New Television

I got my new TV in. It’s a Panasonic TC-P54V10. I’m pretty stoked about it. The guy showed up to deliver it and I asked if he would mind hanging around long enough for me to inspect it. Some places are real picky about this. If you sign for it without inspecting it, it’s yours. If you have problems they refer you to the manufacturer for warranty repair work. The guy not only hung around, but helped me take it out of the box, put it on its stand, and get it plugged in long enough to make sure it turned on.

After that, I left the entire mess of packing materials and the TV sitting on the floor while I got back to work and wrapped up a few things. Later in the day, I moved the old TV out of the way and cleaned up a bit to make room for the new one.

Since I had the old TV out of the way I checked out the jacks behind the TV. I remembered dropping a CAT5 cable, but couldn’t remember if we had put an RJ-45 (network) or RJ-45 (phone only) jack in. Turns out it was the latter so I was going to have to put a new jack in. No problem as this is right up my alley even though I hadn’t done cabling work in a while.
While I was there I decided to replace the face-plate on the wall which had also cracked. I went to go check out my jacks and supply box in the attic. This is where things went terribly wrong. My attic access is a one of those nifty pull-down thingies with a ladder attached to it. Well, when I was pulling it down one entire side of the ladder hinge decided it had enough abuse of the years and let go popping out of it’s pivot cup and breaking loose from the spring and a few other things.

Fortunately, I wasn’t hurt and nothing else was severely damaged such as the trim and what-not. Unfortunately, the ladder piece is severely jacked and I don’t think it’s fixable…which means a complete replacement. My neighbor, Budda, thinks he can fix it but he hasn’t seen it, yet. I’ll certainly give him the opportunity as the project is a little more in-depth than I personally care to deal with.

No worries, let me run down to the hardware store and see what my options are. I picked up a new face plate while I was there and a couple of spare jacks “just in case.” I didn’t want to have to come back.

I get home and re-wire the phone jack to make it a network jack. No luck, it doesn’t work. Shit. Now I have to go up into the attic to see why. Did I mention it’s over 100 now in the great state of Texas, which makes the attic temperature somewhere around 120~130 degrees Fahrenheit? And now, I have to go up in the garage which is nowhere near where I need to be.

*sigh* tools in the bag, up I go. I have to work my way along and through some rafters to get to where the other part of the attic is decked in. It’s hotter than hell up there and I am already sweating like a pig. Great, I’ve been up here two minutes and already lost half of my body fluids.

I make my way over to where the cable comes up into the attic and discover some fuck-tard had decided to cut my cable and do it “their” way. My guess is that it was the DirecTV guy that installed the satellite years and years ago. In my attic, I have all of my CAT5 runs coming to a patch panel for quick and easy cross-connect. I also have a 110 block sitting there with the phone wires. This is REAL common stuff in the IT world, but not real common for a house. So, this guy cut my cable, put a biscuit on the 2x4 and wired it in that way, and then wired that to a line that was already wired into the 110 block for phones. Moron. I was going to have to fix it and run a new cable.

Back to the hardware store. I picked up a few more jacks “just in case” and about 100ft of CAT5 cable. Back home, I pray to the gods and use electrical tape to bond the old wire (already in the wall) to the new one which is now uncoiled to make it easier to pull.

Back in the attic. I think it’s actually hotter, now. I get up there and begin pulling the old one out. Fortunately, the tape held and there wasn’t any extra stuff to hang the new wire up so I pulled out all the old wire until the new one came through. Then I ripped out all of the DirecTV fuck-tard’s crap and re-ran the cable through my wire-loops and everything the way it was supposed to be in the first place.
Now I am completely soaked in sweat, but my cable is now ran and just needs to be wired up. I’m sitting in the attic and I was too hot and tired to bother with hooking up an extra light. I can see, but not that great and I grab a spare jack to wire into my patch panel. My hands are slick with sweat and it’s dripping into my eyes and all over the place. How the hell do the A.C. guys work like this? I eventually get the wire stripped and punched down and everything all wrapped up and make my way across the attic, again, to climb down. You know it’s hot when you step into the 101-degree air and think that it feels cool.

I just polished off my second 32oz. container of Gatorade and head back inside to finish wiring the cable. I grab another jack and begin wiring it up when my punch-down tool decimates the jack. So much for cheap shit from Home Depot. Grab another jack and start over. No biggie, at least I am inside the AC, now. Get it all wired up, grab my laptop, plug it in…and….nothing. It doesn’t freaking work.

So I double-check everything I can down where it’s cool and no luck. It all looks correct. I must have made a mistake up in the attic. So now, for the third time I climb back into the attic, across the rafters, and sweat my balls off trying to figure out what is wrong. I grabbed a small flashlight this time and upon removal of the jack from the patch panel I realize I had put in a jack that was some jacked up IOS standard – not the AT&T 568A / 568B standard that you need in data networks.

Grab another jack, this time the right one, and re-wire the damned thing again with sweat dripping all over the place. It’s amazing I didn’t short something out. Climb back across the attic and outside into the “cool” air. This time, it worked.

Why do all that? Because the new TV has an Ethernet connection and can communicate over the Internet to do things like download firmware updates (which I did), sync the clock to an NTP service, watch on-demand movies from Amazon, get weather reports, watch YouTube, and check out other things.

I finally got everything cleaned up and moved an old coffee table in place to hold the TV. Hopper helped me set it up on the stand and I spend about 2 hours dicking with cables and stuff to get everything setup right. The good thing is that by now utilizing HDMI cables I was able to pull out a bunch of RGB cables and clean things up a bit.

I also tweaked the screen to some specs that were setup by CNET after conducting all of their tests (thanks CNET). Then it was on to re-programming my Harmony One remote to do everything I wanted it to with the new TV.

At the end of the day everything works beautifully. I’m not a hard-core videophile. I like it to look great, not perfect (I don’t have that kind of cash) and this TV fulfills my expectations and then some. The picture is far superior to anything I’ve seen before and I am not even using a blue-ray player, yet. I lost about 2-inches on the top and side by downsizing from a 55” to a 54”, but the form factor is the same as my old TV so it still fits nicely.

Now I just have to get a new stand and figure out how to hide some of the cabling.