Back After Winter Break

Wow! It seems that I haven't blogged in over a month now - where has the time gone? After our big trip to New York over the Thanksgiving Holidays I initially devoted a good deal of effort into post trip cleanup, organization, and blogging...and then I went dark.

I remember, with the Christmas holidays coming up, I was feeling that I should probably get some real work done so that I would keep getting paid. But, as usual, I couldn't resist becoming obsessed with some other non-work related sinkhole.

The sinkhole this time was trying to dump Comcast cable tv. It's always bothered me that we're paying for all this content that is constantly being pumped into our home and we rarely ever watch tv. The idea of all that wasted content makes me sick. I have a compulsion to right size - nothing more and nothing less than is necessary in all things.

I started researching and hatched out a plan to buy an over the air antenna and a computer with a tv recorder since I do like convenience of recording and watching later. I wasn't into doing anything hard like trying to attach the antenna to the roof, but I still thought I might be able to find an antenna that I could hook to the tv and pull in the over the air channels. Unfortunately, it seems that there all kinds of factors that go into getting good reception of the over the air channels and it just wasn't working out.

After many trips to Fry's and Best Buy, hours obsessing and researching, and many late nights of trial and error I finally decided that I wasn't going to dump Comcast. The HD DVR is just so nice and simple when you need it. We don't get our money's worth out of it, but it really is a nice indulgence.

However I did come away realizing that I really liked the idea of the computer hooked up to the tv. We have been using the Wii in our living room to stream Netflix movies and it works really well, but we usually watch tv in the family room so having a computer hooked up to our tv in our family room was something I have been wanting to do. The original idea was to justify the cost of the computer by dumping the monthly Comcast charge, but instead I ended up keeping Comcast AND the new computer.

At first, I had the computer hooked up wirelessly to our internet connection, but it just wasn't as fast as it needed to be so I ended up doing something else I had been wanting to do - run ethernet cable from the kitchen, where our internet connection is, to the family room. That involved several more trips to Fry's. It seemed for weeks that there were packages coming and going all the time, cables and things all over the place, and I was always staying up late. One morning Helen got up and I had never gone to bed. Needless to say she was not thrilled with my latest obsession. She allowed me my indulgence for a week or so before she started getting very agitated with the whole thing.

Eventually the plan came together and now we all enjoy the results - streaming movies from Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, etc. and being able to enjoy the photos, videos, and music stored on the computer in the kitchen from the comfort of our family room.