Tag Archives: cable

The not so mysterious case of Comcast sucks…

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Well, tonight you were schedule to get the post you should have gotten yesterday… But it seems “Comcast is experiencing technical difficulties that are impacting your cable television and high speed internet service.” Therefore, since I don’t feel like re-typing the damned things with my thumbs, you get another day of space filler. So in conclusion, Comcast sucks.

Yes, I know this is a first world problem… and since I live in the United States and not some remote herding camp in East Dirtbagistan, we’re just going to call them problems from now on. It’s one of the perks of living in the first world.

Mission Complete (minus nine)…

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The great heroic project of our age is more or less finished. For all practical purposes, I’m calling the effort to transfer my DVD collection to hard disk mission complete. With the exception of nine disks that I’ll need other software to rip and encode effectively, I managed to bring down the curtain three weeks ahead of my self-imposed deadline of the end of the year. As far as those couple of outliers go, well, I’ll get to them when I Screen Shot 2012-12-11 at 5.12.24 PMget to them. For the most those few disks are fairly oddball titles that you’d really only want to watch once or twice in a lifetime anyway. Still, I have them, and it would be nice to go from finished to really finished eventually.

So, you’re asking, what’s the tale of the tape? Weighing in at a grand total of 1.21 TB (1210 GB), I’ve got 123 movies and 1380 separate television episodes, and 1185 songs available for streaming to every television and iDevice in the house across my own network. Put another way, that’s 10.5 days of back-to-back movies, 44 days of television, and about 3 days of uninterrupted music. That’s certainly not the biggest personal audio-visual library out there, but I’m proud of my little collection. That should prove to be more than enough to keep me entertained during the impending apocalypse.

It’s alot like having a 24/7 commercial free television station that plays only content that you know you’re going to like. I had a real geek-out moment there when I realized just how awesome it really is. Using the Apple TV interface makes it very similar experience to actual channel surfing. When you get bored with one show you can switch immediately to another and then back again even on a TV in a different room. Basically, it’s what TV would be if television wasn’t just an avenue to put eyeballs on advertisements. It’s possible that I’m in love.

In the interest of keeping things safe and sound, I’ve got a redundant copy on site and an offsite backup ready to go into rotation. It might seem like overkill, but iTunes, as we all know, sometimes does funny things and this isn’t a process that I want to go through a second time. I’m not there yet, but I think I’ve taken a big step towards making cable television pretty irrelevant in my life.

Sadly there are still several large boxes of CDs stashed in the basement that need to be ripped since I seem to have lost alot of content dragging it from computer to computer over the last five or six years. Since I seem to have finally stumbled on a solution that’s is going to stick, it might just be time to go ahead and rebuild my audio library while I’m at it… but that’s a project for a later date. I don’t think I can stomach seeing any more shiny plastic discs just yet.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Comcast. Making the list for the third or fourth time this year is the cable company that everyone loves to hate. Ever since I downgraded my service a two months ago, my bills have been arriving with what I’ll generously call wild inaccuracies. I spent 30 minutes yesterday on the phone with a very nice CSR who thought she was going to be able to make this month’s round of corrections. Except, of course, she couldn’t because the amount of the correction was in excess of $25… which triggered the need to execute what I believe she called an “elevation form for tier two service.” Instead of being transferred to this group of genies, I’d have to “stand by for them to contact me sometime within the next five business days.” I don’t know why I ever hold out hope that anything can either A) just work the way it’s supposed to work or B) Be corrected with a single phone call. Clearly my expectations are misaligned with reality.

2. The five day work week. I’m out of practice with being at my desk for a full five days in a row. I know this because it’s Thursday and the only ambition I have left is to muddle through tomorrow and get to the weekend. It’s not that the week has been particularly busy, problematic, or strange… but the trek from Monday to Friday has just seemed to go on forever. Now if I can just gin up enough oomph to drag myself through three more long weeks, I’ll be all set for the 11-day Christmas weekend.

3. Lunch. When I worked in DC, it was two blocks to Chinatown, one metro stop from Union Station and the Hill, or a 10 minute walk in almost any other direction to find a diverse and tasty array of lunch options. Here in Aberdeen, there’s a Subway, a Burger King, and a few other lunch places that more or less serve the same thing. While I don’t miss the daily 90 minute commute, I desperately miss having some variety in my lunch options. I miss General Tso’s from Tony Chang’s, burgers at the District Chophouse, and deep dish from Armand’s. At this point, God help me, I even have fond memories of the build your own salad bar next door to the office and the hot dog cart set up on the curb. I’m not expecting an urban food environment here in the wilds of north eastern Maryland, but if I don’t find something other than sandwiches soon I may have to resort to bringing my own food… and that’s just not an option I want to entertain.

