(no subject)

[verbminx]

Not doing much today. American national holidays are generally dull, and since we have no relatives locally, there are no real fetes to attend. I could have called L or B to see what's going on, but I'm in the mood for a nice evening at home. Thought about seeing AI (as I often go to the movies in the evening on the 4th of July), but honestly, it will be there. (Last year I went to see Shaft with L, which was a lot more fun than sitting in a traffic jam watching things explode.)

So I have elected to do dull around-the-house things; specifically, I have to prepare for the installation of digital cable later this week. A bit later this evening we will have a mock-barbeque with the George Foreman grill. O, lo, the excitement!

Comments

[acedia.livejournal.com]

Supposedly we are scheduled to receive extra basic channels at some point, but until then there have been no rewards to justify the drawbacks of digital cable what-so-ever. When you flip the channels, there's like a 2 second delay of nothing inbetween. What's worse, an analog signal can withstand some interference - it just goes grainy - but with digital, any noise on the line at all and the screen freezes. This happens all the time. I literally will miss at least one scene or joke during every episode of any given half-hour show. It's maddening.

I'm not trying to rain on anything, but if I could go back in time and un-get it, I would.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

We've had USSB/DirectTV for a number of years, in one room of the house, and nowadays it has most of the channels we watch. The problem is that we have had to keep regular cable mostly for WB shows, since that's the only way we can get them - DTV doesn't have a WB outlet, and now that Buffy is moving to UPN... which we also don't have on the satellite... well. Meanwhile, there are DTV channels we watch all the time (like BBC America) which are not available on analog cable but are available on digital.

We can't really afford to have both anymore... DTV is costing like $90/month and then something like $40 for basic cable... it will be a lot cheaper to combine the two. DTV has the problem of not withstanding atmospheric interference... particularly, we pretty much entirely lose service during any kind of storm. So digital cable it is. We will still have tvs that get some kind of basic cable in at least one part of the house.