utenzi

I finally pulled the plug on my pay channels. When I started up my satellite service I received a nice starter deal that gave me the pay channels for a mere pittance but the past 3 months I was paying full price. Ouch! That's something like $45 a month just for those channels and I was only watching a few shows and maybe 8 movies a month. That's nearly $5 a movie! I'd be better off with Netflix. Anyway, today I canceled those channels to bring my bill down to a more reasonable $50, which still strikes me as high, but HD is so pretty on my LCD television that I'm willing to break from my parsimonious tradition and pay what it takes to keep those lovely shows coming. Hell, even Hogan's Heroes is fun in high def. And I've been going nuts watching USA Network's syndicated House shows this past week---who needs pay channels when you have House in HD?

I'm thinking of changing my broadband provider. Right now I use Roadrunner, in fact the new availability of Roadrunner in my area 4 years ago is what made me decide to switch from satellite to cable. Now that I have satellite tv again (so as to better serve my lovely high-def tv set), I'm thinking of getting rid of Roadrunner. That's the speed of my current connection over there on the left. At least it is at 3am. It's probably slower during the day. If you want to check your speed try this site . Due to my living out in the boonies, there's not many options for broadband Internet service. That's why I went with Roadrunner 4 years ago. What I'm thinking of going with is the cellular connection from Verizon. Now in more populated areas there's a regular service from Verizon which has a nice price. Unfortunately it's not extended this far out, so what I'd have to use is a $60/month USB thingy that would connect my laptop to the Internet. I suspect...

A few years back I had satellite television for 2 years and almost never had a problem but this time apparently things are going to be different. I've only had my DirecTV service for a week plus and already there's issues. I have no local HD channels at all. See the picture below for details: I went to my troubleshooting guide and lo and behold, two of my transponders are out of commission. The pictures of the individual analysis are below as well as a picture of a correctly functioning transponder. Sure, some would say that I should be happy that 30 out of 32 transponders are working fine and dandy. Those folk are the glass is half full sort. To be quite frank, I hate their everloving guts. I don't want only some of my service working, I want it all to work. I'm paying for everything so it should all work, dammit. When I called the customer service line I was given the long runaround by the automated computer service. In one sense it's amazing how good those things...

In like a lion, out like a bloody sheep; or maybe January showers bring February flowers? How do those pithy sayings go? Well, if nothing else, having February start with a rainy day is actually a good thing here in drought stricken North Carolina. We need the water! For me the noteworthy aspect of February is that it brings to a close my Xmas induced shopping frenzy. I usually try to close down that bad impulse of mine before this, but for me Feb One always means no more spending profligately. *whew* I need the break and so does my beleaguered bank account. It's too bad though. There's this really pretty fireplace on sale at the Big O, Overstock dot com . Isn't that thing a beaut? Lee and I saw one of these up in Asheville back in October but it was around a $thousand. This one is only $199 but the consumables would get you. The fireplace here uses 1 - 3 gel cans at a time and those things are almost $4 each and supposedly last 3 hours. Assuming the real number is more ...

I was going to miss about a half day of work today. We're in the middle of finishing up a paper and submitting a grant proposal but I really, really needed satellite installed now that I have a high definition tv set. Unfortunately while the installer did make it to my place on time (scheduled for between 8am and noon) by arriving at 10:30am, I totally underestimated how long the install would take. Over to the left you can see my old satellite dish from 4 years ago on the roof, the new one is down there on the metal post being installed. Since the dish for HD is a lot bigger--apparently it uses 5 different satellites instead of the mere one that my old one used--and since it was a very windy day, the installer opted for installing on the ground. This added a lot of time since he needed to dig a post hole and then allow the concrete to harden enough so that the sight line of the dish wouldn't change after he set it. All in all, the installation took over 4 hours so it was 3pm ...