Tuesday, October 30, 2007

It must be Winter, my Skin is Dried Out

The humidity around here drops like a rock when the cold weather comes in. It's easy to tell because all of a sudden the skin feels like parchment and the eyes feel like they're being rubbed with sandpaper and the throat is in constant need of liquid refreshment and the head pounds with sinus pressure and the cats give off sparks when they are stroked.

It's a dangerous time for electronics, too, as the sparks from the fingertips fly off like lightning to toast little circuits in the stereo and the tv and the computer; and turning a switch is a roll of the dice to see how many electrons want to join the human bus on a trip to Ground Central.

That could explain why the TV is being weird. Sometimes it auto-detects the composite signal coming in from the VCR, sometimes it doesn't. And it seems to depend on whether the audio channel of that video source is switched in by the receiver or not.

Another weird thing is that the receiver shuts off if the volume knob is spun rapidly to zero. Not sure if that's a feature or a bug. If it's a feature, it's undocumented.

Time to get out the ol' humidifier and turn this house into a subtropical wonderland.

No comments: