A Long and Winding Road

The road to high definition television – a picture that not only displays in a widescreen cinematic aspect ratio but is twice as sharp as the old standard – has been long and tortuous. A consortium of engineers from all the major broadcasters, Hollywood studios, consumer electronic manufacturers, and, not to be dismissed, computer companies came together in 1991 to establish a standard for HDTV broadcasting and began field testing the new signal in 1994.

In 1996, WRAL-TV in Raleigh, North Carolina, won the race to become the first local station to broadcast in high definition. In1998, HDTV got its public launch (to selected science centers and museums) with coast-to-coast coverage of John Glenn’s return to space on the Space Shuttle Discovery.

It was not until the early 2000’s, however, that TV stations settled on a uniform transmission standard. (Just in time for Super Bowl XXXIV on January 30, 2000.) Cable networks and satellite television companies started adopting the new signal in 2002, but Europe did not join the race until a Belgium TV station began transmitting in HD in 2004.

What Kind of HD?

The ten years the industry spent fleshing out the details of HDTV did not yield any easy answers. Camera manufacturers began the decade in an analog world debating how many lines should make up the new TV picture. (480, 720 or 1080? Interlaced or progressively scanned?) They ended it in a digital era that defines a good picture by how many bits per second a camera can pour into a data stream.

The high definition signal, when you looked at it straight out of the camera, knocked your eyeballs out. But getting it into our living rooms, the engineers concluded, would require new frequencies, new broadcast towers, new TV sets, and a whole new way of making TV shows.

Editors struggled to come up with compression algorithms that could crunch the massive new video files into data their desktop computers could handle. Broadcast engineers, meanwhile, sliced and diced the new bandwidth assigned to their station, weighing the advantage of better picture quality against the potential profits of splitting it into multiple channels, waiting for their bosses, the money men, to tell them which way to go.

To implement high definition television in the United States, the
Federal Communications Commission effectively re-aligned much of the spectrum of the public airwaves. Broadcast television signals were moved to a higher frequency, and the old signal paths were re-assigned for public emergencies or auctioned off for future use by mobile phones and mobile TV (*watch for something called Flo TV from Qualcomm.)

The Perils of Being an Early Adopter

Early adopters, sometimes called “lighthouse customers”, paid a price for being the first on the block with an HD television set. Viewers of that first Superbowl in HD did so on TV sets costing $3,000 or more. Subscribers to Comcast’s first cable HD service in 2003 could watch only a handful of programs produced at that quality. The broadcasters were in no rush to build expensive new HD transmitters, and, even as prices fell on the widescreen units, most consumers were inclined to believe the old TV was plenty good enough. (This wasn’t, after all, like going from black & white to color.)

Originally, the FCC wanted to have the switch from analog to digital TV occur on December 31, 2006. But Congress twice delayed the deadline and it did not take place until June 11, 2009.

King Richard’s Nail

For want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for want of a shoe, a horse was lost. For want of a horse, a battle was lost and that is how, the rhyme goes, King Richard lost his kingdom.

In the transition to high definition television, the equivalent of a nail was the cable connecting a satellite or cable box to the TV set. It wasn’t until 2006 that a Silicon Valley company came up with a cable to iron out this last kink in the high definition chain. It is called an HDMI (high definition multimedia interface) connector and it replaces the old spaghetti bowl of analog cables behind your TV set with a single wire that passes audio, video and computer data between devices as an uncompressed digital signal. In only a few years, it has become the connector of choice on all digital TV devices and many computers.

The Switchover

This week marks the first anniversary of the switchover of American TV from analog to digital. (Next year, Canada and Japan will make the switch; Britain will change over in 2012, and China in 2015.) There were no major disruptions in service. Thanks to last-minute government subsidies for DTV conversion boxes, only 2 million homes lost their TV access when the analog broadcast towers went dark. A Home Media Magazine survey conducted last November showed 33 to 50 percent of Americans now have at lease one HDTV in their homes, and 66 percent say they subscribe to HD television services.

All the major networks and cable channels are producing new programs to HD specifications and stores are selling HDTV sets for roughly the same price as the old TV’s ($199 for a 19” model).

Enter Blu-Ray

The last gray area in the consumer products arena has been DVD’s, but that too is changing fast, propelled by Hollywood’s dismay over losing DVD sales to alternative Internet delivery systems. (In 2009, DVD sales dropped 13 percent from the previous year, from $10 billion to $8.73 billion.)

In a best of all worlds scenario, high definition DVD players would have been on the same upgrade curve as other HDTV components. But six years ago, Hollywood studios became embroiled in a kind of Betamax vs. VHS format war between Toshiba’s HD DVD format and Sony’s Blu-Ray disc. One of the sticking points was how each format handled piracy issues through what is called Digital Rights Management (DRM). Few studios would fully commit to either until that was resolved.

In February 2008, Toshiba folded its tent on HD DVD. Sony’s Blu-Ray format became the de facto standard. With its spectacular picture quality, 25 gigabytes of storage, and backwards-compatible ability to play old DVD’s (lacking in early versions), it is a worthy successor. Hollywood studios can pay extra to license Sony’s DRM copy protection, but individuals and small production companies can burn discs on their own at no extra cost.

Eye-Opening Pictures

For video gamers and people who fancy their living rooms as home entertainment centers, Blu-Ray opens up a whole new audio world of theater-quality surround sound. For the “late adopters”––that 50 percent of America who have held off buying into high definition TV––the cost of an upgrade is now manageable.

The price of Blu-Ray DVD players has dropped sharply in the stores from an initial $400 to $150, or less. Even in a recession, even with an incremental price difference, Blu-Ray DVD versions of movies are selling at about the same rate as DVD’s did when they were introduced as a replacement for VHS. (In April, the Blu-Ray DVD version of Avatar sold 1.2 million copies on its first day of release.) And computer manufacturers are starting to include Blu-Ray drives as part of the upgrade to Windows Seven and Intel-based Apple systems.

For the first time in 15 years, all the kinks in getting the high definition signal from the camera to your television set have been worked out. And for the first time, you can see the difference at no extra cost.

It’s going to be a very good Christmas for Blu-Ray manufacturers this year.  Now the engineers can spend the next decade finding a way to universally deliver the same high definition signal to everyone, everywhere, on any device over the Internet.

There is in the television version of the game a remarkable sameness to every hole. From the tee, the camera drifts hypnotically up in the air following each drive and the ball slowly falls back to earth about 300 yards later, a little to the left of the fairway, a little to the right, or maybe in an aptly named sand trap. Then everyone gets a second shot, some of which sail off into trouble while others land on the green and backspin to the hole. Finally, the competitors gather on the green where one putt or two usually spells the difference between winning or losing a hole.

This happens, more or less, 18 times in the course of each player’s round. With 156 players entering most tournaments (and roughly 60 making the midway cut), that means golf viewers can watch about 7,776 holes of golf of in a typical four-day tournament on television.  Broadcast 50 of these, like television did last year, and you have more than 375,000 holes to snooze through on the Lazyboy.

The Tiger Woods Effect

Because golf tournaments run over a Thursday through Sunday schedule, the barometer of who is winning or losing is the leaderboard. A white erasable board that used to be carried around on a pole at major tournaments is now a slick TV graphic overlaid on some verdant shot of idyllic repose just before they cut to a commercial. Since there are only around 200 golfers with PGA touring cards, the names we see there don’t change much week to week. But the one we always look for is Tiger Woods.

