Thursday, November 30, 2017
Going tubeless
A while back I wrote about how my wife finally decided to join the 21st century by getting her first smart phone. Not only had I been shocked by the fact that the woman who barely had a use for her old dumb-phone now wanted one because she realized the world had gone App-centric and she could no longer get by without using any “Apps,” but that it had taken her a full decade to realize this.
Well it seems my reaction might have been a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
You see while I – “Mr. IT guy” – may have poked fun at her Luddite views surrounding technology and cell phones in particular, I was harboring my own, deep, shameful technology secret.
I was still using a “Boob-Tube” as my primary TV.
Yup, that’s right.
The TV at the heart of our living room’s “home entertainment system” was 27-inch Sony Wega CRT model from the turn of the century!
It’s not that I haven’t wanted a spiffy-new HDTV with all the bells-and-whistles all this time.
I did!
It was just when our last TV died almost 20 years ago, flat screen models were just coming out and were outrageously expensive. And being the frugal (not cheap!) kind of guy I am, I just couldn’t see dropping a couple of grand on a TV set.
So instead, I opted for the biggest and best conventional TV we could afford. And I have to say that the $600-plus we paid back then was well spent. That Sony Wega’s served us flawlessly for almost 17 years. Even today its picture looks and sounds as great as it did back then, so I’ve never been able to justify going out and spending $1,000 or more on another TV when the one we had was still perfectly good.
My plan was to always to replace it with a huge, hi-def, flat screen TV the moment it started going bad.
The only problem was, our old Sony showed no signs of breaking down anytime soon.
But this year, I’ve finally given in and joined the HDTV crowd and ordered a 55” 4K TV from Amazon.com during their Black Friday/Cyber Monday sale
.
So what caused me to literally up my TV-watching game?
Why, “Mrs. New Smart-Phone User” herself, that’s who!
You see she decided it was time we renovated our family room, replacing the worn carpeting, doing some painting and other minor repairs. And as anyone who has ever embarked on one of these DIY adventures knows, these types of projects have a tendency to snowball and start encompassing other things…
… like replacing the worn our couch…
…and our easy-chair…
.. and getting rid of some furniture we really didn’t need anymore…
…and finally coaxing (goading?) me into building that built-in bookcase I’ve been planning on doing ever since we moved in 20 years ago.
A bookcase that, coincidentally, was to be designed around housing a large flat-screen TV.
So with that project underway, I started looking at Black Friday sales on new TVs, just to “get some dimensions” so I could leave the proper space for the future TV.
I, of course, had absolutely no intention of buying one. I mean after all we still had a perfectly good TV. But after having to lug that 100-pound behemoth around the room while painting and to get it out of the way for the carpet guys, I began to have second thoughts.
“Out of curiosity,” I posted it on Craigslist to see if anyone would want it, because I sure as hell wasn’t about to just put it out on the curb. And to my surprise in less than a day, I got a response from a guy whose kid likes playing retro video games. According to him, those old games actually don’t look good on newer TVs and needed an old-style TV like mine.
So with a clear conscience that I wasn’t being wasteful, I gave our old TV to him and freed my inner-geek who has been wanting to revel in all the 4K, HD glory that most of the world has known for a while now.
And to think, it’ll have only taken me almost 20 years to have done it!
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