Yep. Saving money. buh-bye, xfinity
Jane's blog has details—we're bailing from cable tv and phone…
by CJ | Mar 30, 2016 | Journal | 57 comments
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It seems that you’re not sports fans. Sadly cable is still necessary for those of us who are. Streaming hasn’t quite gotten there.
You can get sports: espn is on Amazon Fire; you can also get the specialty networks like MLB.com etc…which we probably will get if the Mariners start to take fire. We’ll also get Ice Network.
Here in Oakland-I’m not an A’s fan, I’m a Giants fan-you cannot watch the Giants on streaming. Also auto racing, most of which cannot be watched streaming. By the time I assembled enough streaming to watch the sports I like I’ll be paying as much as cable.
Our phone is bundled with our cable and Internet, and is a good price, so we can’t get rid of anything without shooting ourselves in the foot.
Ours is all bundled too, and costing us 230 a month.
Dang! All I get is FIOS+fone on fiber from Frontier, typically around $66/mo. That, amounting to an extra $30/mo for FIOS, not the $19.99 they sold it as, was an extra expense I had to really think hard about. OTA TV is fine. When PBS goes on Pledge break with all their atypical shows, then I get time to work on building my Linux systems. 😉
Never had cable. Don’t think I’m missing a thing. Anything I really want to watch I can find online, but there’s just so very little I care to watch it’s not worth it. I’d rather read, or write 😀
Back in the 1980s, Sprint boasted that they were the nation’s first fully fiber-optic telephone service. Eventually, Sprint became Embarq, and then CenturyLink. The name changed, but the infrastructure that was in place when they took over the smaller telcos didn’t get upgraded. As a result, I’m on copper for DSL, and there’s no projection when, if ever, we’ll go to fiber-optic.
Because I HAVE to have a landline phone that’s reliable, I am forced to go with the public utility telephone service. The problem with the other telephone services is that if power goes out, they don’t have backup systems in place. The Public Utility Commission of Ohio requires that public utilities have backup systems operational. So, the telephone company is required to have battery backup in the central office, the gas company is required to have backup power in order to keep the natural gas pressure up in the lines, the water department is required to have backup power…well, you get the picture. Cable TV companies are not considered public utilities, and as such, are not bound by the same regulations as the telephone company. For example, many municipalities require telephone wires to be buried 18 inches underground. Cable lines are not subject to that requirement. If the power goes out at my house, my telephone is useless, even with a generator, unless the cable company’s switching systems (computers) are all up and running, too. This presents a difficult problem for people who rely heavily on their telephones for such things as weather spotting (my avocation), or have medical issues that require a reliable telephone system, or emergency services such as 911 centers.
In June 2012, we had a huge line of derechos come through our region, causing damage as far as Richmond, VA – I live about 40 miles north of Dayton, OH – and knocking out power to many homes in our city. My parents were without power for 3 days, and because they were also on a bundled service from the cable company, Time-Warner, their telephone was also out and they couldn’t call for help. My mother was diabetic and couldn’t walk very easily. If she had fallen, or was in diabetic shock, there wasn’t any way my father could have called for help. For some people, the obvious solution is to have a cell phone as a backup, but my parents didn’t grow up in the age of cell phones and they have trouble with them. Consider you’re 80+ years old, the keypad on the phone is small, and your hands aren’t as agile as they were when you were 40 or even 60, nor are your eyes as good, and you don’t have sufficient light in the house to be able to see the keys, much less press the right ones.
As much as I’m disappointed in DSL service’s lack of improvements in data speeds, it’s still the best solution for me, working as a volunteer in emergency management.
I got FIOS a couple years ago. My end has to plug into AC. If that goes out it has its own battery backup.
For your parents, look at the Jitterbug cell phone service. They are primarily marketed to seniors, and a big selling point is the large type, well lit keypad.
Thanks, I’d considered that, but my brother got Dad a phone and added it to his family plan (5 phones). We still have to show Dad how to use it, because he doesn’t use it that much, and forgets how to clear the “Missed Calls”, or how to get back to the main screen. It’s okay, I don’t laugh…after all, he taught me how to tell time on an analog clock back in 1957…….
We got rid of cable about 2 years ago and haven’t missed it. With a digital antenna there are a lot of channels that you may have access to. Some channels mainly show old TV shows, but some of them are better than what’s shown today. For the recent stuff Netflix keeps us up to date. We kept the telephone and bundled it with the internet, but we switched to AT&T U-verse. Gotta have a landline in Houston in case of a hurricane. During Ike everything was out for a week or more except the home telephone! It is amazing how much you can save without that cable bill, and how much more time it gives you to read, write, etc…..
