Illogical advertisements!

Maybe I'm just overly critical, but there are some recent television advertisements that have wedged themselves under my skin; not because of the product or service, but simply because there is something in the ad that doesn't match real life terribly well or is otherwise illogical.

The worst offender is a recent ad for an insurance company. In the ad, a woman's car has been hit from behind by another driver's car. The woman's perfectly cool, calm and collected as if nothing really has happened -- and having been in some accidents I know that is the last thing I feel like and that's probably true with most other people. Secondly, she gets on the phone to... no, not the police (as she would be required to do in this case, given the amount of damage)... no, not the ambulance or paramedics... her insurance company!?!!! Who rings their insurance company first off when they've been in an accident??? Now this insurance company (supposedly a competitor to the one which is advertising) has a "feature" on their phone where you speak your first name. In this case her name is "Moira" and the computer's voice recognition reckons she's said "moron"... but can someone please tell me of an insurance company -- any company in fact! -- where they get you to state your name over the phone? It's usually some sort of ID code or policy number since the computer database lookup (preparing a particular customer's entry to be viewed/modified by the eventual person who will handle the call) typically requires a special unique identifier (hence the policy/customer number) since this is less prone to error than using a person's name... Finally, the ad states that when you call the company being advertised you'll always speak to a real person... but every other insurance company I've contacted over the phone for the entire time I've had insurance I've eventually spoken to a real person -- albeit after a menu selection, which at least means I might be speaking to people in the right department!

A second, and massively less annoying one, is an ad we've seen the last couple of summers for an apple cider style alcoholic beverage (are you admiring my restraint in not mentioning the companies? :-) ). In this case, there is a very large apple tree covered with flowers and in fact dropping huge amounts of petals around so that the surrounds look like they've had snow -- except the lovely young men and women are clad in summerwear/swimwear. The first problem lies in the amount of petal litter (the tree would need to be at least 10 times the size to emit that many petals and would probably fall over under its own weight!). The second is that all these petals have drifted off the tree - but they are all pristine white and not a hint that the petals are in any way beyond their prime... except that flowers don't drop their petals until the fruit has started to form, right? Which means the petals will be old and probably crusty... The third problem is that sitting right under the tree (still covered in blossoms) are several cases of freshly picked apples. Now I don't know terribly much about apples but I'm fairly sure that you can't have the one tree being covered in blossoms and yet have fruit picked from it...

Any ads you find to be illogical like these? Ad (sorry, couldn't resist!) them to the comments. Or if you've got any information that might suggest that I'm wrong about the apple tree...

Cricket is not boring!

On the subject of cricket (see my other post for today), I have a comment about the game of cricket. Or rather, some people's responses to cricket.

Many people say it is boring. In doing so in that manner, they are really saying it is an absolute thing - which means that they are effectively disregarding my opinion on the matter.

Be warned - if you are one of these people, your comment is "unliked".

I've played cricket. I would have kept playing if a team would have taken me and if my eyesight hadn't gone bad (thankfully, it's quite well corrected now so I could probably play but I now lack the skills to do so). I am passionate about the game and don't find it much boring at all (not quite true: I do find the T20's reasonably boring... they don't last very long and there doesn't seem to be much in the way of strategy or tactics, just go out and smack the bowling or try to bowl wide yorkers outside off stump to restrict the batting).

I love strategy and so the longer the game form, the better I like it. And so, in one fell swoop, I prove that cricket is not boring as an absolute - only in your opinion, to which you are freely entitled even if I disagree with you (which I probably will).

Just don't tell me my opinion does not matter. My opinion matters, at least to me!

The drama of trying to watch digital TV

Here in Oz we once again have a 3-way one-day cricket tournament. Channel 9 have the rights to broadcast it free-to-air, but the matches which don't have Australia in them seem to be broadcast on one of the channel 9 digital channels.

This is a problem for us as we don't yet have a digital TV nor a set-top box to watch these channels - they are only being mandatory here in December 2013 (most of 2 years away yet) so we haven't bothered.

What we do have is a TV tuner card in one computer (but like our TV it is only analogue and therefore can't get the digital channels) and we have a USB digital TV tuner stick. I thought, "Great! Just plug that in and away we go!"

Not so :-(

I plugged it into my laptop running Win7 expecting it to simply try to download the driver and install and then I could use a program to access it - it is USB after all! Instead, Windows told me it knew nothing about the driver... so I went and downloaded it (not being able to find the install disk). I went to run the driver install program, and Windows told me that I needed to actually log in as the administrator (not just use admin privileges) in order to install hardware! So I did, and guess what? Windows failed to install it... because when I'd set my computer up I'd left the admin password blank (I'm the only one using this computer and quite frankly I couldn't be bothered with yet another password) - and Windows told me that it would not install stuff if the admin password is blank. Grrrr.

So, now I'm currently downloading a CD image for a program that will let me set the administrator password, so I can install the driver, so I can watch TV...

In the meantime, while that was downloading (it's currently up to 40% and taken 2 hours to get that far :-( ) I decided to try it out on my old WinXP machine which would just barely keep up the frame rate - not an issue since at least I'd be watching something. Sure enough, installed the driver, installed the software, and up and running within about 10 minutes. With one exception.

I still can't watch the cricket. The receiver I'm using is at the other end of the house to the TV antenna point (which is actually unusable as it is an old type of socket and I haven't got onto our landlord yet to get it changed over!) so I hooked up a "rabbit's ears" antenna - only to find that the receiver can only find ABC and SBS digital channels since the commercial channels (including 9) are too stingy to use high-powered transmitters for their digital signals... and only a roof-mounted antenna has sufficient gain to extract the digital signal properly.

Sigh.

At least there's still cricinfo.com.au's live scorecard, so long as our Internet connection doesn't go down...

Edit (24 Feb 2012): today we bought a cheap HD set top box with PVR function via external USB hard disk, and set it up to see if it would work off the rabbit's ears antenna... and it did, so now I'm watching the current cricket match on HD through it and it is sensational!