jake, the nerd :)

Last night was an adventure. If any of you had previously read one of my blogs, I was going to be working during the Super Bowl last night. What most of you might not have known, was that Cafe Trio, where I work, has no TVs thus not giving me any chance to watch it.
Luckily, to the customer's and employee's surprise... The local nerd busser, Jake, was working that night.

Knowing that it was not going to be a very busy night, I decided to bring in my 19" Samsung LCD HDTV and plug it in outside next to the bathrooms and the patio entrance.
To make this all that much neater, I really had no plan for any of it to happen this way since all I brought in was a TV and a coaxial cable with no antenna and no extension cable for power.
We turned the TV on, and set it on the counter on the patio outside, and positioned it so you could see it directly through the door since the door is a see-through door made mainly of glass.

To figure out a way to get a signal, Xan (one of the servers) and I plugged in the coaxial cable just hoping that we might be able to pick up a picture with no antenna. Unfortunately it did not work, but I had an idea.....

Directly above us was a metal wire that strung about 15 feet in which the sheets that cover the patio when the sun is out, are held together by. Automatically a light switch went off in my head and I was like "Duh, lets just cut the coaxial cable, pull some of the copper wire out and hook it up to this wire!!"
So we spliced the wire, pulled some copper out, hooked it around the wire and lets just say we had 19" of pure digital, picture perfect quality HDTV football (commercials mainly) to watch and enjoy throughout the night.

The awesome part was the three or four guys that went out to dinner last night (who goes to dinner when the Super Bowl is on anyway?) found this TV and kept coming back to it every couple of minutes to check on the game. Wonder if their dates really thought they had to use the bathroom that badly? ;)

.... well if any of you have questions on how our science experiment worked and how we were able to get a HDTV picture with a coaxial cable and a metal wire, just ask .... Jake the Nerd will help :D