gadgets, sports, tv
Robert Seidman 
Inertia is hard.
It’s been almost 15 years since I got my first DVR. If you follow a lot of TV media coverage like I do, nobody could fault you for thinking that DVRs are in nearly 100% of homes. That’s almost certainly the case for TV media professionals.
But heading into the 2013-14 television season, nearly 14 years after the dawn of DVRs, Nielsen estimated that slightly less than 47% of homes* were equipped with DVRs.
Don’t blame Nielsen.
Compared to, say, curing the common cold, it’s relatively very easy for Nielsen to measure out-of-home viewing. But easy does not equal “cheap” or “free” so more accurately one could say “it’s easy, but expensive to measure and nobody wants to foot the bill.”
I love the San Francisco Giants. I just love baseball in general, but I’m a big Giants fan. I’m the kind of fan who watches some/most/all of the TV coverage for pretty much all 162 games. I’m the kind of fan who watches the pre-game and post-game coverage. It’s great pre/post coverage especially when the A-Team of Greg Poppa, Bill Laskey and Vida Blue is assembled. That trio has great chemistry.
I love Willie Mays as much as the next 50+ year old, but I loathe CSN Bay Area’s “Say Hey Tuesdays” when they do the pre/post game coverage for Giants Tuesday night home games from a live shoot at 24 Willie Mays Plaza and encourage people to yell and scream behind the telecast. Yep, they even give fans signs to hold up (see picture above).
Though my hearing tests normal for someone my age, several years ago I began to notice some occasional difficulty when watching dramatic television or movies. I don’t have any problems with sports, news, talk shows, etc., but programming with a musical scores and sound effects was problematic.
To get the volume loud enough where I could comfortably hear dialog, the music/special effects were uncomfortably loud resulting in constantly turning the volume up and down.
I’m not a huge fan of the quantified lifestyle but I like to walk a fair bit so I’ve been using fitness trackers for the past two years. I started with a FitBit One and liked it just fine but lost it after about a year. I replaced it with a FitBit Flex which is worn on the wrist.
There are definitely a couple of advantages to wearing activity trackers on your wrist, but after nearly a decade of not wearing anything on my wrist I didn’t love wearing something on my wrist. So I replaced the Flex with a FitBit Zip. The Zip is a downgrade from the One since it can’t track steps climbed and a downgrade from both the One and the Flex since it can’t track sleep.
But I lost the Zip after a few months and replaced it with a WiThings Pulse*. I found the Zip about two weeks later and usually carry both it and the Pulse.