Even before he turned professional in 1996, Woods, then only 20, was a golfing phenomenon. He entered the field with a $40 million endorsement contract from Nike and $20 million from Titleist. Eight months later, he won his first major tournament––The Masters––by a record 12 strokes. Over the ensuing years, Woods has gone on to win 71 titles on the PGA circuit (including 17 majors), 37 victories in the Europe, and 18 other tournaments around the world.

It is more than a play on words to say Tiger Woods has changed the face of golf. Yes, he was one of the first African-Americans in a sea of white competitors, but he also plays the game with a balance of skill, determination and daring that makes his every round compelling viewing.

Since Woods joined the pro tour, the number of hours of golf on television has more than doubled. There’s nothing like a star to attract attention. But credit for golf’s rise in popularity belongs equally to a man who never broke par in his life –– and a back of the napkin idea he called The Golf Channel.

The Golf Channel

Joe Gibbs was a cable TV operator in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1990 when the PGA brought its tournament to nearby Shoal Creek Country Club. As was the custom at the time, Gibbs was one of the local businessmen who offered his guesthouse to a visiting pro. Ben Crenshaw was slated to occupy it. When he found other accommodations, Arnold Palmer moved in.

Over several dinners in the next four years, Gibbs and Palmer conspired to create a 24-hour cable channel dedicated exclusively to Golf. Palmer and his management firm IMG put his name and $80 million behind the venture. Gibbs, meanwhile, went about signing rights to tournaments on the European golf circuit and building a state-of-the-art digital studio in Orlando, Florida.

The Golf Channel launched in January 1995 with tee to green coverage of the Dubai Desert Classic. Today, Golf Channel reaches 120 million viewers and broadcasts 2100 hours of tournaments, golf news and original programming to cable golf channels in the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Canada and 56 other countries. Through a 15-year agreement signed with the PGA in 2007, it is the exclusive provider of Thursday and Friday coverage for 30 PGA tournaments and full coverage of 13 others (not including the 37 tournaments it broadcasts from the European circuit and other events in Asia and the Middle East.)

How Many Cameras Does it Take To Cover a Golf Shot?

The singular focus on one sport has all but transformed the experience of watching golf on television. Golf Channel doesn’t just cover a tournament, it overwhelms it. Typically, it will bring 22 cameras to a tournament. For the recent President’s Cup, it had 36. During The Masters, it will have over 50 cameras on the course.

With commentators spread strategically across the course, it can switch seamlessly from a drive on the 18^th to a chip on the 12^th to a putt on 13 as fast as a baseball director switches cameras to cover a double play. This speeds up the game at home considerably, allowing commentators to inject a dramatic narrative into the action that the players (who are just thinking about their next shot) often don’t know is going on.

Central to golf coverage these days is the control room truck. When The Golf Channel started broadcasting, TV networks had to be careful about laying cable to remote cameras so they would not interfere with play. Studio cameras on platforms around the critical 17^th and 18^th hole still rely on cable runs. Most of the cameras on the course today, however, are wirelessly connected to the truck on radio frequencies.

With the advent of high-definition television, the bandwidth required is robust enough the networks now bring in a company in advance of each tournament to construct a radio tower onsite. The signals transmitted are strong enough that the company must notify the FCC and local radio stations (and sometimes the nearby airport) what frequencies it is using.

Golf Graphics

To be approved as a PGA tournament site, a golf course today must by contract supply to the PGA a digital topographical map of its course. The Golf Channel uses this, as do CBS and NBC, to create digital graphics showing the trajectory of a drive off the tee or a landing pattern for shots that hit the green.

The digital maps are part of a larger database the PGA keeps called “Shot Link” that provides the golf commentators a plethora of information about each player. Ever wonder how Johnny Miller knows this is only the 5^th green V. J. Singh has missed in regulation in the last three tournaments? It’s not memory. “Shot Link” is the proverbial Ask.com of golf: Fingertip facts for those long fairway walks.

All of the networks are very proprietary about their graphics. Although it is not unusual for The Golf Channel to hand off its cameras and crews to a network for weekend coverage, CBS and NBC will take over the control truck and install their own graphics package. CBS is particularly proud of its “trickle of balls” map showing how balls will land on a green. CBS also has “SwingVision”, two high-definition cameras that capture a player’s wing at 40,000 frames per second with a shutter speed of 1/50,000^th of a second so analysts can break down every nuance of a shot. The Golf Channel, for its part, has “Trackman” for the tee shot trajectory and “AimPoint”, a 3-D modeling program that predicts how a putt will break along the contours of a green.

Wake Me When Its Over

Golf’s latest technology was on full view recently in the marathon broadcast of 20 hours of golf from the President’s Cup in San Francisco, and it only went to prove golf is only as interesting as the players. Tiger Woods won all five of his matches, leading the United States team to a 19 1/2 to 14 1/2 victory over an array of international rivals. The only memorable thing about the event, however, were the dorky team sweaters the golfers donned so you could tell one team from another.

The President’s Cup is not a marquee event on the PGA Tour. Coming after the last Fed Ex cup event, it is notable for two things: 1) no prize money, only a charitable contribution to the winning golfers’ favorite cause and 2) a dizzy array of formats and point scoring that changes every day.

On Thursday, six foursomes play off against each other in a best ball contest where teammates alternate shots around the course. On Friday, the six foursomes each play their own ball, with points for a hole going to the team with the lowest score. On Saturday, five foursomes play both best ball and four ball matches; and on Sunday, individual golfers from each team square off against each other in twosomes.

The ten hours NBC devoted to the tournament on Saturday (11 am to 9 PM EST) may have set a record for golf on television, and it still left me confused about which rules applied to which round. But golf is a relaxing sport, and even this juggernaut hodge-podge of a tournament allowed me a few hours in the Lazyboy to relax my way through it without even breaking a sweat.

The challenge for the 47 developers who entered was to come up with ways of using the vast collections of federal records the Obama administration is now putting online as part of its Transparency Initiative. Through websites like Recovery.gov, citizens can now track the dollars spent in the $787 billion stimulus package. Through a newly re-designed online version of the Federal Registry , they can access copies of pending legislation, department rules and regulations, meeting notices, executive orders and other documents. In Data.gov, they can download and manipulate thousands of federal databases.

In almost every department of the federal government, websites, podcasts, even twitter feeds are emerging to spread the government’s message. Have a simple question about swine flu? Try flu.gov where you can download a widget that shows the weekly outbreaks of flu by state in a Flash animation map you can put on your website, post to your Facebook account or load on your mobile phone.

Never has the minutia of government operations been so readily accessible; and never has it been more important to have trained researchers, academics and, yes, journalists schooled in the art of reading the data.

Apps for America

“Apps for America” was a contest conducted by the Sunlight Foundation for the Office of Science and Technology. Its focus was on Data.gov where, in addition to the databases, the website has a “Tools” section that hints at various widgets you can use to incorporate the databases into a wide variety of geo-mapping programs for graphic display. From the size of the prize money ($25,000) and the low volume of entries, it appears to be one of those press release contests designed more to build awareness than meaningful applications, but it is a useful demonstration of my point.

The winner was a program called Datamasher.org––an almost Fortran-like formula that allows you to use add, subtract, multiply or divide operatives to compare one government data set against another. If, for instance, you put the mortgage foreclosure rate in every state against the suicide rate, you will find Nevada has the highest suicides per mortgage foreclosure in the country, an odd but not particularly useful piece of information.

