Finally — it’s October, almost 8 months since we started having serious issues with Mediacom at our new place. For the uninitiated — we had problems with our cable company, Mediacom, where we couldn’t watch our TV and use the internet at the same time. We were finally told the only way to obtain the quality of service we were expecting was to get a second line put in to the house. We ditched their TV service and switched to Dish Network with an awesome HD package and a DVR (sort of like a TiVo). When we did that, we tried to get Verizon DSL, but failed. So we went back to cable internet. And we only had it for about three days before it died. Completely. The wait time to get a tech out to fix it? 6 weeks. Completely unacceptable! Eventually, we were able to cancel our cable and get the DSL. I haven’t looked back for a moment with any regret.
Now we have silly “problems,” like trying to manage the space on our measly 250 gig DVR by deciding what shows get to stay, and which ones have to go. I’ve been recording Star Trek: Enterprise in HD, which comes on everyday, multiple times a day. But I’m watching them and deleting them to free up space. I did figure out I can just protect what I don’t want it to overwrite and it will automatically delete unprotected things to make room.
Our DSL is fast, and I haven’t had any problems with it (knock on wood) and zero days of downtime! They don’t seem to throttle our bandwidth when we push its limits with BitTorrent downloads, and there aren’t many ports blocked off. We opted for the wireless DSL router, which saved any sort of configuration hassle to get it up and running. We can even connect to it with our Nintendo DS handhelds and play people online in Mario Kart! The Wii also connects to it, which is cool because it lets us play YouTube videos on the big screen.
I went over to my friend Nathan’s last night. He had purchased an HD-DVD player and twelve HD-DVDs (I presume on credit; that’s a heck of a lot to shell out at once). We watched “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” and “Scorpion King” on his roommate’s 61″ plasma tv with some sort of awesome surround sound system. I say I’m impressed, because I am, but probably less so than I would be if I didn’t own my own big screen with HD satellite programming.
All in all, it’s nice to have all that, even if it is just “stuff.”