New TV – (June 2007)
Cable Box Woes – (July 2007)
TV Service Woes – (September 2008)
TV Service Woes Remedied – (September 2008)
Neither Side Gave In – (October 2008)
Temporarily Disconnected – (January 2009)
I Want My U-Verse, Fuck You Time Warner – (March 2010)
Fuck You U-Verse…no, I still love you – (March 2010)

It all makes for a fun little story if you read them all.

So what does this have to do with anything?

Today I wake up and pop open my e-mail like any other day and there it is…an e-mail from AT&T letting me know that U-Verse is now available at my address. All those months of putting my address into the availability checker and asking them to notify me when available finally paid off. I think I came a little.

Hopefully, I’m not counting my chickens before they’re hatched because God knows with my luck in this area that something is bound to go wrong. But tonight, I’m putting together a package and scheduling an install date.

Giggity!

So when I happened to see he was coming back around this past spring, I snagged some tickets for the whole family. This time we saw him at the Fraze Pavillion. It was out first time there (and we’ve lived here 4 years now) and we were impressed with how nice it was. Bonus that it’s just a few miles down the road. Kinda crazy that we have the Nutter Center (seats about 12,000) and the Fraze Pavillion (seats a little over 4000) both less than 10 miles away. Pretty much any act coming through Dayton stops at one of those two places. I need to make more of an effort to get out and see some live entertainment.

At any rate, Weird Al was as enjoyable as you’d expect. Good stuff. We had seats in the 4th row, but they were a little too far to the side of the stage for my liking. I think I’d have rather sat a few rows back, but more centered. It was a perfect summer evening for an outdoor venue though and that alone made for a nice night.

I just realized while posting this that I didn’t take a single photo. Sorry. You’ll just have to imagine it.

I’m also a Netflix subscriber. I like rating what I watch. I’m often amazed at how well Netflix predicts what I’ll rate a movie.

I find the 5 star rating on Netflix a hair confining, but make the best of it:

1 star would be a movie that sucks. Something I can’t sit through or did manage to and want to stab myself for soing so.

Inversely, 5 stars would be a movie I could (and do) sit through or watch everytime I catch it or would actually make an effort to view again. Not always about quality, but often about enjoyability for me.

3 stars is where most movies will fall. This is a movie I sat through and didn’t have any strong feelings either way. It was a movie. It entertained me for 2 hours. I watched it. I’m not pissed that I did, but I could have lived without ever seeing it. The average movie. Most movies.

Obviously then, 2 stars and 4 stars are the degrees that fill the space between 1 & 3 stars and 3 & 5 stars respectively.

2 stars would be an average movie that I didn’t care for or had something stupid or sucky about it.
4 stars would be an average movie that I was fond of or had something particularly good or notable about it.

I set Facebook up to import my movie ratings when I rate them on Netflix. I sort of took to giving a quick explanation of my rating in the comments of the ratings post on Facebook.

Kinda fun. It challenges me to think a little about the movie I watched – no matter how deep and meaningful or silly and superficial.

I just realized that I don’t share those little ratings/reviews on my blog and I probably should. So from now on I will.

(be sure to click and check it out)

Caught this on TV earlier by accident. It may be one of the funniest things ever in the history of everything. My daughter and I cracked each other up all night long with it and I’m laughing again just posting it here.

“I’m not gonna lie. I was playing my tuba and this cobra man started dancing around.” – holy fucking hilarious.

I just wish I could find a decent quality version of it. Who the hell records their TV with a camcorder anyway?

(link to video for blog haters who read my posts on Facebook)

Not much to say. It’s cool. It might get a little use around here. Mostly because we don’t have any other devices floating around to stream from Netflix (or anywhere else for that matter). Quality is equivalent to standard definition TV.

Once we get around to paying down much of the debt we ran up in the past year or so, I’d like to really set the house up with some new entertainment equipment. I’d love to get the whole house networked and streaming our entertainment options. We’re still using the receiver/speakers on the big TV that we bought in 1996.

Whatever. The Netflix streaming on Wii is neat. I’m sure there are much better options, but if you don’t have anything else around it’s nice to play with.

I’ve grown to enjoy Red Eye over the past few months. Very entertaining more often then not and I liked this little conversation on Health Care reform.

(link)

And if you disagree, you’re probably a racist homophobe who wears fur to whale eating parties.

We really dug AT&T’s U-Verse and were a little miffed that it wasn’t available when we bought the house. We’ve been reluctantly paying Time Warner for a little over a year now and we went with (for the first time in forever) a lower package. We’re normally all-in when it comes to TV packages, but Time Warner just sucks so bad and is so out of touch with what customers want, need and expect that it’s not even funny. To be honest, I miss some of the channels we haven’t had for the past 15 months, but refuse to give TW any more than I have to. We don’t even have cable boxes on the TV’s upstairs because I don’t want to give them the monthly fee. It costs almost $18 just to have a DVR on the big TV. (Yes, $18 a month – broken down as 9.95 for DVR service, $7.64 for a Digital Converter and $0.32 for the remote… Fuckers!)