The first runner-up was ThisWeKnow.org, a website that let’s you type in your zip code to discover random facts kept by the government about your neighborhood. In 60647, for instance, there are 290 factories within 15 miles spewing 5,927,650 pounds of pollutants in a county with 310,000 unemployed and a city with 464,912 homeowners, 597,000 renters, and 6 legislative earmarks requested by 6 organizations. Aren’t you glad you asked?

The last finalist––and best to my mind–– is govpulse.us, a gateway to the Federal Registry that lets citizens sift through this massive database by agency, topic, or date. Beyond the simplicity of browsing, govpulse.us also provides handy “sparklines” on new or pending rules and regulations and links to Google maps with thumbtacks showing locations near you where a rule, hearing, or legislation might apply.

The app is not without its faults. I eagerly clicked on the thumbtack nearest my home and was surprised to find the Coast Guard was proposing a new regulation on when Chicago River drawbridges must open for recreational boats. Only at the bottom did I discover they had been promulgated in 1994.

Data.gov

Data.gov is clearly a work in progress. There are only a couple hundred federal programs that offer “tools” for looking at their information, and 100 of those are Defense Department podcasts featuring briefings, blogs and videos supporting our troops abroad. (None help figure out what’s in the Defense Department budget.)

Of the 26 widgets now available on Data.gov, most of the good ones have been developed by federal agencies to reflect their own special interests.

The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has half a dozen widgets that let you type in your zip code to discover the air, water and land pollutants near you, see reports on local factories emitting pollutants, and/or report violators. The presumption, and it is not without merit, is that these can proliferate virally on the Internet like Smokey The Bear logos so you can report polluters as easily as forest fires.

My favorite widget so far comes from the FBI. It is a 10 most wanted list you can incorporate into your website, post on Facebook or carry around on your iPhone. At the top of the list is Osama bin Laden with a picture you can click through to a close-up if you happen to see him sitting next to you on the CTA.

Recovery.gov

President Obama has a lot riding on the success of Recovery.gov so it is no surprise it is getting a lot of scrutiny from tech heads, contractors, opponents and journalists. His promise in his State of the Union speech was that the public could track every dollar spent in every federal contract to see whether it is being spent wisely. But that is really, really hard.

The proof, six months into the project, is that the General Services Administration has already awarded a $9.5 million contract to Smartronix to redesign the site. Throwing contracts up on the net in raw data form is one thing; creating avenues for understanding what’s in them and parsing the data to come to meaningful conclusions quite another.

Fortunately, there are journalistic enterprises that took Obama at his word and have devoted the resources necessary to unravel the complexities.

Propublica

Propublica.org is a website created in 2007 with a grant of $30 million over three years from former Golden West CEO Herbert Sandler to conduct investigative journalism in the public interest. Working out of a newsroom in New York, 32 seasoned reporters under the direction of former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger are delving into topics like the bailout package, stimulus, Guantanemo, and gas drilling with technical resources few newspapers can muster.

They publish their reports online and in conjunction with newspaper partners. (Their most well known project was a long article––the result of a two-year investigation––on the hospital deaths during Hurricane Katrina published last month in the New York Times Magazine.)

I heard an example of their work on NPR a few days ago when a local reporter used some of their findings to show contractors in Illinois receiving stimulus money  were employing only 9 percent minorities (mostly women) versus the 22 percent norm on other government jobs.

If you go to the Propublica website, you will find not only detailed articles but graphics like the “Stimulus Progress Bar” that make Recovery.gov understandable.

The Next New Thing

And that is what transparency is all about: making all this data understandable. It’s great that the government is pushing all information onto the net. (What are the alternatives? Hire more people to process Freedom of Information requests and xerox copies of documents to mail back in return?)

Rest assured, the political operatives in Washington, the lobbyists on K Street, the private corporations who traffic in government funding (who doesn’t these days?) have the money to probe and manipulate this gold mine of data to their advantage.

Who can the public rely on to do the same? In this era when newspapers can scarcely scrape up enough money to send a reporter to cover a three-alarm fire, organizations like Propublica are the next new thing in journalism. Just as they once did in forming the Associated Press to disseminate their news, newspapers would do well to invest in clusters of reporters armed with sophisticated data-mining tools to produce it.

Perhaps newspapers alone can’t fund the whole thing. Foundation support or benefactors may have to play a prominent role. This was the case back in the 90’s when Charles Lewis first established the Center for Responsive Politics to study campaign finance reports from the Federal Election Commission (a model that Sandler says inspired him). That pro bono effort  has led to a website OpenSecrets.org that every political reporter uses in every campaign to report on where the money in politics in going.

Data mining the government is a growth industry. The widgets are cute. And there’s an argument that if you have enough bloggers looking at enough data, something good is bound to happen. It’s called the 1000 monkeys at a typewriter theory.

If you can find a way to apply all this technical data-mining know-how to the single purpose of showing the public how their government works––and put it in the hands of someone who can think and write at the same time––then you have something wonderful. A story people will want to read.


Hastening its demise is the arrival in Beta testing of Google Voice, a clever telephone answering system that has the potential to transfer many of the functions telephone carriers charge an arm and a leg for (voice minutes, text messages, voicemail, conference calling) to Google’s servers, where customers can access them all – free (*see below).

The premise behind Google Voice is simple: Pick a telephone number. Any telephone number. (Eventually, even your current telephone number.) Anytime anyone calls you on it, three things happen:

1)    It simultaneously rings through to all your home, office and mobile telephones.

2)    If you want to screen calls, or block telemarketers, a “presentation message” plays that requires the caller to state his name so you can decide whether to take it or send it to voicemail.

3)    If the caller does leave a message, the voice message and a transcribed version appear in your email where, at the click of a button, you can text or call back free.

A Killer App

The marketing slogan for Google Voice is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” For the moment, Google insists the aim is to manage your existing network of phones, not replace them. Phone calls enter and leave Google servers through voice routers, incurring the usual voice minute charges. Text messages, however, travel over the data stream. As Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP) improves––the technology behind Internet phone services like Skype––phone calls will as well, and this makes Google Voice, with its many cool features, a killer app.

If you have a BlackBerry or a T-mobile phone that uses Google’s Android mobile operating system, there is already a mobile app for using Google Voice on your cell phone.  If you have an iPhone, however, you are SOL because, as you may have read recently, Apple has banned the Google Voice app, largely to assuage its exclusive telecommunications partner AT&T, which stands to lose billions if the application becomes popular.

This is one reason Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from the Apple board of directors last month, and why the FCC three weeks ago asked Google, Apple and AT&T to file formal papers Friday outlining their position on how Google Voice will affect the telecommunications marketplace.

Rough Seas for AT&T

The mobile phone market is the fastest growing segment of the telecommunications industry. The New York Times estimates it is a $178 billion business rapidly on its way to reaching $300 billion. If Google Voice can be brought up to its full potential, the outlook for AT&T and all the other telecommunications companies is not good. AT&T still charges for incoming as well as outgoing calls. (U.S. Cellular, Sprint and T-Mobile do not.) As Google perfects its ability to deliver Google Voice calls using only the data stream, AT&T’s ability to run up minutes and text message charges will be severely curtailed.

