Happy Birthday

Today is my birthday. It was a beautiful day -- about 55 degrees and I got to celebrate it by climbing on my roof. I have one of those semi-bungalow style really steep roofs that normal men my age wouldn't dream of climbing. But, I had a job to do.

On our roof is an antenna I had put up about 13 years ago. This was before we had cable the first time, before we switched to DishNetwork, and before we switched back to cable. I had cut the wire to the arial the last time because CableVision used the wire to connect our cable to our upstairs TV. Because the antenna was still connected, we ended up with mixed signals. (In my previous post, I reported it was DishNetwork that did this, but my son corrected me. DishNetwork wired our house correctly. CableVision reused the antenna lead without first disconnecting the antenna).

Anyway, I connected the lead, but alas, the TV tuner card isn't working. Daniel, my son who got me in this mess, is in Connecticut at the model U.N. He's trying to defend the U.S. position on private militias and space weapons. (HINT: The U.S. is the only country for these two items. He's going to have fun). I have decided to wait for him to return instead of trying to configure the card. He already did it once and would probably get mad at me if I tried. Doesn't matter I am a highly technical person. I am still a dad, and dads just screw things up. Ask your kids.

Also CableVision via their OptimumVoice department is causing all sorts of problems with our phones. They installed a new cable model (a Motorola SBV5222) and the phone line keeps dropping. We have no way of knowing until we pick up the phone, or we meet someone who asks, "Hey, what's wrong with your phone?". 

Some good news. The T-Mobile Hotspot@Home modem arrived. It's also a wireless router and it is much better than the Belkin wireless router we were using. It provides a strong clear signal throughout our house, and unlike the Belkin, it doesn't freeze up when we are pushing a lot of data through it.

Right now, T-Mobile provided us with a temporary number until they are able to get our home phone number transfered to our T-Mobile@Home phone. Since our old number isn't working due to the modem, I've rewired our phones to use the T-Mobile@Home instead of OptimumOnline.  At first, I changed our OptimumOnline phone mail message to tell people to dial the new T-Mobile number, but then I remembered that OptimumOnline has a forwarding feature which I was able to set via the webpage. Now, when you dial our OptimumOnline phone number, our T-Mobile@Home phone number rings.  As soon as the phone number transfer is complete, we're saying goodbye to OptimumOnline.

And, because our new T-Mobile@Home wireless router doesn't freeze,  we are actually able to use Boxee to watch Internet streams to our TV, and it is great. For the first time, I am watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn't see it the first time around, but they have all three seasons available via Hulu. Also available in Hulu are the five seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. I also showed my kids a few episodes of Hawaii Five-O which they thought was great in a very camp sort of way. We played Spot the Hippie. One of the trademarks of Hawaii Five-O was the hippie scene embedded somewhere in the episode.

We did have one disappointment, Astroboy isn't the 1964 original, but some 1990 remake. That's no fun at all. I haven't checked to see if they have Speed Racer.

So, even though we don't have reception right now, we are having a blast with the Internet streams -- especially from Hulu.