Decisions, decisions
Decisions, decisions
I have to make a decision soon about my television service.
Currently, I have cable television from Time Warner Cable. I used to be with Adelphia before they went into bankruptcy and before that it was Century Cable.
The Time Warner service sucks.
In the nearly twenty years of cable service, I only had two service calls from Century and Adelphia. One was when I signed up for the cable service and they brought the decoder box out and installed. The second call was when I converted from an analogue cable signal to a digital cable signal. I think I did the conversion. Since Time Warner took over service, I had made five or six calls for service and have three service appointments to fix problems.
My cable service crapped out last night after I through up my blog posting for the day.
All I got get was visual static; I had ghost images, broken movement, unsynchronized sound when I could get any sound, black and green bars across my screen periodically, and completely or partially black screens. This was not what I had been expecting when the technician left after replacing my cable box.
I spent thirty five minutes on the phone on hold listening to really cheesy promises of how much Time Warner cares about me as a customer. I finally got a live body. She was profoundly apologetic.
Unfortunately, apologies do not fix a cable television problem.
She said the next available appointment was next Tuesday.
I was less than thrilled at the idea of going almost a complete week without television service. I actually amazed myself at how well controlled I was when she told me no service for a week.
I asked what sort of compensation she was going to give me.
She said that she would request a senior technician to come out since the first technician was apparently unable to solve the problem. She also said I would receive one month’s service fee credit on my next bill.
I went to bed early last night and slept well.
This morning when I woke up, I turned the television on and got the Message of Death screen on the television. The Message of Death screen is the notice that a channel will be available in a few moments.
It reminded of old Blue Screen of Death in the Microsoft DOS Operating System. You have to have been around personal computers for a long time to remember that. The closest thing to the Blue Screen today is a 404 Error Message.
Anyway, after thirty five minutes of MoD, I figured that I wasn’t going to doing any viewing today; only six more days until the service technician would be out to fix the problem.
Around lunch time, I turned the television on just to see what would happen.
I got a perfect picture. Everything was coming as it should. No ghosts. No broken images. No black and green bars or black screens. No frozen motion. No unsynchronized sound. It was great; unfortunately for me, there are no programs on television at that time of day that I have any interest in seeing.
I guess the real test will be tonight after I have my dinner at El Gringo. I wonder what will happen when I turn on the television.
Now, I need to decide what to do. Do I stay with Time Warner Cable or do I go with Direct TV and rely on a satellite for my television service?
I know that I can not even think about switching my phone service and my Internet service over to Time Warner. Their reliability is so doubtful that such a decision would clearly be foolhardy on my part.
The problem that I would have with Direct TV is that my unit faces west and is on the ground floor of the building. The satellite would require a cable run down the outside of the building. I know the homeowners association has rules about running cables and such on the building but I know there are others with the small dishes on the roof so it ought to be able to work.
I think the dish would be less expensive in the long run since I would be buying the decoder box. I could have the place wired for two rooms without a lot of cables running all over the house but that would seem like an unnecessary extravagance since I can only be in one place at a time.
The key factor would be if the disk service gave me all of the channels I wanted and the ones I watch regularly or not. No sense buying a service that doesn’t have what you want.
Decisions, decisions, someone has to make a decision soon.
Woman of the Moment
I learned some more about the Woman of the Moment from doing a simple Google search. I was surprised that there were only 4,400 web sites that came up under her name; that seemed on the low side to me.
Oksana Mazurovsky was born in the Ukraine 23 years ago, proving beyond a doubt that she is not Irish. She also reported in a personal biography on one web site, the only one I visited, that she served in the Israeli Army and knows how to handle an “M-16 gun.” She now lives in Seattle. I hope she likes rain.
Any Marine will tell you there is a big difference between a gun and a rifle.
But why quibble over semantics? Most civilians wouldn’t understand why there is such a distinction.
Be well and stay happy.
