Yeah...That's The Back Of Our TV

 You're seeing a picture of the back of one of our TVs because this afternoon, I hooked up a sound bar to better experience the wonder that is television. We found the cheapest sound bar we could find (and I do mean cheap...). It's amazing how advanced TVs have come in less than a century.

The first TV I remember was not an RCA, or Curtis Mathis, or Magnavox. No, it was a Heathkit. If you're not familiar with Heathkit, it was the Ikea of TVs. Basically, you built it yourself. The first TV I watched was built by my father. It ran on vacuum tubes, and it didn't get the public television channels, so no Sesame Street, no Big Bird and the like. The first time I ever saw a muppet was when I attended kindergarten and they wheeled in a TV for all us to watch. I don't remember a lot about kindergarten, but I do remember all the kids knew exactly what the show was and I had no clue.

Fast forward a half a century. TVs have changed, like everything else. They're smaller and larger. They're cheaper and more expensive. They're modern marvels of technological advancement, and this afternoon if we had the newest model of a Samsung TV, I would have been able to simply hook up the HDMI cable that came with the sound bar to the HDMI connection in the TV dedicated exclusively to an audio output.

But, because the TV is a few years old, our particular TV has no dedicated audio output for an HDMI cable. I had to find another way to get the sound bar to work. It took a while, but I did it. The reason I took a picture is because the TV currently sits in a corner of the room and I was unable to see the back of the TV clearly, so I took a picture and that helped me hook things up.

My dad was an amazing man. I can't imagine what he would think of the world in which we live. I'm sure he would think much of what we take as "everyday" would be overwhelming.

And he'd be right. Oh, and the fact that I could use a portable device to snap a picture and see it immediately and be able to manipulate it and attach the picture instantaneously to a blog, well...that would blow his mind as well.