Yep. I recall trying to get into the big alarm clock to find out what made the hands go round… 😉
Actually bundled our cellular with the internet, so we got a discount. The landline is still “old school”.
Our cable and high speed internet bundle is only $100 a month since we signed a 2 year contract while Google Fiber was invading the neighborhood, but our provider is only located in Kansas and California. They have the best customer service too — you speak to local people, and the service office is only 10 miles away. We’ll need to consider other options at retirement when we’re RVing, and hope Direct TV isn’t the only choice.
best I can hope for is 50Mb/sec, but the cost is prohibitive for me, that’s just for internet service. I don’t want my stuff bundled, at least, not the landline telephone…..
I’ve got 15/5 on my FIOS and that’s fine for me–but then I used dialup until a few years ago. Now I don’t have to worry about downloading 30-70MB files, like the source code for Firefox or Libre Office. It has added $30 to my phone bill. They advertized $19.99, but then there are extras, taxes, etc. I’ve got limits. Still have the dialup rig setup.
You’ve got ARRL requirements?
Good on you, especially given that xfinity is a bunch of malarkey! We have ’em for internet (no other providers) but we ditched the cable side of it more than a year ago and haven’t missed it a bit.
If (crossing our fingers) Google Fiber or C-Spire’s service becomes available here, we’ll hop on that boat like refugees fleeing Italy in the war…
Between Amazon Prime, Netflix, Crunchyroll and Funi, we’ve got our viewing bases covered. Most of the shows we watch are on those sites, and I wait a week to get caught up on my Agents of Shield fix online. When we moved we purposefully did not go with Comcrap as our internet provider of choice and are much happier with Frontier. It’s still odd not watching the news as I get ready for work in the morning, and to be honest, was the only time I ever used the cable side of the service at my old place. I’m fairly certain I spend more time in GW2 than I do watching television nowadays.
My recent fav was Agent Carter, but I guess that’s over with. I find it somewhat refreshing not getting the news…too depressing. I get just enough from my blurbs on Google or Yahoo. I don’t need the gory details, just the what, where and when.
If you really want TV news, many local stations stream it live, so you can watch it on your computer. But I’m not sure it’s a good idea. “What bleeds, leads” (“lede” is a 1970s neologism), and it seems TV news is bloodier, or maybe just more affecting, than web news. A friend watches TV news, and he seems on the paranoid side to me.
For a change, a lot of international sites offer streaming news, which is a nice perspective.
Most broadcast channels offer episodes online, which provides more TV than I probably should watch.
I get most of my news from the interwebs including foreign sites. I won’t watch clips unless they promise to be really neat or some new science thing. I detest talking heads and my tolerance for commercials is such that I have to look out the window and ignore them or I may begin to detest a product I actually like.
I agree. Reading is ever so much faster than listening to talking heads. For video plus text stories, as on CNN.com, typically the video has less information than the text.
AdBlock or Ghostery will stomp most commercials, though sometimes you have to turn Ghostery off for a few seconds at the start when they do their ad-blocker check. (I don’t use AdBlock myself, but I hear it recommended.) These also make Internet sites more friendly and less blinky.
Another good source for less sensationalized news is NPR. Aside from a short summary every (half-?) hour, they don’t repeat news–though some stations run the shows twice in a row.
In case of a big news story, I find it best to go to a local TV station. It’s usually ad-free because advertisers don’t want to be associated with either disasters or interrupting something truly important.
I find the international news sites to be more refreshing to read than local ones. I’ve taken to catching up on the news while on the way to work, it makes the transit ride bearable.
I agree with the “paranoid” comment. I’ve noticed that in my own household. I can usually tell when someone’s watched the news; more attention to whether the alarm is on or not and a lot of looking out the window when a car passes by. Noises that would normally be ignored have to be investigated. And I’m just walking around the house listening to an audiobook or something, oblivious to it all. You don’t want to remove yourself completely, but it’s nice to be in your own little world with a “reasonable” foot in the real one.
Bleah. I rarely watch broadcast news unless I am aware of a breaking story I find important, and prefer to read the paper. I don’t even visit many online news sources, although if it comes up in one of the blogs I follow, I may search out a particular story. I have been known to request that we not idly watch an episode of one of the shows we have stored on TiVO or our ROKU box, because I don’t feel like staring at the boob tube just then.