I have to make a decision soon about my television service.
Currently, I have cable television from Time Warner Cable. I used to be with Adelphia before they went into bankruptcy and before that it was Century Cable.
The Time Warner service sucks.
In the nearly twenty years of cable service, I only had two service calls from Century and Adelphia. One was when I signed up for the cable service and they brought the decoder box out and installed. The second call was when I converted from an analogue cable signal to a digital cable signal. I think I did the conversion. Since Time Warner took over service, I had made five or six calls for service and have three service appointments to fix problems.
My cable service crapped out last night after I through up my blog posting for the day.
All I got get was visual static; I had ghost images, broken movement, unsynchronized sound when I could get any sound, black and green bars across my screen periodically, and completely or partially black screens. This was not what I had been expecting when the technician left after replacing my cable box.
I spent thirty five minutes on the phone on hold listening to really cheesy promises of how much Time Warner cares about me as a customer. I finally got a live body. She was profoundly apologetic.
Unfortunately, apologies do not fix a cable television problem.
She said the next available appointment was next Tuesday.
I was less than thrilled at the idea of going almost a complete week without television service. I actually amazed myself at how well controlled I was when she told me no service for a week.
I asked what sort of compensation she was going to give me.
She said that she would request a senior technician to come out since the first technician was apparently unable to solve the problem. She also said I would receive one month’s service fee credit on my next bill.
I went to bed early last night and slept well.
This morning when I woke up, I turned the television on and got the Message of Death screen on the television. The Message of Death screen is the notice that a channel will be available in a few moments.
It reminded of old Blue Screen of Death in the Microsoft DOS Operating System. You have to have been around personal computers for a long time to remember that. The closest thing to the Blue Screen today is a 404 Error Message.
Anyway, after thirty five minutes of MoD, I figured that I wasn’t going to doing any viewing today; only six more days until the service technician would be out to fix the problem.
Around lunch time, I turned the television on just to see what would happen.
I got a perfect picture. Everything was coming as it should. No ghosts. No broken images. No black and green bars or black screens. No frozen motion. No unsynchronized sound. It was great; unfortunately for me, there are no programs on television at that time of day that I have any interest in seeing.
I guess the real test will be tonight after I have my dinner at El Gringo. I wonder what will happen when I turn on the television.
Now, I need to decide what to do. Do I stay with Time Warner Cable or do I go with Direct TV and rely on a satellite for my television service?
I know that I can not even think about switching my phone service and my Internet service over to Time Warner. Their reliability is so doubtful that such a decision would clearly be foolhardy on my part.
The problem that I would have with Direct TV is that my unit faces west and is on the ground floor of the building. The satellite would require a cable run down the outside of the building. I know the homeowners association has rules about running cables and such on the building but I know there are others with the small dishes on the roof so it ought to be able to work.
I think the dish would be less expensive in the long run since I would be buying the decoder box. I could have the place wired for two rooms without a lot of cables running all over the house but that would seem like an unnecessary extravagance since I can only be in one place at a time.
The key factor would be if the disk service gave me all of the channels I wanted and the ones I watch regularly or not. No sense buying a service that doesn’t have what you want.
Decisions, decisions, someone has to make a decision soon.
Woman of the Moment
I learned some more about the Woman of the Moment from doing a simple Google search. I was surprised that there were only 4,400 web sites that came up under her name; that seemed on the low side to me.
Oksana Mazurovsky was born in the Ukraine 23 years ago, proving beyond a doubt that she is not Irish. She also reported in a personal biography on one web site, the only one I visited, that she served in the Israeli Army and knows how to handle an “M-16 gun.” She now lives in Seattle. I hope she likes rain.
Any Marine will tell you there is a big difference between a gun and a rifle.
But why quibble over semantics? Most civilians wouldn’t understand why there is such a distinction.
Be well and stay happy.
posted by Chuck Reinhardt at 3:54 PM
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