Tag Archives: Cable TV

Pulling the plug and loving it

Posted on by
1

Recently we decided to cancel our cable TV service. We only had the most basic service anyway. But when I called our service provider, Comcast, to request that the service be discontinued, you’d think we were from outer space, the way the service operator reacted. She kept asking me pointed questions about WHY? Why would anyone ever want to do that? She said she’d never heard of such thing (which I sincerely doubt). Whatever. Michele and I are actually loving this decision. Not only does it save us money, it helps us to raise our kids in an environment where we don’t have to worry about bad content continually popping up during a show we might be watching. Actually I think commercials are the worst part about today’s TV experience. The things they show especially in the evenings are pretty outrageous. And then even during kid shows, the commercials peddling this toy or that gadget for kids are just as horrendous, if for a different reason. I can’t stand the clamoring for “Daddy, I want that,” or “Daddy, PLEASE can we get that toy?!” We’ve had no TV for about three weeks now and so far our family life has managed to not fall apart one iota. Keegan is about the only one who complains about the absence of TV because he got used to watching the daily news in the morning before going to school.

Some new feature goodies

Posted on by
Reply

Lots of nice improvements have been made recently in web-related software and services that I regularly use. Here is a list of the ones I can think of that are worth mentioning:

  • coComment: This service just keeps getting better. Now it allows me to track conversations via webpages or comments on individual postings. Cool! Even better is the fact that I can be notified when someone has commented on a webpage or posting or comment by seeing the coComment icon in my webbrowser change color. When there has been some activity on something that I have tracked in coComment, the blue coComment icon in my web browser’s status bar adds a red-bordered envelope. Another cool feature is that if I navigate to a webpage that anyone else is tracking via coComment, the coComment icon turns orange to let me know that others are discussing it. All in all, very nice!
  • Meebo: I have been using Meebo for a little over a month now and have found it to work quite well for the IM accounts I use, including Google Talk, AOL, and Yahoo! Messenger. A few days ago they really hit the ball out of the ballpark, in my opinion, when they announced a new service called Meebome. Basically this allows me to embed a live chat service in any webpage I want. I quickly put one here in my blog and I might add it to a few other places. With this service in place, I can be logged into Meebo and automatically see if/when someone visits FML! Noone has initiated a chat with me yet but it is really interesting to see in real time the number of people who visit the site.
  • Bloglines: Like coComment, this service, too, just keeps improving. The latest improvement allows users to use the letter ‘o’ to open up the original blog post when viewing it in Bloglines. The lack of this feature (which has been present in Google Reader from day one) has been the only major gripe I’ve had with the service ’til now.
  • Google Maps: I have always liked this service and again, it just keeps getting better! The latest improvements include the ability for me to use the service from my cell phone. Very, very nice. I’ve tried it out and it works very well. The only problem is that as one would expect, it takes up a lot of bytes and I will have to watch this carefully because of service limitations in terms of the size of data transfers with my cell phone service. Another improvement in the service is that I can now store favorite locations.
  • Comcast Digital Voice: This VOIP service from our cable TV and Internet provider is something we’ve thought about in the past but didn’t try because we didn’t think we needed a dedicated home telephone. We thought we could just rely on our cell phone service instead. After trying this for a few weeks, though, we concluded that it would be good to have a regular telephone service. We chose Comcast Digital Voice because it seemed to meet our needs quite well and we get a discount because we are already have other Comcast services. We’ve only had it in place for a few days but it seems to work great!

Blogged with Flock

Back online again

Posted on by
Reply

It is great to have high speed Internet again after being without it for over a week. We are settling in nicely here in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. We all really like this location and we are enjoying the many conveniences such as tons of places to shop for groceries and other things. As an example of the benefits to living close to everything, Monday night, after a long wait, Comcast service people came to install cable TV and Internet access. I had bought a cable modem when we had cable Internet installed in our house in Indiana 3 1/2 years ago, and I assumed I could use that same modem here. Unfortunately, Comcast doesn’t support it and told me I had to buy a new one. I zipped down the road to Best Buy and found a nice Motorola cable modem for $75 (by the way, that’s less than half the cost of the modem I purchased from the cable company in Indiana when we moved there). The entire trip took only 15 minutes.

Another nicety? There is a Starbucks less than a block away. (Funny though, I have yet to go there.) I badly need a haircut, but the nice thing is that there are two barber shops within a stone’s throw of our house.