Archive for the 'Television' Category

We watched last night’s episode of Lost fairly late last night. It was… interesting.

Not the best episode by a long shot. But very interesting to learn that Libby was in the same psych ward as Hurley. I wonder why. Was she ever a shrink, or did she just learn to fake it from being around them for a long time?

I was hoping for more new revelations about the hatch and Dharma than we got.

Something interesting my wife, Sarah, and I noticed, though. It’s a lot harder to get satisfaction from individual episodes than it is a number of them at once. We watched the first season and the first 17 episodes of the second season over the course of about a week and a half, so we were seeing something like three episodes every night for that time, more or less. You got a lot of information very fast that way.

Now it feels like it’s coming at a trickle, and it’s strangely unsatisfying.

We’ll get used to it.

Cable guys left after a couple of hours. They’ve grounded our cable line now, but there’s still a resistance problem on the line, which is causing cable modem dropouts and serious problems with our digital channels.

That also means that our brand new Charter DVR can’t sync up to grab channel and program guides, so I’m steering the TV blind.

Anyway, the cable guys are coming back tomorrow to finish the job — they need to find and fix the resistance problem, then possibly install an amplifier. There’s so much cable draped around our house due to its layout and where all the boxes and whatnot are, that there may be some serious signal loss.

They seem pretty confident that they’ll be able to get everything fixed tomorrow. I’m not holding my breath; I’ve had pretty much nothing but trouble with Charter. For example, about two years ago, I called them to get a billing adjustment because we had been getting the wrong cable modem speed for the amount we were paying. Derek, the support goon of the day, told me that it was obvious I was using multiple computers on the line, that nobody has more than one computer in their home, and therefore I was running a business on the cable modem connection, and he started spewing quite a number of threats about cutting me off or charging me hundreds of dollars.

Man, that really got me angry. I explained that I was paying for a DSL line at another location to run my servers off of, paying $175/mo for them, because I didn’t want to violate the terms of use of my home connection, and that he could basically stuff it. In the end, I had to fax them a copy of my latest invoice for that service. Never heard from Derek again. But my friends and I still wonder, any time any of us have any kind of problem with customer service, if Derek’s on the job.

Also discovered today that ReplayTV doesn’t support the serial connection to our cable box — I’d hoped to sling the Replay to another TV with that instead of having to use the IR blaster, which only marginally works. So I guess if we’re going to use the old ReplayTV still, it’s back to infrared. OTOH, this makes me more inclined to sell off the ReplayTV box. Assuming of course that the Charter DVR works out.

Twiddled the old ReplayTV so I could record Lost tonight. My wife’s out for a while tonight, so we’ll watch it when she gets home. Can’t wait to see what happens next!

Just finished watching tonight’s episode of “24.” What the heck?

Has that loser wimp of a president been faking it all this time? Suddenly he’s the mastermind of this whole conspiracy? Is it just me or is that really, really hard to believe?

“Next week on 24: Jack jumps a shark on the way to kill more terrorists.” Woohoo!

I made good use of my last week of being out of work by watching the entire second season of Lost up to present. I’m finally all caught up with the mysteries of the island.

A month out of work was plenty for me, thank you very much. I start at Mozilla tomorrow, doing some much-needed technical writing. Be nice to be doing that again. Hopefully I can climb the learning curve fast and start being productive.