Converter Box Coupons Finally Came!

On March 4th, I ordered two coupons from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) for $40 each towards the purchase of two digital converter boxes to pick-up broadcast signals.

In case you've been living under a rock (or just don't have a TV, in which case, you wouldn't care anyway), on February 17, 2009, all the full-power broadcast channels will have to switch to digital-only transmissions. Currently, most are broadcasting in both analog and digital, but the portion of the analog spectrum they use has been deemed by Congress necessary for other uses, among them communications systems for police and fire services. The National Association of Broadcasters has a website they have promoted on-air like crazy at www.dtvanswers.com, but the official government website where you must request the coupons is www.dtv2009.gov.

Now, there is currently controversy regarding the availability of low-power and translator stations, which are not being required to transition to digital quite as fast. Indeed, their trade association, the Community Broadcasters Association, has filed a lawsuit against the FCC arguing that manufacturers and sellers of converter boxes that do not pass through the analog signal, are violating a 1962 statute called the All-Channel Receiver Act.

I must admit I am not very familiar with the Low-Power TV community; it seems like most of the ones in the St. Louis area are affiliated with religious broadcasting networks. Within Missouri there are 100+ LPTV or translator stations, according to the FCC lookup site.

So if you do want to make sure you can receive all the stations, regardless of how they broadcast, it seems like the best option is to buy one of the converter boxes listed on another CBA website, KeepUsOn.com.

Anyway, we finally got our coupons (really they look like credit cards) on Saturday, almost two months after making an online request. And of course, they must have been mailed a couple weeks ago from the processing center in Oregon, because they expire in less than the 90 days they are supposed to be good for (on July 16th).

NTIA is an obscure, yet powerful agency. I was mainly familiar with them in the past for their administration of a Clinton-era grant program my old employer considered applying for called the Technology Opportunities Program (TOP). We never got that grant, but our friends at The Youth and Family Center on N. 20th did, and developed an interesting and innovative initiative called St Louis WizKids.

Woolworths

Today I stopped by SLU Pius library to quickly return a few books, as I had only put 15 cents in the parking meter on Olive in a shady spot behind what I still call the Midtown State Office Building (now the SLU School for Professional Studies). Not that many years ago (1999 I guess), part of my job as a new intern with the City was working with DFS people in that building on a public-access computer project. Getting an analog line for hooking up a modem to provide public internet access turned out to be impossible given their PBX system. Ah, those were the days.

But as I drove across Grand on Olive, I reminisced further back, to the days when F.W. Woolworth Co. was still in business throughout St. Louis and her leafy suburbs.

I suppose in some ways the place of Woolworth's in American society was not that different from the Wal-Mart of today. In fact, in 1997 as Woolworth's declined, it was replaced by Wal-Mart on the Dow Jones.

Woolworth's stores, as well as S.S. Kresge stores (the precursor to K-Mart), however, were located in city neighborhoods and suburban strip malls. They were much more of a human-scaled store. Think about where Woolworths stores were located:

Grand and Olive
6th and Locust
South Grand near Hartford
Cherokee and California
Concord Village Shopping Center on S. Lindbergh (that is the one I remember best, from my days as a little 'un in South County).
...
and I'm sure there were dozens of others that either closed well before I came along, or were just outside my sphere of activity. I vaguely recall an S.S. Kresge store in Hampton Village about where the Great Clips is now.

The big store at Cherokee and California is today a Mexican grocery store, but if you look closely, you can still see the "no soliciting" decals in the windows next to the front doors, not to mention the holes in the stucco where the lettered signage was once mounted. Similarly, you can tell there used to be a Woolworth's in the former "Comp and Soft" space on S. Grand because of the distinctive red metal signage.

When I was an exchange student in South Africa, I discovered their Woolworths chain, which was and is a very high-end operation owned by the similarly high-end British retailer Marks & Spencer -- and apparently not even affiliated with the Woolworths in the UK, which was part of F.W. Woolworth until 1982.

I guess I was disappointed at the time to see just how high-end, and heavily grocery-oriented, the African version was. Seemed rather counter-intuitive, with so much poverty just a few miles away. I was more likely myself to buy groceries at a Shoprite store, or at one of the little ramshackle trailers and ISO containers housing independently-owned walk-up stores located amidst the dormitories or near the Metrorail stop on the UWC campus.

Now Officially ABD

OK, so I think I can now call myself a "PhD candidate" as on Friday I completed the defense of my secondary field paper, which nobody will ever read again (I hope), entitled "Politicizing Ethnicity: How Ethnic Identity Aligns with Patronage and Partisanship."

Perhaps it helped that the 10:15 am aftershock from Friday's 4:30 am earthquake occurred during the middle of my defense.

Now that that badboy is out of the way, the dissertation will be my main focus for... well, whatever free time I can conjure up!

Meanwhile, I am hopeful that despite the downturn (read liquification) in the real estate market, some of the plans for downtown will continue to proceed. It would be just too depressing to see the Jefferson Arms sit vacant and boarded up for another couple years. For that matter, I still haven't seen much progress on the new construction side of the Park Pacific development just across the street from my work.