These (TV and Internet) Times They Are A Changin'
Tuesday, Sept. 09, 2003
As far as entertainment in the home, yesterday was a big change day.
I had to take off work around noon to meet the Dish Network installer guy so he could install my dish. And I have to say, it is the biggest eyesore on my house. My house faces west. The Dish Network site said that the dish would have to face south, so I was hoping that it would be on the back side of the southern side of my house so it wouldn�t be visible from the street. However, I forgot that living in the eastern United States that maybe they�d have to aim it a little to the west also. So they mounted it on the corner of my house at the front.
I find it irritating and makes me look like I�m showing off. Or, even if not that, I have a big stinkin� satellite dish on the side of my house.
Griping aside, it�s very cool. However, the replaytv service doesn�t have a choice of just picking America�s Top 100 pack w/ HBO Goodness as an option, so I had to go through and delete out about 500+ channels. Name a language and there are about 8 channels in that language that I had to delete. However, I do have lots of neat fun channels.
I have about 8 Spanish channels. And, since I�m not the king master of Spanish, I�ve got the Spanish 101 from Arizona University distance learning recording this morning, and also a Spanish 1 from some High School. I have about six educational channels like that.
I also watched the news at 10 off WB, channel 11, in NYC. Favorite line: �Trouble at a local park where both harsh words and bullets were thrown�� They threw bullets? That could sting. Also, the weather guy said, in reference to the nearly dead tropical storm off the Carolinas, �Forgettaboutit!� The newscasters were a guy who looked like he belonged in American Psycho and a petite Asian lady who was able to generate a very nasal voice while not having a big nose.
I had the replay catch the Los Angeles news at 10 last night too. But, ooh, best of all, I have Tech TV now. Cha cha cha. And speaking of gadgets, google the term �wave ceptor.� Yeah, buddy. Campmor has one for $29.
And since Dish is giving us free everything until January 8, 2004 (except the local and all our distance WBs and UPNs), we have about 12 HBOish channels. I canceled Netflix last night. And I called today and will be having our cable tv and cable modem turned off tomorrow when I drop off the cable modem. As I suspected, they say I can keep the $6 ethernet card they installed.
So, if you knew my knology email, which I only used for large attachments really, it�s gone as of tomorrow. I�m hopping on the free (and slow) Juno bandwagon. Since the file sharing posse is out in force, The Fear has driven me away from all that.
The next home entertainment issue that must be tackled is adding another hard drive to the replay unit. Ours is able to support 4 drives, which is just plain silly. I�ll add in a Maxtor 120 gig (the old replays like mine can�t use more than 137 gigs on any drive) which will make my capacity of 21 hrs low/14 hrs med/7 hrs high change into around 120 hrs low/60 hrs med/30 hrs high. Then I can record everything at high quality.
I recorded the Texans game Sunday at Medium quality and with the crowd making artifacting in the MPEG4, it made the ball invisible at times. Very irritating. Did they make the field goal? Who can tell since the ball disappeared once it was at the level of the crowd.
And I�m now a Texans fan. When I was a kid I was a Cowboys fan, which was only natural being born in Dallas (Richardson Hospital), but in the 80s they just sucked, but when the 1990s came around, they rocked again. Then they became a lot of degenerate, coke-snortin�, wife abusers who didn�t practice and started losing. I blame the owner for getting rid of Jimmy Johnson. Besides, as an adult, I like Houston better than Dallas.
Today I get to vote against at tax increase which, as a homeowner and auto owner, I�d get soaked. It would alledgedly raise 1.3 billion in tax money. That�s more than Gray Davis�s 700 million dollar tax increase, and California is recalling him. Heck, they�re California and we�re just Alabama, too. And, bigger joke, our governor is a republican. I thought they were supposed to give us tax cuts. Jerk.