A typical iPhone plan, for instance, comes with a variety of monthly fee options:

1)    Voice (450 minutes – unlimited usage): ($40 – $100)

2)    Data Plan (an Internet connection): $30 fixed

3)    Text messaging (200 – unlimited): $ 5 – $20, or 20 cents a message

Among my friends, most opt for plans that run $70 to $100 a month. Without too much tweaking––remember, this is still in a Beta stage––Google Voice could save them and other customers more than 50% on their monthly bills.

Google Voice can provide these savings because Google does not own or maintain any telephone lines or mobile towers. Everything Google Voice does piggybacks off existing voice or data lines. (AT&T no doubt will argue this gives it an unfair competitive advantage.) What Google provides is the software switching for calls, storage for phone messages, and many clever features: all the bells and whistles of modern day telephony without any of the heavy lifting.

Other Features

The VoIP connections can sometimes be flaky. Google Voice works better on a land line next to your computer than on a mobile phone sailing down an expressway at 60 miles per hour. But the transcribed voicemails (updated just last week to include punctuation) are very cool.

The presentation message can be switched off so there is no telltale sign you are screening calls. If you are talking on your cell and walk into your house, you can switch the call to your home phone with the press of a button.

You can also make conference calls linking up to six participants, dialing out to each participant one at a time, pressing a button, then dialing out to the next. And you can record different voice message greetings for different phone number groups (friends, family, business contacts, etc.) –– or individual numbers. As you might expect, Google Voice allows you to import and choose these from your gmail contact list (or Outlook, Yahoo, Palm and others in a .CVS or vCard format).

If, for instance, you never want to talk to your ex-wife, you can record a greeting just for her: “Hello, you’ve reached the voicemail of Scott Jacobs. He’s dead. Have a nice day.” Or tell selected friends something you want only them to hear:  “I skipped work this afternoon to go to the Sox game. Meet me under the scoreboard at the seventh inning stretch.”

You can also use the spam blocking option to screen out telemarketers. One standard response recently added allows you to give telemarketers or others the familiar  “diddle.de.de.diddle.de . . . the number you have called is not in service”.

The free calls and text messages are limited to the United States. But international calling is also available at modest rates. Paris, London, Mexico City are two cents a minute: Tokyo is three.  Want to call relatives in Uzbekistan? Nine cents a minute.

Not For Everyone . . . Yet

The rollout of Google Voice has been very deliberate. The application is based software designed by a company named GrandCentral that Google purchased in 2007 for $95 million. Last March, Google renamed the application Google Voice, adding the transcription feature, and announced a Beta test later in the summer. On July 27, viewers of NBC’s Today Show were told the test was now ready to go. Google was flooded with applications. How many users are now on the system remains a corporate secret, but the waiting list is said to be hundreds of thousands of applicants.

Want to get on board? CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP. Have fun, save money.

“Perspective is everything,” she replied. It is, alas, oh so true -–– especially when it comes to the delicate art of making home movies.

I am not the only father on the block with a camcorder. When the balloons come out and the fire truck shows up, they pop up like mushrooms after a rain. Because I have a second career making professional videos, however, the fathers often ask me for tips on home moviemaking. My advice invariably comes down to a simple premise: shorter is better.

Endless Opportunities

That, of course, doesn’t dissuade the avid parent from recording endless hours of their child’s achievements. Year by year, Christmas by Christmas, vacation by vacation, graduation upon graduation starting in kindergarten and up through 1st, 2nd, and the all-important 8th grade ceremonies. I don’t want to think how many of these precious moments now sit (unedited) on closet shelves waiting for that day when said child must clean it out after dad’s funeral.

I have a friend who has been recording his daughter on Hi8 videotape since she was born in 1992. Last year for her Sweet Sixteen party he spent months editing the 400 hours down to 10 minutes––and aged ten years in the process. Not only did he have to hunt down a playback machine for the now-defunct format but he had to confront all the memories he left on the cutting room floor.

My own approach to home movies is to throw away as much of the crap as fast as you can. With the easy availability of digital editing on most computers, there’s no excuse not to. (Except, of course, time. But you should have thought of that before you embarked on your career as the Francis Ford Coppola of the family.)

Remember When

Home movies have come a long way since the day of Bell & Howell. My father had one of their early 16mm box cameras with floodlights that sprouted like antlers on top for night shooting. With time measured in feet––small 100-foot film reels yielded about three minutes of memories––he brandished it at every family occasion, but shot sparingly.

He would then drop off the film at the camera store for processing. A week or so later, he would pull out the projector so we could sit around the living room (or rec room, as the case may be) to see what came out.

In this fashion, I watched my life in the Fifties flash by ten seconds at a time. A toddler walks to church in a silly hat, spins around in an airplane ride at a carnival, shakes hands with Hank Aaron at spring training, and, soon enough, is sticking straws up his nose at his sixth birthday.

The perspective I have on my early childhood––that it was short, pleasant and not altogether dignified––is shaped by the technology available to record it.

The Seventies

When video camcorders came on the scene, that technological change had an equally significant impact on our perspective. VHS tapes were 60 minutes long, cheap as dirt, and included the sound of events as well as the pictures (not that you could hear anything above the din.)

Children  of that era may well look back at their own home movies and conclude their youth was long, tedious, and just as undignified. The camera catches everything. As I watch the videotapes I recorded at the time, I’m struck by how often I chose as the cameraman to hit the record button and wait for something to happen. I’m also struck by how infrequently I do watch those tapes. Without editing, an hour of my son’s soccer game can be a painful experience.

Sift and Winnow

Five years ago, when digital video editing became an easy adjunct to home computer software, the paradigm shifted again. Whether you are burning DVD’s for the archive or grabbing a clip to email grandma, the important thing isn’t what you record but how you put it together. What you include. What you leave out.

If you take it one step further, you can add music to set a tone, use quick cuts or special effects to change the pace of events (or provide pacing where none was really there) so your home movies are what you intended them to be. The decisions you make in editing become more telling of your moviemaker perspective than where the camera is pointed.

The Medill Block Party

To underscore that point, I offer here my three-minute version of The Medill Street Block Party I recorded last month.

I can do this because of the ubiquity of YouTube, another game-changing technology that influences our perspective.

I made a variety of choices in putting this video together. First, of course, was the inclusion of my son. Second, was finding close-ups of other kids in the neighborhood so posterity would have a snapshot of where each was at this point in time. And I used three songs – Hot Fun in the Summer Time by Manhattan Transfer, The Mighty Worm by Ralph Covert and the St. Louis Blues March by the Glenn Miller Orchestra for a little punctuation.

The other parents on the block seem happy enough with the result.  But here’s the rub. This is just my perspective. So I’m also including HERE the full 34 minutes of raw tape in the hope that others will download and edit their own version of the block party – and prove my point. Maybe my perspective is right. Maybe it is wrong. We all see life a little differently.

A Week Behind Contest

Yes, we’re going to have our first Edit-It-Yourself video contest at The Week Behind. The rules are that there are no rules. The raw footage is provided in a small .mp4 file format that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to download, but it will open up into a passable video in any of the standard computer editing programs (iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Final Cut or Sony Vegas.)

Pick your own music. Pick your own shots. (I don’t care if my son is included.) Get creative. But remember, shorter is better.

There’s a prize for anyone who enters. And the best entries will appear in Week Behinds to come.

Have at it. Perspective is everything.

Sterling, the “visionary in residence” at Wired.com, made his remarks at the annual South by Southwest conference in Austin in one of his famous “rants” that was so far-reaching even he is waiting for the podcast to see what he actually said.

