will our leaders tell us why
yep, time warner is exactly the same company i'm used to dealing with. so far i've had to drop $100 deposit on a directv HD receiver, only to find out i can't get HD from them because of visibility to the dish. so i took back the receiver and prepared to jump ship to cable.
except the story i'm being told tonight by them is different from the story i was told this afternoon. huh? apparently standard cable + HD is $63/month, and i only get local HD channels + three additional (TNT, TBS and ESPN). i can get five more for an additional $7 a month and HBO is another $12. i realize many people survive without cable; part of that mentality is what makes me hesitant to throw down so much a month for it. $63 is a little outside my reasonable zone.
i am certainly calling afternoon time warner dude back tomorrow to get the scoop on their mysterious fluctuating prices. geez how i am pining for cable ala carte.
those chevy malibu "a car you can't ignore" commercials are even more ironic because the chick is running into an olds cutlass, an older rebadging of the malibu. it shouldn't make me as angry as it does every time i see it.
imap on gmail, finally. of course, if you cared about that, you already knew about it.
cable ala carte = iTunes.
We have $10 cable with just local channels. You can get the HD versions of all these for free using an HD tuner, right? Anything else we'd want to watch (BSG, etc.) we buy from iTunes. Regular cable + Tivo = a resonable amount of TV a day and iTunes fills in the gaps.
Before you invest a ton of time calling folks, consider why even bother to spend more of your hard earned money so you can waste more of your life away in front of a TV?
i'm sort of the same way - i don't really 'browse' for stuff to watch, it's usually pretty targeted. but there's a healthy amount of stuff i enjoy that's on cable, and what i would spend on a monthly certainly amounts to less $$ per show than i would get from itunes.
that was hard to read. translation: it would cost me more to buy episodes of series' i would get on cable from itunes per month than a monthly cable bill. (not even factoring in the cost of the disk space i would need to store all of the stuff i grab from itunes...)
now i could watch everything free off a site like tvlinks but the resolution makes my brain hurt - a 2" window on my laptop is one thing, it's unwatchable on a larger screen. i could torrent everything and build a small form-factor PC for cheap, plug it into the DVI on the tv and watch everything that way... but my ISP would likely shut me down if i started using torrent that much.
re: wasting my life away... i'm going to entertain myself one way or another. if it's not tv, it's going to be some other form of media: movies, music, books, video games. some form of media will end up getting my $$ - in the end, i don't find one medium any more or less valuable than another.
Ehh, I thought the same thing about media consumption until recently. Why don't you use this little hickup in service to your advantage to try it out? Try going without cable for a month. I think you'd be shocked at how much of it was just noise. We've been pairing out TV consumption down lately. We're down to around an hour a day. So much of it was just pointless. For instance, I LOVE the Food Network, but I can only think of three recipes I've actually tried!
Artie, then you're just not dedicated. You disappoint me.