DTV arrives!

Well the countdown is finally over! Digital Television (DTV) has finally, officially arrived in America, once and for all. Uh, perhaps as many as 1 million people may be left in the dark now, or at least with "snow" on their screens, because their analog signal is gone. Today is also my birthday. Whats been nice the past 4 months, is I have received a nightly update from my local TV news channel, on how many days until my birthday! What was not so pleasant, was the daily updates from my local news on the countdown to digital TV! I first wrote about this on Nov. 17, 2008 in my blog post 92 days, when I discussed this boring countdown to the end of analog TV. On Feb 16, 2009 I wrote about it again in my blog post Digital Daze (which was picked up and published on the St. Louis Bloggers Guild website), when I lamented that the DTV countdown was given an extra 4 months so that the 6 million or so people in the US not connected to cable or satellite, could go through the converter box maze of coupons and PSA's, or try to follow a local Best Buy "associate" on how to set up their new antenna to pick up digital TV signals. Apparently, the extra 4 months has "helped" 5 million or so people get with the program. Today the FCC has beefed up their customer service "hotlines" to handle the deluge of calls they expect from the 1 million people who "chose" to ignore the warnings that have been coming to them for months and months! Will this be anything? Like what happen on Jan 1, 2000 when millions of Americans were certain their computers were going to crash, but it turned out to be a non event? We'll see. All I know is, I have been ready for this transition for years, and am happy to see the end of PSA's when I watch the 10 o'clock news. Gosh, I must be old...I still watch the news on TV.