I wanted to make a clarification about my aversion to cable telephone. It’s not if MY house power goes out, I have a generator, it’s if the cable service’s power goes out, they don’t necessarily have backup power. They’re not required to have it, in any event, since cable, satellite, and wireless providers aren’t considered public utilities.
One of the *ahem* interesting things about our house was the way the previous owner had jury-rigged a method to siphon power out of the phone lines! Illegal and somewhat dangerous as all get-out, but I rather understand why; his wife was bedridden for the last couple of years of her life, and was on a ventilator to boot. He was paranoid about the power going out and shutting down her life support. He also had a backup generator (which was stolen before we moved in by neighborhood crack addicts). We added solar power this last year, and haven’t regretted it at all.
Never have had cable. We didn’t upgrade to a color TV until ’96 or so, when Lechmere went out of business (to our frustration: it was an excellent, local electrics store that got taken national, bought out and shut down despite locally still going strong). We still have that TV but never bothered to upgrade it to the current High Def or whatever TV standards, so my spouse just watches DVD movies on it. I mostly confine myself to reading the Boston Globe (in proper, hands on paper format) from the sofa, while calling out “what’s that they’re doing now?” after having declared I had no interest in watching the movie.
@Reasean, I miss Lechmere still. Started shopping there when I lived in Concord and Cambridge, continued when I moved back to RI. Another case of expanding too quickly! It was a sad day when they closed!
The same thing happened to Jordan Marsh and Filene’s: Campeau (I believe his name was) bought up Filene’s. Macy’s bought up Jordan’s and decided to get rid of it. Campeau bought up Macy’s (or vice versa) and then decided to close down Filene’s. The two, Boston flagship department stores, both of which were doing excellently in their original locations directly across the street from each other are now no more. We have interloper Macy’s and, as of last Fall, and new place I haven’t really explored (its prices seem too cheap) called Primark. I especially miss Filene’s.
Hmmm… this afternoon, I had trouble getting to your web page. If I were paranoid… *looks about with shifty eyes*
No, you’re not paranoid…I was having the same problems.
Completely off subject. Has anyone been watching the World Skating? Men’s long program was last night! Javier KILLED IT!
`
WE have it recorded. Got to watch it.
So today, Saturday, is World Autism Awareness Day. As a relatively “new found” Aspie, unawares until the age of 65 inspite of the subtle signs, I don’t have that much to say but to emphasize the one thing the controversial definition in DSM-5 does do approptiately is put the label “Spectrum” on it.
We, if I may be so bold, are each at least as individual as those of you who are “neurotypical” people. One might wonder then if the ASD, or especially the traditional but misleading “autism”, label is very useful.
Nobody is in the end well served by stereotypes (to which the old label “autism” leads) even if many of us as one group or another have certain similarities. (Kids are often the worst at stereotyping–they just don’t yet have the mental abilities to deal with complexities–and unfortunately some of them never grow out of it.)
You probably have been familiar with some Aspie characters. Sherlock Holmes foremost. In BBC TV shows: Martin Ellingham in Doc Martin, Brian Lane in New Tricks. On American TV: Gregory House on House M.D., just to name a few.
I’ve “suddenly” come to realize the so PC term “differently abled”. But again, the stereotype of “The Rainman” for Aspies is just wrong! My sister believes in “compensations”. She’s my polar opposite (implying my father was a de-novo mutant with a transposition) and I can’t convince her she’s wrong. It’s not compensation, implying some neo-religious act of “balancing”, but different abilities deriving from individual brain development.
Americans, as a group, have a special problem with issues of brain development such as, but not limited to, ASD. We’ve derived from, and come to believe, a philosophy that all men are created equal. My mother believed that. If I had certain “failings”, it was because I wasn’t “trying hard enough”. She might have been constitutionally able to understand that my brain, and her husband’s come to that, just wasn’t “wired the same”, but the concept just didn’t exist in “the Heartland” a century ago, the Edwardian Era of “Downton Abbey” in Britain. Asperger’s Syndrome wasn’t documented until the year I was born. Documented, perhaps, but not recognized for three decades until DSM-4 in 1994!
And, yes, ASD isn’t the only distinct difference in brain development Americans have to struggle with accepting. 😉
So, “awareness day”? Awareness of what? Individual differences? Limitations of presumed equality? Presumptions themselves? Stereotypes? We need a day for that? Anybody who does should take it!
