC digital broadcasts, more commonly known as DTV or Digital TV. Learn more about DTV at the U.S. government’s official digital television website, www.dtv.gov.

A small number of stations in the United States will still be allowed to continue broadcasting those old NTSC analog signals after February 19th, but for the most part, analog TV sets will stop working on that date. And if you get your daily fix via cable or satellite TV, no worries. Nothing will change for you a few days after the St. Valentine martyrs get their annual tribute.

Now we don’t know about you, but the mere thought of being denied our god-given right to watch infomercials and the home shopping network 24×7 has put us into a digital frenzy. We’re pretty sure that those converter boxes will become scarcer than hens teeth as the deadline approaches. Expect long lines at electronics retailers, with people camping out at the local Best Buy, waiting for the next shipment of converter boxes to arrive from China by armored car. The lines will be so long, you’ll think Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft was releasing their newest game console. People will be paying proxies to stand in line for them. Scalpers will be buying the converter boxes and selling them on eBay at 300% markups. So, with these visions of my digital future weighing heavily on my mind, I’ve decided to start my dtv converter box shopping now.

Gamers line up to buy the Nintendo Wii (from zeldawii.com - click on photo)

Uncle Sam, in the guise of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (doesn’t that name just roll off your tongue?), has blessed Americans who apply for their $40 converter box coupons (limit two per household) at www.dtv2009.gov. They will send you a coupon that can be used towards the purchase of government-approved eligible converter boxes. It’s not actually a coupon, but rather what appears to be a debit or gift card, complete with a 16 digit account number embossed on the front, along with a way cool hologram, and the obligatory high-coercivity magnetic stripe and three digit CVC2 code on the back. And it expires two to three months after you get it, so if you snooze, you loose.

What will you pay for a DTV converter box? They are generally available anywhere from $60.00 to well over $100, online and at retail stores. We think that manufacturers and retailers have taken advantage of the fact that the government is subsidizing these converters to the tune of $40 each, and they’ve decided to inflate their selling price. Low-end DVD players, which are substantially more complex and expensive to produce, sell for prices starting in the $30 range. If you are considering shelling out over $100 for a converter box, you might want to think about replacing your TV with a digital model instead. You won’t have to deal with two devices or two remote controls, and you’ll gain some functionality and ease of use by replacing your TV, VCR, Tivo and/or DVD recorder, instead of retrofitting your old set, especially if you plan to record programs off-air. One of the biggest limitations when using a atv-to-dtv converter box is that you can no longer select the channel using the tuner (or programming capability) of your TV, VCR, Tivo or DVD recorder. You are forced to select the channel via the converter box (“Series 3″ Tivos have both ATSC and NTSC tuners.)

What would these DTV converters sell for, if it wasn’t for the government subsidy? We suspect they would be in the area of $25-35 each. Expect them to drop back to that price range once the subsidy program goes away, and replacement of older televisions with new digital receivers picks up more steam. Almost all new TVs sold today have digital tuners that do not require an analog-to-digital set-top converter box.

So while the government subsidy program has probably encouraged people to buy converter boxes, it has no doubt also inflated the prices of those boxes. It has also encouraged some people who would have simply replaced their television sets, to put off that purchase, and opt for a converter instead. Based on some of the reviews being posted by purchasers of these set-top converter boxes, there are a lot of people unhappy with the performance and quality of these products. It seems likely that many of them will decide to scrap their converter boxes in favor of a new TV. We think a better way of providing a subsidy for DTV to Americans would have been a one-time tax credit for the purchase of a converter box or new digital television set. It would have had less of an inflationary effect on retail prices, been less expensive to implement, and would have been less susceptible to abuse than the coupon program.

We don’t know about you, but we can’t wait to see those infomercials offering their snake oil in 1920 x 1080 high-def resolution, with Dolby 5.1 surround sound. So if you haven’t done so already, apply for your converter-box coupons, bring your TV viewing into the digital age, and help increase our trade deficit with China, all from the comfort of your web browser. Click here to follow our adventures as we shop for, purchase, install and compare the features and performance of set-top DTV converter boxes.

To paraphrase the late television legend Tom Snyder, “Fire up a colortini, sit back, relax, and watch the bits, now, as they fly through the air”. (There is a treasure trove of Tom Snyder’s interviews from The Tomorrow Show available on youtube.)

- Routing By Rumor

Tom Snyder (1936-2007)

photo: wkyc.com Cleveland/Akron, OH

]]> http://dieactordie.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/lost-comedy-video-weird-al-yankovics-first-tv-appearance/ Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:37:15 +0000 dieactordie http://dieactordie.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/lost-comedy-video-weird-al-yankovics-first-tv-appearance/