Virginia Heffernan, the new media columnist in the New York Times Magazine, is pretty sure the gist of his talk was that “connectivity is poverty.”

“Only the poor – defined broadly as those without better options –– are obsessed with their connections,” she wrote. “Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away.

“The connections that feel like wealth to many of us –– –call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends –– are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because –– it seems so obvious –– we cannot afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home.”

The questioning of the value of the new social networks -–– which Sterling started, but Heffernan brought to a head ––– has resulted in a cascade of responses from the blogs and bloggers who follow such things. Tweets were flying even before Sterling left the room in Austin. Of course, with only 140 characters to work with, most were fleeting, snarky or self-absorbed. “I had a seat in back of the room. He looked confused, but I couldn’t see all that good.”

A few days later, Marc Savlov attempted a more philosophical response in his Austin Chronicle weblog. The issue Sterling raises is whether we are “oversharing” on the net and how that affects our social interactions, he said. Then Savlov gave three examples of past, present and future social networks:

“This is who we were:  communities of individuals who forged identities, selves, and lives via formal (or informal) interactions within a societal whole. We met one another at home, school, work, play, and everywhere else, and we did it all face to face.”

“This is who we are: communities of individuals who are online half the time; often inseparable from our laptops, cloistered in the muted, ambient click-type drone of coffee shops or working late into the night alone in home offices; hearing the quiet pattering of unclunky keyboards; the kids in the kitchen instant-messaging before the bus arrives, after the bus arrives, on the bus; Dad scrolling through Slate/Wired/Salon or eyeing the tumbling economic dice; Mom wondering why she even bothered to get that now silly-seeming Realtor’s license; chatting; texting; iPhoning; linked-in; sharing our individual triumphs and tragedies, from Obama to Mumbai, in real time, for all the online world to see, read, and share.

“This is who we will be: a single community; global; linked-in; variegated and living lives beyond the passé 20th century notions of borders, beyond languages; a new species almost . . . keenly aware of the marketers and corporate data-mining that exist primarily to sell us back to ourselves; and able to take advantage of the strange sense of slow self-empowerment that arrived near fully formed once we realized that privacy as it once was is no longer privacy as it has become, or needs to be. The more we share ––– online –– the less we have to fear.”

Okay, so maybe that last one’s a stretch. The premise behind South by Southwest is to get people together in the present to talk about the future, so a little high-falutin’ rhetoric about a single, global, linked-in community that transcends borders and languages can be excused.

Not so easy to excuse is the paucity of genuine thought in all these new social media forms, as ubiquitous and compelling as they have become.

Sterling’s own critique of the social networks -–– in retrospect, he prefers to call it a discussion rather than a critique –– took off from his own recent experience as author of a new book, written on paper, and distributed through book stores for, horror of horror, money.

“What I do is I write a lot of words in a row,” he said. “I mean, like a whole lot of words, not even character count but actual words. Then I go back and I restructure them and move them into other sorts of methods. In theory, they have a dramatic arc and a denouement and a coherent story line. And then I send them to my agent who then sends them to an editor who then sends them to either a higher-ranking editor or a publisher -– who then moves them through a distributor, who is really kind of the magic key to the whole business . . . And then it would go out to either a large number of independent book stores or chain stores and then it would be retailed and people would pay money for it.”

Yes, Facebook has become a mechanism for creating your own community of friends. And yes, it sure beats the postal system for sending out pictures of your baby, copies of articles you read and want to share, and –– let’s be honest here –– self-promotional links and materials.

For people who used to work but now stay at home unemployed, self-employed or caring for a child, it replaces the everyday conversations that used to take place around the office water cooler. (Come to think of it, it probably serves the same function for many people who still go to work and still drink the water.)

But how much of all this is just a waste of time? Do I really care what kind of plant you resemble? Whether you woke up with a sore shoulder? Who’s your favorite Beatle?

If the only people we were talking to were our nearest and dearest friends, maybe all this oversharing would be tolerable. But the impetus behind social networks is to build your friends list. And there is every opportunity to do so. (Including an app that scours your email address book to invite, with a single click, all of them to become your friend.) So we all do it. Like there’s some kind of prize for having the most friends.

There is a downside to having too many friends that nobody tells you about. Yes, you can tell them all about your latest accomplishments; but so can they tell you about theirs (as well as the health of their dog.) Recently, I checked into my own Facebook account and discovered the first page of recent posts only went back one hour.  It took six more pages of click-throughs to get back to when I last checked in –– yesterday.

What we need on these social network sites is a new tag called “Time wasters.” We could set up a website for it: timewaster.com. Under this heading, we could include:

• 25 Things You Don’t Want to Know About Me.
• Uncut birth videos
• My Favorite Cereal
• The Best of Spam
• I’m Not Your Friend (the best rejection letters sent to friend requests.)

I’m sure that’s only scraping the surface of useless posts on Facebook, Twitter, Ning, et al. The question we all have to ask ourselves is: once the surface is scraped away, is there anything else of value we really need to know?

If you watch TV, and who doesn’t, it’s hard these days to escape ads warning that on February 17 broadcast television will undergo the most radical transformation in its 67-year history. All the current analog TV transmitters will go dark and TV stations across America will forevermore send out a digital signal––that only TV sets with a digital tuner can see.

This is not the end of the world. Eighty-nine percent of American households are hooked up to cable or satellite dishes where the transition will be relatively seamless. But an estimated 13.5 million homes are not. Those viewers as well as countless others who watch their favorite programs on spare sets stashed in garages, basements, work rooms and other odd nooks must now step up to the new digital age.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, there are 400 million TV sets in America. Over the last decade, the Electronics Industry Association says its members have sold 116 million new digital widescreen TV’s to forward-thinking viewers who anticipated this day would come.
The other 284 million TV sets (99 million of which are in storage) are old time “picture tubes” encased in a box and equipped with “rabbit ears” to pull analog TV waves out of the air.

Yes, those that are connected to cable or digital satellites that will weather the storm, but sooner rather than later, most of these old TVs will find their way into the the alley – where they are likely to implode.

Digital Television

Broadcasters are carefully tiptoeing around public confusion over the difference between digital television (DTV) and “high definition” television (or HDTV).

Technically, the digital switchover is simply a re-assignment of airwave frequencies accompanied by an upgrade in broadcast transmission from analog to digital equipment.

The segment of the radio wave spectrum reserved for TV transmission is being lifted from a low frequency to a higher frequency range (to make way for new uses by mobile phones and other communication devices). New transmitters are being installed to send out the signal as digital data rather than analog airwaves; and broadcasters who make the switch are being given enough new bandwidth to transmit four channels in the space they previously used for one.

With a simple $60 DTV converter box, you can plug your old antenna into the DTV box, plug the box into your TV, and voila! You are getting digital television.

Press a button on the menu screen––didn’t know you had a menu screen? You do now––and in place of the dozen or so VHF and UHF stations you used to get in Chicago you will find more than 30 channels (most of which are variations of the same old ones.)

With the new DTV conversion box, snowy pictures or “ghosting” are a thing of the past. Either you get a channel or you don’t. But if you do not have an HDTV television, you are not getting true “high definition” television. And what you are getting is likely to confuse you.