I have my blue light bulb out on my porch light…put it in last night and burned it all night and all day today. It’ll stay on until at least tomorrow morning……this one’s for Cody.
Elementary has been doing a neuroatypical storyline, Holmes dating a neuroatypical woman. I’m certainly neuroatypical in the literal sense of the word, but I have to say, rather than slicing and dicing humanity into neat little categories, I’d rather acknowledge that human thought and personality represent a mixed strategy for dealing with survival. By mixed strategy, I mean that one simple answer doesn’t work: you need multiple answers. If you play rock-paper-scissors, is rock or paper or scissors a winning strategy? No, you need them all for success.
We used to skate with a young man in his 20’s who had severe autism. He was quite amazing. Figure skating is a business that takes precision—precise technique and precise attention to detail. He could take a relatively short instruction, and go out there and do jumps and moves that we greatly envied—real commitment of a scary sort, because if you’re off in the least, you’ll take a hard fall. He just didn’t miss. We did. Often.
I had a young lady come to me when I taught. She said she was rated special ed and wanted to take Latin. I told her sure. Romans of all sorts learned it. I knew my teaching methods might have to be different. So I adjusted the requirements, and she did learn, not an ace student, but a lot. She was also my aide when I had 500 kids in study hall in the auditorium, some of them, well, problems. Somebody doused the main stage/house lights, which meant inky dark, and possibilities ranging from theft to a gang attack. I vaulted onto the stage and fought my way through the curtains to the main power switch and threw it, restoring light. I made my appearance through the curtains and beheld mass confusion frozen in place: did my best Patton imitation and ordered the miscreants and the potential victims back to their seats, and descended to my desk, where my purse and gradebook were not—
But my aide, clever lass, had instantly grabbed both and dived into the kneehole of the desk, from which she emerged triumphant.
I learned from her, let me say.
People on the autism/Asperger’s spectrum often can concentrate fiercely on something that interests them, to the point of being oblivious to the house on fire! One of my friends has an autistic son, and in RPG terms, Otto has ‘min/maxed his stats’. Otto has an impressive skill for escape and evasion that makes short work of any obstacle between him and his goal. He has been found blocks away eating ice cream at the 7-11, having circumnavigated fences, gates and holes a dog would have trouble wiggling through, and dodging the person who was supposed to watch him! I wish we were better at communicating with him, though…
And once on TV, I saw Sarah Chang, Wikipedia, at the ripe old age of 10, just ripping Pablo de Sarasate’s “Carmen Fantasy“. But then that year she’d recorded it for her first album, Debut, for EMI. Not so surprizing since she’d been at Julliard since she was 5!
Stereotype: “child prodigy”.
What’s the difference? Really. It’s so easy to stereotype people. Who does it help? Who does it hurt?
After I figured it out, I was able to look back on incidents in my life where ASD, and the lack of understanding, made things “unpleasant”, but on the whole I’m glad I wasn’t singled out, was able “to pass”.
I’ve never had cable. When my Mum died I inherited her old TV -which mostly functions as a laundry stand when I get ambitious and iron. I do have a DVD player. It comes in handy for my Christmas ritual watching of Hogfather.
I did buy the discs of ‘The Cave of Forgotten Dreams’ after seeing it in the local theater. Nice to be able to fast forward through the contemporary blather and focus on the cave paintings. Absolutely fascinating. I am still stunned by the sight of the childs footprint with a wolf pawprint close to it. Both as sharp as the day they were made thousands of years ago. (no way to tell if the footprint and pawprint are contemporary or many years apart.)
Congratulations CJ on another superb Foreigner book. Just finished it and I must say I can’t wait for the next in the series.
Thank you! It’s written and in!
I started it today and am most distressed to report that I have only 94% left to go. I wish it could last me for several months but the pace of the story is such, and my fevered pace of reading desire is such, that midday tomorrow may be the best I can do, and then another whole year to wait. I feel my glass is only half full even though there is so much yet to read…..
On the happy front, my 16 year old daughter wants to read the book that gave our old cat Py her name:) so I bought her the omnibus edition. She is allergic to my copy which is full of the dust of the ages.
You won’t remember this, CJ, but I sent you a picture of our Py when she was a baby 17 years ago. I was extremely trepidatious about contacting you, but it was about Py, so I screwed my courage to the sticking point, and you were full of appropriate admiration.
Be sure to pick up the second omnibus. The trilogy is split across them.
I do remember, Kokipy. 😉 How time does fly!