Anyway, over the past 15 months, I’d occasionally check the AT&T site and try the availability tool. It always told me service wasn’t available at our address. One time at the mall we stopped in and talked to them a little about how we had service and loved it then moved less than a mile away and now can’t get it. We were told that crews were always in the area expanding coverage. We also knew this was true because those crews usually spent months at a time at my wife’s hotel and she even hit them up trying to get them over our way or find out more info.

Then two or three weeks ago, I swung by the availability check tool and punched in our address knowing what the result would be. And I was right. But something clicked this time and I thought, “Why don’t I start punching in addresses in my general vicinity and see exactly where the lines are.

(In all fairness, I had done this before, but not to great extent. Just some random address on each street until I found availability. Nothing detailed or methodical. And I knew we were close, but not covered.)

So this time I start with the guy across the street and get a “no” on service. So I got around the circle of the cul-de-sac and get three more “no” answers for the two house on the end and the house to our right. So then I go to the house across the street at the end (the 6th house of 6 on our little cul-de-sac) and get a “yes” on service. WTF!?

So obviously being on a cul-de-sac, our street hits the perpendicular street and forms a “T” shape. Our street runs east/west and hits the “T” on the east side (the west is the ‘circle’ end of the cul-de-sac) and the perpendicular road runs north/south. Of the six houses on the cul-de-sac (three on the north side and three on the south side) only the easternmost house on the north side shows availability.

I’m trying to paint a picture here.

So I decide to go south down the perpendicular street and find no one able to get sevice on either side of the street. But if I make a right and head west, so that I’m now checking houses who share the woods behind our house (people who we share property lines with in some cases) I’m seeing that they all show it available and two of them actually currently have AT&T service!

So I come back to the “T” and go north on the perpendicular road and find that everyone that direction has service available and a few even use it already. I complete the circle by checking the houses behind the people to our left on the end of the cul-de-se (the next perpendicular street to the west) and find complete availability with some customers sprinkled in.

Ahhh, let me just draw a picture:

The yellow glowing house is us. People in red can’t get service and people in green can. That’s how broken and fucked up it is. My guess was seem to be right in between two VRADs. I don’t know a whole lot about how it works, but I know it’s distance based and that it’s not unusual for odd patterns like this to appear based on the way established wires/cables are running.

I figured I’d either need to go back into the AT&T store or give the 800 number a call and explain the situation and see if they could send someone out to see things firsthand and let me know if there was a way to make this happen or not. All I know is it was frustrating looking out the front window and seeing a house that got service and then looking out the back and seeing another bunch of houses with service available.

Then, no shit, two days later, my wife gets a call from a friend of ours who just moved (into a really nice fucking house/neighborhood). She wanted to let us know they were getting U-verse and wanted to pass along some info knowing we had been wanting it for a while. Basically they were in almost the same situation. Houses all around able to get service, but their address showing not available. The difference is that AT&T just got over to their neighborhood and had salesmen going door-to-door to drum up awareness, interest and sales. So they talked to the dude and explained and he confirmed the weirdness and said that this happens a lot and most times, AT&T just has to come in and “get it working”. I assume this means running a few new cables to shorten the distances, but I have no idea, really.

At any rate, she gives my wife this guy’s name and number.

So on Monday she calls and he shows up at the hotel to talk to her. He gets the info (our address and the addresses around us) and tells her the same thing. Basically, let me get hold of some people and see if we can get this working for you, it shouldn’t be a problem. He’d be in touch.

We heard from him today and he made an appointment to stop by on Saturday. Not sure what for, but it’s a positive sign.

So here’s to me getting my hopes up and maybe, finally, after 15 long months, getting rid of Time Warner and their bullshit once and for all.

If this doesn’t pan out, I might have to consider DIRECTV. I’m not totally against it, but I’d rather not. And I’d still need to use TW for my net connection. So that’s less than optimal too.

Keep your fingers crossed for me.

(link)

Bonus funny (with Kenan, of course):

(link)

What Up With That

(and yes, my blog has been reduced to posting SNL clips featuring Kenan Thompson – fuck you for noticing)

(link)

And for some reason this cracked me up too:

(link)

I know I’m WAY late to the party, but I recently discovered Dr. Steel and I absolutely love everything about the character – the music, the videos, the concept, the gimmick. Wonderful, wonderful stuff.

(Back and Forth)