Yet Another Gift Chat and an Automatic Firefox

FCC Thinks Anew About a-La-Carte TV

Something strange is afoot at the Federal Communications Commission. Its new chairman, Kevin Martin, said last week that the government might have to require cable and satellite companies to let customers pay for only the channels they want to watch.

The FCC has not lately been in favor of any sort of restriction on the ability of media companies to sell their content (although it's had no problem with imposing far more onerous regulations on consumer-electronics and computer manufacturers).

Martin's thesis is that if customers could cherry-pick their favorite channels, they would no longer be offended by the racier fare that comes standard in the current set of cable and satellite packages.

That makes sense to me, although my support for so-called a la carte TV is on simpler grounds: I don't want to pay for things that I don't care to watch.

As various pundits have said since Martin's revelation: When you can cherry-pick the best songs off an album at a store like iTunes, where do cable and satellite providers get off insisting that we buy these huge packages?

I hope Martin and his colleagues pursue that idea. Giving customers that option seems only fair. And any cable or satellite company that wants to argue that this is impossible will first have to answer why cable operators in Canada seem to do fine offering that level of choice.

Even weirder than the FCC's chair endorsing the idea of a la carte cable, however, is cable-industry CEOs agreeing that they could deal with it, as executives at AT&T and Cablevision have said.

One Day in Consumer-Electronics Hell

The Sunday after Thanksgiving should have ended with two things accomplished at my mother's house in northern New Jersey: a stereo set up to play CDs and a TV connected to cable. Neither happened as planned.

The stereo was my fault, even though it should have been simple enough -- drill a couple of holes for the speaker wires in the bookshelves, hook up the stereo components to each other and plug in everything.

It didn't take too long to run the speaker wire through the shelves, but then I had to play the usual guessing game with the two leads of each paired wire: Which one connects to which terminal on each speaker? I guessed that silver went to black and gold to red, then clumsily stripped off some insulation to connect them. (Tip: never clip your fingernails right before attempting this task.)