High Definition Television

“High definition” television (HDTV) refers to a way of recording television programs that has been simultaneously coming into vogue over the last decade. With hi-def TV, you get pictures that are as much as six times sharper than standard TV and digital audio, including 5.1 Dolby “surround sound” which, if you have five speakers, is pretty bleeping cool.

A hi-def picture is most recognizable by its widescreen format. Instead of the old 4 X 3 boxy look of standard TV, it is displayed in a 16 X 9 format similar to movie screens. (On older TV’s, HDTV programs appear with a black bar above and below the picture in what is called a “letterbox” format.)

Almost all of the new hi-def TV sets are flat screens. They take up less real estate in your home entertainment center (formerly known as “the den”) and consume far less power. But receiving a DTV broadcast signal is not the same as receiving a high-def picture – unless you have a high-def TV.

To Convert or Not to Convert

To ease the transition to digital television, Congress has set aside $1.5 billion for the Commerce Department to issue consumers a free coupon worth $40 toward the cost of a DTV conversion box. To date, 42 million coupons have been issued, but only 18 million have been redeemed. If you can resist the sales pitch to add on a digital antenna (which you probably don’t need), that reduces the cost of the DTV box to about $20.

But there are downsides to settling for a conversion box, especially for elderly viewers and others who have so far resisted all the other new digital gadgets. The programming menus vary from one DTV box to another. If you scan for digital channels in one part of the room you may get a different set of options than if you moved the TV to the other side.

In the olden days of television, a 17” Sony Trinitron was considered a pretty good-sized TV set. Put a DTV box on it and the widescreen letterboxed version fills only about 15”. Switch between channels and you’ll discover that each broadcaster presets their own aspect ratios so some programs appear double letterboxed and cropped into a 13” picture. Try to go into the menu supplied with the DTV box to adjust the aspect ratio for each channel and you’ll feel like you are assembling a child’s toy without instructions on Christmas Eve.

Bart Forbes, a spokesman for the U.S. Commerce Department, admits the DTV conversion kit is a stopgap measure, and he points out the coupons are not a magic bullet. The coupons were aimed at preventing poor, rural and older citizens from losing their TV signals entirely. They were not intended to let viewers replicate the HDTV experience.

Jim Morrissette, the video guru for Kartemquin films, doubts whether the millions who buy the DTV converters will be satisfied. He suspects many people used to just turning their TV on and off will be confused by the menus and wonder why the picture no longer fills the screen. Then he asks the obvious question: “Why would someone buy one of these when they can get a new 19” HDTV for under $200?”

Indeed, the size––as well as quality, aspect ratio and back panel connections–– of television sets has improved dramatically in the last year even as prices have plummeted. The average flat-panel TV is 26” or 32” today, and it can be purchased for roughly the same price as a 17” cathode-ray tube (CRT) television set 20 years ago. The Best Buy special this Christmas was a 19” Dynex HDTV for $199.

At what point do we all throw out the old to get on board with the new?

What To Do With Your Old TV

Americans have a love affair with their TVs. We keep them on average 13 to 15 years and we save them to pass on to our children when we get new sets. But that behavior is changing. In 1999, Americans threw out 16.5 million TV sets. By 2005, the last year on record, that number was up to 27 million.

With the digital switchover, there is less reason than ever to save the useless sets, but it’s not so easy these days to just throw them out.

The Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation refuses to pick them up. Goodwill doesn’t want them. (“Our mission is to recycle. If we can’t repair and resell them, we can’t take them,” a spokesman said.) And the Salvation Army has no firm policy on what to do, but is not encouraging drop-offs.

Although the EPA lists 57 places on its website that recycle electronics in the Chicago area, only three of them take “picture tube” televisions. Two of those charge 50 cents a pound for the service––the average 21” TV weighs 40 pounds––and the last couldn’t be reached for comment.

In 2007, Chicago opened a new Electronics Recycling Facility on Goose Island to pick through old computers, hard drives, cell phones and other digital accessories to salvage parts. But it too has no use for the CRT’s because of the danger of handling them, the toxic materials inside and the lack of an after-market for the parts.

The Hazards of Cathode Ray Tubes

Cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are what made television possible in America. They are picture tubes that project electronic TV signals from a small receptor at the back through a cone-shaped glass enclosure that amplifies the signal onto the TV screens we watch. The screens are covered with phosphors that translate the electrons into an image, then the tube is sealed to prevent distortion and protect viewers from its hazardous effects.

When a CRT is discarded, everything that made it functional makes it hard to recycle. First, you have to break the vacuum seal at the neck of the tube to slowly let air back into the vacuum. If you simply break the tube, the vacuum will implode sending shards of glass in all directions.

Next, you must remove and recycle the outside screen. Once that is accomplished, the tube glass can also be re-used, but first it must be cleansed of its lead lining and any traces of barium, both toxic substances. The process is slow and must be done manually piece-by-piece. As a result, “glass to glass” recycling of old TVs is rarely done in America, or elsewhere for that matter.

Few Recycling Options

As it stands now, only 18% of discarded TVs ever reach a recycler. The vast majority of these (about 80%) wind up being shipped overseas to Asia, South America and other developing countries for resale or materials recovery.

Inside the United States, the EPA estimates only two percent (that’s less than 100,000 TVs) are broken down in “glass to glass” recycling plants while another 16 percent go to smelters for lead recovery or recycling companies that cull out the plastic and metal parts.

Thinking of just throwing them into a landfill? Think again. In 2001, the federal EPA issued guidelines prohibiting the disposal of old TV sets in landfills. In 2002, it began fining violators. Eleven states have passed laws banning the practice. Last July, the Illinois legislature joined them.
Although the Illinois statute does not take full effect until 2011, many municipalities have already adopted the ban not only because the sets are not bio-degradable but because they pay for landfill by the pound.

A Modest Proposal

The bleak prospect for disposing of old TVs calls for some creative thinking. Lately, I’ve notice in antique stores a number of old radio consoles refurbished into cabinetry by furniture restorers. Maybe we can recycle our old TVs into new uses the same way.

Back in the 70s, I recall a gimmick video came out with a yule log burning on a TV screen. There are tens of millions of unused fireplaces in America, all just the right size. Maybe we can put the old TV in the fireplace, stick a VCR under it and run the “Yule Log” VHS tape on an endless loop.

It will serve as a constant reminder that while the future always beckons, the past is hard to get rid of.

Note: Figures cited above come from a July 2008 report titled “Electronics Waste Management in the United States” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Brandon Leavitt’s time has come –– again.

As he stands in his solar-heated workshop in Niles, eight men and women listen to him explain his life’s work: harnessing the sun’s energy. He’s been at it since 1976 and his career has risen, then almost set, then risen once more. For him the presentation is familiar and matter-of-fact; for his guests, members of an Evanston synagogue looking to renovate, it’s a prospective bold leap.

Leavitt is standing in front of a 4-by-10-foot solar panel and a 120-gallon storage tank. “We activate the system, and now you’re running your own utility company,” he says. “The system turns on when sunlight hits it, and turns off when it’s dark. We pump a liquid –– usually water, sometimes antifreeze –– to the glass panels on your roof. They heat up the same way your car does on a sunny day. We use the heated water to warm the building, and for showers and laundry and so forth.”

Questions follow. What are the maintenance problems? What’s the life of the tank? Does solar power reduce the need for air conditioning? What about generating electricity? How about the break-even point –– how long does it take to pay back the investment?

