I hope you had an enjoyable Thanksgiving holiday and were able to spend some time with family and friends. It's a brief, enjoyable time that passes far too quickly.

I spent Thanksgiving week moonlighting on a second job. It was a part time gig, and only paid five dollars for a week of work, but I learned a great deal about myself and about how the entertainment industry works.

No, I didn't get into a movie for free, my family and I spent the week as a Nielsen television ratings family.

I'm sure you have all heard about the Nielsen ratings, where audiences are measured, deciding the fate of what programs continue to stay on the air, as well as a method for television stations to set their advertising rates.

Twice a year, in November and February, the networks have their "sweeps" periods, times when they go all out to attract your attention and watch their programs. These are when ratings become crucial, so that's when viewers get the "good stuff," big movies, new episodes, special appearances -- the works.

In order to measure this, the Nielsen company needs to measure a cross sampling of the country, so they use whatever patented computer formula they have developed to select folks to fill out a diary of the television they watch for a week.

I got the call last month, and figured, what the heck, it might be fun, so I agreed. There have been many television series over the years that I have liked that had been cancelled due to low ratings, so I figured this would be my chance to make sure that some of the programs I watch now would get a boost.

They asked how many televisions we had in the house and sent a diary for each set. The package arrived with five one dollar bills "for our time," and directions. It was pretty straight forward: simply find the correct page for the date and time, fill in the channel number, channel name, program name, and who watched the program. This, after going through all the diaries (we have three televisions in our home, two that get watched on a regular basis, one that doesn't get much use since my children have grown) and preparing the diaries by filling in the names and ages of who watches the sets, as well as the channel lineups.

I like to watch television at night to relax, and watch for a short time in the morning to get the weather and some national news. I never really paid all that much attention to how much time I spent in front of the set until this past week.

There are some diet and nutrition experts that will tell people wishing to lose weight to write down everything they eat in a diary, complete with date, time and portions. This is a useful exercise that helps you realize how much eating you do and to put some thought into what you are eating and why you are eating. I have never done this personally, but after being a Nielsen participant for a week, I understand the concept.

When you sit down to relax, the last thing on your mind is filling out paperwork. There's a reason the word "work" is part of "paperwork." Technology is changing television watching, further complicating this task. We subscribe to a satellite television service that we receive our local channels on and we have a digital video recorder (DVR) that you can program like a video cassette recorder (VCR) to record programs. Instead of using videotape, this device captures the program to a computer hard drive for later viewing.

The DVR has greatly changed the way my family watches television. If there are programs we want to watch, we record them and watch them when we want to, up to months later. It's heaven for a television viewer, a nightmare for program providers. The DVR also allows you to skip through the commercials in 15 second intervals with the press of a button. For the diary, I had to write down when we watched the recorded programs as well as when they were intially broadcast.

I was glad to see the week over, but glad I did my part to keep "quality" television programs on the air.

As always, I welcome your comments. You can reach me by email at tstangl@lemarscomm.net, telephone 712-546-7031, x40 or toll free 1-800-728-0066 x40.

Thanks for reading, I'll keep in touch. Feel free to do the same.