CBS 4 Denver/Bresnan weirdness

UPDATE: Wow! 4:29 AM and the still image below is still being broadcast. Somebody screwed up royally here; 7 hours + of lost advertising and lost viewership. Yikes. Hopefully this will be discovered and repaired by tomorrow sometime.

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Today, Saturday September 20 2008, there was some weirdness happening on my Bresnan Communications cable service. For at least a couple hours in the evening, channel 4 (CBS 4 out of Denver) was broadcasting just this single paused image:


This occurred at the very least from 9 PM until 10:40 PM. I noticed it because I had set my DVR to record "48 Hours", and this paused image is all that showed up for the entire hour. I have no idea what this image is actually from, other than it's probably not from "48 hours"; perhaps it's from one of the shows from the previous two hours: "NCIS" or "The Unit", but I don't watch either show and thus don't know them well enough to guess.

Now, the question is: who's responsible for this paused image to appear? It's got to be one of three entities: (1) the CBS network; (2) CBS 4 Denver; (3) the local cable provider, Bresnan Communications. I discount that this is a network problem because CBS was broadcasting just fine on another CBS cable channel. So between (2) and (3), I think the likely problem is happening at the cable provider, where someone pressed a "pause" key accidentally, or some piece of software has broken causing this still image to broadcast continuously over their cable channel 4. I suspect Bresnan instead of CBS 4, just because it's my guess that there is someone at CBS 4 always monitoring what they are actually broadcasting. After all, that single broadcast channel is most of their business. However, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine this slipping through unnoticed at Bresnan, where most of the operation is automated and very few folks would likely be constantly monitoring their 100 or 200 channels. Plus, I think I noticed a similar problem on another cable-only channel tonight too.

I thought this might be a glitch in my 7-year-old ReplayTV DVR. Such glitches happen occasionally, where the audio stops being recorded, or some other strange problem. But I rebooted the DVR and the problem didn't go away. So I bypassed the DVR and went to direct cable viewing on the TV and sure enough, there was this still image!

Anyway, the lesson here I think is just that even with all of todays cool technology and automated systems, it's still possible to have a glitch like this happen. I'd be curious to find out if anyone else has seen something like this happen.

Followup on LG VX8600

In April 2008, I reported that my LG VX8600 cell phone had survived a trip through a washing machine. This was true, and after I dried it out for a couple days, it seemed to work fine, except that the power key wasn't working. Later in an addendum I stated that even the power key seemed to be working again. However, I had spoken too soon apparently as the power key stopped working again shortly thereafter. No problem, right? Just leave the phone on all the time, even when recharging, and I wouldn't NEED the power button.

Well, this month (September 2008), in anticipation of an upcoming out of town trip, I purchased a cheap-o spare battery and a car recharger. Before trying to swap the battery out for the new one, I was aware of the possibility that I might not be able to power the phone back on (since the power key was hosed). However, I checked the VX8600's manual, and somehow had gotten the impression that the phone would power up also if I just inserted a charged battery. But I didn't read the remainder of the information that indicated you also needed to press the power key.

So (*sigh*) of course as soon as I swapped the battery out, I was able to charge the replacement battery, but I wasn't able to turn the phone on. Arrgggh. So I looked into getting a new phone. I was just about to order a replacement phone (I was within seconds of pressing the online "order" button), when I decided to try one more thing: taking the entire phone apart to see if I could fix the power key.

So I proceeded to take the phone apart to investigate. It wasn't going to be any good to me if I couldn't power it on anyway. I took the phone out of its protective leather case, and checked out what I needed to do to take the thing apart. This was the process I used:

• With a small knife, I removed four little pieces of plastic that cover the tiny screws on the back of the unit.
• I then unscrewed 6 screws: the four on the back of the unit that I uncovered, and 2 inside the battery compartment. I needed a *tiny* screwdriver to do this; my normal tiny screwdriver that I use with many computer-related screws was too big. Luckily I did have a super-tiny screwdriver that worked great for removing these screws
• Once the screws were out, I was able to remove the back cover. This back cover is essentially there to protect the circuitry and provide a way to lock the battery in place.
• I then found that I could remove the small power/microsd circuit board, and also removed another separate piece of plastic at the bottom of the device near the microphone (perhaps part of the microphone sub-assembly)
• I was then able to remove the main circuit board from the phone. The black plastic cover for the numbers you press came out at this point. I could remove the circuit board to the extent that it was separate from the piece of plastic that covers it, but the circuit board was still attached to the display portion of the phone via a small piece of circuitry encased in plastic (like a small, flat ribbon cable).
• At this point, I snapped back into place the small power circuit board, then I held a charged battery in place with one hand and tried pressing the power button. Nothing :-(
• So the next thing I tried is some further disassembly, peeling back a piece of plastic stuck to the actual circuit board covering all the number and navigation buttons, including the power button
• I then fiddled with the buttons a bit, pressing them with the small screwdriver and with my fingers. After a bit of this fiddling and with the sticky plastic piece still pulled away from the circuit board, I again tried holding the battery in place with one hand and this time pressed the power button. LO AND BEHOLD, the power came on! Wow. I then powered off and on a few times and it kept working (yay).
• Next, I tried slowly re-assembling the phone, checking at each point along the way to make sure the power button continued working. I re-attached the sticky plastic piece over the buttons, put the flat black plastic numbers piece back in place, made sure all the circuit board pieces were properly in place, snapped the back on again, put back the 6 screws, and re-attached the little plastic screw covers. At each step of the re-assembly process, I kept checking to make sure the power button continued to work, and it did!

So, after completely disassembling the phone, fiddling with the power button completely uncovered, and testing, I was able to get the power button working again. There is not one thing that I know I did for sure that fixed the problem; perhaps it was just exposing the button to air that may have caused some deeply buried water to evaporate, or just the fiddling that caused that button's contacts to connect again. But whatever it was, I have ended up with a working power button, and after testing I can report a fully functioning cell phone once again.

I unfortunately didn't think to take pictures along the way during this process, but if I ever have a need to take the phone apart again, I'll be sure to do so.