His systems are problem-free, he says. “The pump has the only moving parts, and the panels are tempered glass.” He bangs one, hard, with a fist. “And our tanks last longer than conventional hot water heaters because there’s no direct flame and no sediment.”

“For electricity, PV (photovoltaic) cells –– the kind you would need for air-conditioning –– require three times the equipment,” Leavitt says. “And they’re only about 12 to 15 percent efficient. Technological changes are hard to predict, but our units are 70 percent efficient right now in terms of converting sunlight to useable energy.”

Realistic Energy Alternatives

The group nods. Leavitt has seen it for years: the dawning appreciation for ecologically-sound alternatives to familiar, less-sustainable technologies. But he also knows he has to get to the bottom line.

“As for payback, that depends on what you spend and what you save
–– on what system you choose, your usage, the cost and efficiency of the fuel you’re displacing,” he says. “Generally we can cut costs by a third, and we can set up the financing so that the savings cover the monthly payments, with rebates and grant programs covering half the installation costs. And we can connect to an existing forced-air furnace,” Leavitt adds, describing the heat-assist coil “like a car radiator” that circulates hot water to warm the blown air.

It Started with Buckminster Fuller

Leavitt, 56, did not start out in the “future business.” A Chicago native with no college degree, he spent three years after high school in the music business. Then a friend with an engineering background talked him into attending a summer seminar in 1975 with noted inventor/futurist R. Buckminster Fuller. “He’s a big part of what got me into this,” Leavitt recalls. “He was all about solving a problem without creating another one for the next guy. That’s what his ‘Design Science’ is all about. He believed the only Design Science solution to an energy problem has to be renewable.

“One thing we know about fossil fuels is they’re finite,” Leavitt continues. “The more you deplete them, the higher the price –– they’ll get extremely expensive to recover –– so we should be conserving them for non-burning uses, like plastics and pharmaceuticals. Fuller said ‘a problem is a solution waiting to happen.’ On energy, he was right on target.”

Leavitt’s own first steps in renewable energy came in Florida in the mid-70’s. While continuing the informal studies he’d begun under Fuller, he worked with Florida companies developing solar hot water collector prototypes.

“Solar water heaters –– simple tanks on rooftops –– have been used in Florida since early in the last century,” he says. “There are people who have functional collectors that are seventy or eighty years old, and they don’t even know it.” For decades in the first half of the twentieth century, several companies serviced a South Florida solar thermal market of about 50,000 homes.

Florida was where the action was, but Leavitt always knew he would come back to Chicago someday. “There wasn’t much of a market for solar here yet. We had to create one,” he says. That’s what he began to do, writing his own ads, running tests in two leased buildings near the Edens expressway (“where drivers could see the panels on our roof”), and opening Solar Service, Inc. in 1978. His timing was fortuitous. That year, the federal government initiated tax credits supporting solar and other alternative sources.

Heating Mom & Dad

His first customers were his parents in Lincolnwood. Their system is still working. Then he sold systems to three of his former teachers from Niles West, and started giving talks at environmental seminars and other schools. He got on radio shows, and in the fall of 1983 he was interviewed by John Hultman on WBBM. Hultman wound up buying a system for his own house in Northbrook.

“Originally it was going to be two panels,” Hultman says. “But we talked about it and upgraded to four. The costs came to something like $13,000, minus about $4,000 that we got back with the tax credit. Brandon made it easy. We haven’t had him out here very often –– I think we had to replace a connector once and change some insulation to keep squirrels from chewing through, but otherwise it works fine.”

By 1985, he had installed about 300 systems and his business had grossed $3 million. He went from three employees to twenty, and conducted some 100 seminars a year.

Then in 1986 the Reagan administration finished canceling the tax credit for solar energy and the market collapsed. Leavitt had to discharge his staff and close his shop. Other solar companies did likewise, leaving customers unsupported. Leavitt soldiered on, taking over many of their contracts and running a solo solar service business from his home for the next thirteen years. “I did it as an obligation to the customers,” he says. “My lifestyle was such that I didn’t need a lot of income.”

“9/11 Was a Wake-Up Call”

In 1999 the tide turned back in Leavitt’s favor, when the Illinois legislature mandated that Commonwealth Edison provide renewable energy funding. Leavitt ramped up his sales force, leased new warehouse space, and started rebuilding his client base.

“We’re doing about one hundred systems a year again,” he says. “Residential is about 80% of the work, though commercial brings in about half the income.”

In 2003, Leavitt got one of his largest contracts, installing 24 rooftop solar panels on World’s Largest Laundromat & Cleaners in Berwyn. At the dedication ceremony, Lt. Governor Pat Quinn praised Leavitt’s foresight.

“9/11 was a wake-up call that we need more all-American energy,” Quinn said. “We don’t want to rely on some foreign potentate for our energy supply. And Brandon Leavitt: he’s the North Star that guides us. We’re going to make Illinois number one when it comes to solar energy. And in that Hall of Fame, that Solar Hall of Fame, Brandon Leavitt will be there, because he really is a pioneer, a trailblazer.”

Good Business, Good Guy

Tom Benson, owner of World’s Largest, says Leavitt’s solar panels are saving him more than $1,000 a month. His projected savings on gas bills were 20 percent, but in fact have approached 25 percent. The break-even point for his investment, originally projected at ten years, will be closer to six.

“I’m not a mechanical guy, but Brandon made it easy to understand,” Benson says. “You can save a lot of money going solar.”

David Fleming was an employee of Leavitt’s during the first hopeful period, from 1980 to 1986. “I had no idea there was anything like this in Illinois,” Fleming recalls. “It turned out it was the best job I ever had. Brandon was the best boss I ever had, even when everything went bust. More than anyone else I’ve ever known, he lives by the golden rule. Treating everyone fairly, asking for input, never dictating, helping out on jobs even when he’s busy selling.”

“The bust years put everything in perspective,” Leavitt says. “Last year a guy came up to us on a job and asked if he could do some work. He said he’d been unemployed for a while. I asked what kind of work he did, and he told me he was a plumber. He wound up doing good work for us.”

Contact information: www.solarserviceinc.com or (847) 677-0950.

My son Noah is getting to the age when he will begin playing video games. So in the interests of male bonding I took him down to the local Best Buy to pick up the new Nintendo Wii.

This is the latest game console that allows users to wave a stick and watch their every move on a TV screen carried out by a videogame avatar.

Wave the wand one way during “virtual bowling” and you’ve got a gutter ball. Don’t straighten your wrists on impact and you’ve just sliced in “Wii golf.”

But both Noah and I were more interested in how wielding a sword with the same stick in Zelda: The Twilight Princess would help us slay the bad guys and save Hyrule.

I did not expect to be able to buy one. It’s not so much that there’s a waitlist, it’s just that they tend to sell out the instant they hit the store shelves.

As if to prove it, as soon as I entered the store, I encountered a red-faced man angrily chewing out a store clerk about why they were out of stock for the third week running.

“We only get a dozen or so every week,” the salesman said, “and most of those are spoken for.”

The man stormed out of the store. He was obviously angry. I went with Noah to see whether there was some Xbox360 game he and I might enjoy. Me more than him since the 360 is more of my generation.

While we were standing in the Xbox aisle, the same salesman who just dismissed the angry Wii customer came up and asked how he could help us.
“Well, I don’t imagine you have a Wii laying around,” I joked.

He shifted his eyes side to side.

“You want one?”

“Of course,” I said. “Do you have one?”

“Let me see what I can do,” he said. “Stay here.”