As expected…

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I didn’t have high hopes for my test run with the indoor antenna. Since I live 40 miles from the nearest TV transmitter and there’s plenty of hills and trees in that distance, the antenna was a hail Mary play. Being that I’m only out $7, it wasn’t too costly an experiment. Unfortunately, the antenna failure led me to contemplate Plan B… kit the two small TVs in my bedroom and upstairs living room with Apple TV boxes and stream content as needed. Sadly, Plan B has also hit a snag. A snag in which both small TVs are so old that neither one has the required HDMI port. There are ways around that, of course, but none of them are particularly good. So that leaves us with Plans C and D.

Plan C is to replace the TVs – probably a $400 total expense since I’m looking at the sub-32″ class for both units. Add the two Apple TV units and the startup cost should be right at $600. Getting rid of two cable boxes would get me off the hook to Comcast for approximately $20 a month… so in 2.5 years, option C pays for itself, except for the part where technology has improved in the interrum and upgrades need to be made. Plan D, of course, is to do nothing at all and just learn to enjoy the pucker every time I get my e-bill from the cable company. I know what I want to do, but maybe after Thanksgiving the numbers will start to look a little more palatable.

Overboard…

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It occurs to me that it’s possible I’ve gone slightly overboard in my relentless pursuit of lowering my cable bill without giving up access to Game of Thrones when it starts airing again in March. Since I live in the middle of nowhere (that’s not a complaint, by the way, simply a statement of fact), I’m not sure it’s going to have the oomph to pull in a signal from Philly or Baltimore, but I’m going to be playing around with an OTA television antenna for the first time. That’s not quite true, I suppose. Growing up there was an old TV in the basement that when they antenna was adjusted just right, could pick up two or three channels. Since the only thing I really use the TV in the bedroom for is to watch the morning news while I’m getting ready for work and catch the late news again before bed, I’m hoping that this will be the perfect excuse to jettison one more cable box and its associated fees from my plan. If it works in the bedroom, I’ll duplicate it downstairs. In the event it doesn’t work, I’ll pick up two new Apple TV boxes and just stream content either from the computer or the iPad. At first, this started out as a philosophical question about why I was paying for 200 channels I didn’t watch… It’s becoming something more like a holy quest… and those always turn out just great.

Where credit is due…

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I was all set to come back to the house tonight and write a scathing rant about Comcast. Give their track record, I didn’t think they’d have a prayer of restoring service today. Happily, I would have been dead wrong in that assessment. So now I’ve got to give credit where it’s due. Less than 36 hours after the lines came down, I’m back up and running with TV and internet. No fuss, no resetting boxes, just walked in turned things on and the signal was there. Nice job, Comcast. You done good this time around and I appreciate that.

Maybe tomorrow we’ll get lucky and I’ll have something to rant about.

Telling tales about the end of the world…

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I was really warmed up to take the worst that Mother Nature could dish out… and as usual, Mother Nature turns out to mostly be a pansy. Her worst, at the moment, would appear to be denying me access to cable television and high speed Internet. Both of these are annoyances to be sure, but not quite the mayhem and chaos we had been promised earlier in the week.

I know there are flooded basements, trees downed, and homes lost out there, but for most of us in the all-Irene-all-the-time news cycle, all this experience has really served to do is reinforce the already strong notion that weather is almost always over-hyped and under performing. That’s a pity, because the time in the future when calls of imminent destruction go out and it’s not just a drill, most of us are going to shrug, go on about our business, and think we’ve seen it all before.

There’s got to be a better way to handle these things than the media going crazy and making every story a tale of the end of the world…

Sometimes things go right…

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Hard as it is to believe, sometimes things actually go right. I had Direct TV installed this morning and the installer called about 15 minutes before he got here at 8:15 to let me know he was on his way. He did a quick survey of the project and then got to work. Of course it remains to be seen if the damned thing will actually work once the dish is mounted and all the TVs are plugged in. I’m sure that will be a follow-on post.