shock & awe
The snow is floating down in such big clumps that the shadows it makes looks like bugs scurrying across the sidewalk. It doesn't look like any of it is sticking. the weather report says 5 inches. maybe class will be cancelled tomorrow morning. wouldn't that be swell?
I came home from work today at 2 to meet up with Comcast. I ordered the new comcast "dual dvr". I've also been having weird issues with my cable since I moved in, so I scheduled a service call, too. They informed me on the phone this would be two separate comcast visits. so I scheduled them both for the same time.
I got home and dan was in his room. I mentioned to him that comcast was coming after I noticed comcast pull up outside. I think he's been stressing out over papers. he's been acting weird lately. I noticed him come out of his room to use the bathroom in a towel and a tshirt. meaning he was just hanging out in his room without pants on. then again, don't we all do that?
my cellphone rang and it was comcast telling me the service man was there and I wasn't answering the door. I told the lady, he's at the wrong house. I went out on the porch, and of course, he was at the wrong house. i went out on the porch and met up with the guy. he asked was the dvr installer. he wanted to see my tv to make sure it was all good. he came upstairs and looked at the FRONT of my tv and said "no, this isn't going to work." I questioned him a bit and he had no answers but he offered to show me the box.
We went out to the truck and he shows me the box. it has one coax in, and component, svideo, and composite outputs for audio and video and spidf outputs and just a ton of connections. I told him that this would work fine on my tv. he guaranteed that it wouldn't. I guess he thought you HAD to use the component output or it wouldn't work. I dunno. comcast techs seem to be so misinformed. same goes for the people who answer the phone. I proceeded to go into descriptive detail on what each of these plugs do, basically just flooding him with information until he let me try it on my tv. we took it up to my room, and after I hooked it up, he started making phone calls to get it all turned on. I think it's kinda silly that I paid this dude 24.95 for install when I'm the one who did all the work. Maybe I should ask comcast about that. he started to tell me how someone was using the usb port on his dvr but he didn't finish his thought, I should have pressured him. I'm curious what I might use the usb or firewire ports for.
he left and 10 minutes or so later some other comcast dudes showed up. I explained that the dvr guy had just been there and I showed them the signal level issues I was having in my basement on the projector and showed them the small amount of fuzzyness that became apparent after I hooked up the dvr. they bitched that the other guy should have done all of these things. I told them that comcast had told me that it would require THEM to fix this other stuff. anyhow, they went outside and went to work on my problem. after at least 3 service calls these guys finally knew what to do. I went out back to watch them and they were climbing the pole to change my wiring, redoing all of the janky wiring on the side of my house and checking levels and making phone calls to higher-ups to get some other levels looked at and tons of stuff. these guys fixed my cable and made calls to fix the cable for the whole neighborhood.
This seems to be how it is with comcast. you get 5 service calls where the techs seem to know jack shit. they stumble to answer your simplest questions, they don't seem to have any knowledge about what you think should be common problems. but then you get that one guy, or usually it's two guys, and they're fucking superhuman. they can just fix everything like they're flipping a switch. I wonder if it's because they're working together they strive to do better. kinda like if I have someone around I don't feel like sitting around all day watching tv, because I see what I'm doing through their eyes and feel like doing something better. right, I wasn't like that today. well, as they were leaving I told them thanks and I was glad to finally get someone who knew how to fix something. they gave me their managers number and encouraged me to call him and tell him that. I may just do that.
after they left I started playing with my dvr. I've been playing with it and watching tv and basically not leaving my room since then. being able to record shows like this and pause tv and watch shows on my own schedule will definately change how I watch tv. even without some of the tivo features, this alone is worth the $10 a month. it's like a shift in how I use my tv. then again, today, instead of making me want to watch LESS tv, it was making me want to watch MORE. hopefully this isn't a trend. I think maybe I should cancel netflix. there are so many movies on comcast in demand, and I really don't NEED to see those 400 movies in my netflix queue. plus, i can always borrow movies from BitTorrent or BenArwin. my two favorite movie sharing protocols.
I have a huge bag of mini kit kat, they have valentines messages on them. they're so rectangular. I bet I could stack them into simple structures. I should try that. maybe at work on my desk where I have more space to construct.
oh, today I also wrote a script to intercept my notification e-mails from allofmp3.com and automatically download the mp3s. I don't know how much I'll use allofmp3.com after I burn through the $15 I sent them. but I like the idea, so maybe I should send them the $5 a month I normally send slsk. I could actually end up with more music per month. then again, slsk seems to have a wider selection of rarer stuff.