I waited. I waited a long time. But soon enough he came back. Tucked under his arm wrapped in magazines was a Nintendo Wii.

“You’ll need another controller. You should think about the Wii Play, which comes with another set of games for an extra ten bucks.”

I thanked him profusely. He had one more piece of advice.

“My suggestion is you make a beeline to the checkout register. If anyone asks, tell them it was a return.”

I took the Wii under one arm and Noah under the other and did as I was told.

Because he is of that age where he sometimes understands some things, Noah kept saying as we stood in line, “Daddy, we have to get out of here!”
When we finally got to the last security station, the guard checking receipts saw the Wii and said, “Who are you? Some kind of VIP?”

Back home, I unpacked our Wii. I set up my Nintendo account and created a set of Miis –– Nintendo’s avatar system that allows you to create an on screen character to represent you,

If you’ve ever wondered what you’d look like as a Playmobile doll, it’s worth checking out. The visual options give you surprising flexibility to tailor your on screen presence to who you are. After waving the wand I had created a fairly convincing version of myself, my wife (that she approved of) and Noah who, at the age of 3, could have cared less.

So once I had my Mii’s in order, I cleared an open space on my living room floor and inserted the Wii Sports module to see what all the buzz is about.
Of the five sports, Tennis, Baseball, Bowling, Golf and Boxing, Bowling is by far the easiest to master. Immediately you get a sense of what you can and should do to make the ball roll, spin and knock down the pins. Before long you stop thinking about how you look and that’s when the silliness ensues.

Try golf and tennis and you quickly realize you are as bad on screen as you are in real life, not to mention how much worse you are without a club or racket to lean on between shots.

Boxing elicits the most ridiculous looking human behavior imaginable, with bobbing, weaving and flailing arms, but the good news is when you get hit you don’t actually bleed.

As much fun as my wife and I had competing against each other, Noah was having none of it. He liked the duck hunting game, but for him it was less about shooting the targets and more about the “bang!” the controller makes when you pull the trigger. Hand him Link’s sword in Zelda and he’s like an Octopus with eight machetes slicing up everything in his way, including the couch and dogs in the room.

What I’ve learned from my Wii experience so far is that thumbs and trigger fingers are overrated. I can kill more alien Covenant in Halo than any dude on the block because my hands have mastered the unwieldy Xbox controller. But my wife consistently beats me at tennis, golf and other video sports that seem to require full body coordination.

That’s probably why Wii is so intensely popular with casual and hardcore gamers alike. It’s the great equalizer. All the countless hours I’ve logged blasting aliens on the Xbox or wandering around Azeroth in World of Warcraft don’t amount to a hill of beans when I’m standing in my living room pretending to swing a bat or a club or a sword.

And, that’s just fine with me. I guess I was getting rusty on humility.

A couple of days ago, I stopped off at Loeber Mercedes in Lincolnwood to take a look at the just-released smart cars. I’ve seen these tiny little vehicles all over Europe. In France they are parked in every conceivable and improbable place (including every sidewalk in Paris).

They’ve been available for sale in the United States since the end of January, and I was curious to see what this version would be like.

The smart car –– the company doesn’t capitalize the name –– was developed by the inventor of the Swatch watch. It is manufactured by Mercedes Benz at a state-of-the-art new facility in France they call “smartville.” It is distributed in this country under an agreement with the Penske Auto Group.

The smart comes in one basic model: a two-seater, powered by a three cylinder, one liter, 70 horsepower Mitsubishi engine, capable of getting 36 mpg average (33 city, 41 highway).

On the highway, it can reach a top speed of 90 miles per hour and the transmission is an “automated manual” 5-speed that operates either by stick shift or paddle shifters on the steering wheel.

There are three cars to choose from: The Pure, The Passion and The Cabriolet –– a French term meaning beat the crap out of Volkswagen.
They run from $12,500 to $17,000 depending on the amenities.

Smart Cars in Action

The smart is just over eight feet long (106 inches) and five feet wide (61.4 inches), which means that one can be parked on a sidewalk and two can fit in the standard American car parking space.

Leaving out the outside influences of semi-trailers passing you at 80-miles-an-hour in the middle of a winter snowstorm, it’s a pretty good car for getting around Chicago.

When I walked into the showroom, the smart car seemed to smile at me.
The front grill, with an upward curve, catches your eye. The silver metal oval lines on the body trace the steel safety cage that protects the occupants from crashes. [From all reports, the vehicle is quite safe because of this and the standard four airbags and the collapsible crumple zones of the body.]

For the eco-minded, let me add . . . the car’s exterior is made of recycled, high-impact, flexible plastic panels. They are ding-resistant and, if dinged, are easily replaced. Replace them all, and you can have a new color car.

Mercedes offers a body kit so you can mix and match the color scheme of your car (for a price, of course – a complete change-over takes about two hours).

The interior is surprisingly roomy – for the passengers. Headroom wasn’t an issue (even for my 6’1” frame) and there is plenty of elbow space. But there isn’t much room left for anything else. Getting in and out is easy and the sight lines are superb (except for rear vision – because of the integrated headrests in the molded seats, seeing between them in the mirror might be an issue). And I should note the interior doesn’t seem “cheap” in any way. It comes with an optional six CD changer, heated seats, and a standard leather- wrapped sport steering wheel.

There is a small cargo area (12.8 cubic feet) behind the seats (and over the engine compartment) big enough for perhaps four to five paper grocery bags. As an urban runabout the layout is great, but don’t expect to go to the lumberyard with one. If the boards are short, the passenger seat does fold flat for a little extra storage.

Eco-Friendly

The smart company set out to become the most environmentally conscious auto manufacturer on the planet –– and by all indications have succeeded. Virtually the entire car is recyclable. If you damage or swap out the body panels, for instance, they are sent back to smart to be ground up and formed into another car.

The factory itself has reduced total emissions to the equivalent a town of 50 people would produce (as opposed to a city of 30,000 that a similar manufacturing operation normally would produce). And the company is committed to improving on those and other numbers yearly.

A Museum Piece

The smart is one of only six automobiles ever installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the only one that is still manufactured and sold.
There is an unmistakable “cuteness” to the whole thing, but for some reason I can’t help but think of it as a “gadget. A very cool gadget, yes; but it has something of an iPhone appeal to it.

Somehow, I feel like these little cars just won’t make it in the United States, as much as I hope they do. The driving experience here is different than in Europe. Trips are generally longer and go along highways as opposed to narrow roads. I’m just not sure people are ready to face down an eighteen-wheeler in one of these.

I also doubt Americans will see the advantages of the smart’s easy parking. Our country is organized by parking meters and lines-on-pavement delineated spaces. The fact that you could fit two of these into a parking space is of little benefit if you end up with a ticket if you try.

I also have a few issues with the gas mileage. For a self-proclaimed “green” company, I’m disappointed it only gets 36 mpg. For its size and weight, I would think that they could at least equal the Toyota Prius in the 50-mpg range. And the fact that it’s sold through the Mercedes dealer network means that any service that needs done must be done at a Mercedes dealership with the attending service rates.

In the end, I don’t think this will be your only car. It is probably a second (or even third) car in the driveway.But as a commuter or urban runaround, the smart is one decidedly stylish way to go.

The smart went on sale the last week in January, but you can’t take possession of one just yet. For a $99 fee, you can order one, but expect to wait ten to twelve months for delivery.