I’ve been meaning to add a new post on here for awhile, just haven’t gotten around to it. 😉 November seemed to sneak up on us this year, maybe its because we’re used to lots of white stuff covering the ground and being very cold. I managed to finish my second ever five mile race the Saturday before Thanksgiving.
I developed an app to help keep me on track during my training for the race. Although I didn’t beat my previous time, I felt a lot better finishing this race then that one. It also didn’t help my time that the course was a lot tougher, a stiff wind that always seemed to be coming right at you (even after the turn-around point) and hilly! I took a quick lead ahead of Susan to put some time between us, and as we passed each other, her words “I’m catching up to you!” was all the motivation I needed to keep going strong!
Susan was on call for Thanksgiving so we watched the game and had a nice little meal for ourselves. Susan made the dessert and I somehow got to do everything else! Waldo has been doing good, he seems almost like another dog now that we let him out by himself. We should have gotten the invisible fence a lot sooner!
After finding a good deal on cyber Monday for a 32″ LED HDTV and hooking it up, I started looking into alternative means to Charter for cable and internet. To get the HD Channels on a 2nd tv we would need to rent another receiver from Charter and get charged five more bucks per month. Charter’s internet pricing was cheaper than AT&T’s for high speed, so I started looking for options for cable. DirectTV definitely had the best 2-year contract deal, but once the 2 years was up, it jumped to a ridiculous amount and I didn’t really want to enter into a contract. The other option, Dish network, was pretty closely priced to Charter and provided more channels, but we’d still have to get two receivers and charged extra per month for the second one (I think it was 7 bucks here).
Then I had a radical idea, what if we ditched cable altogether? I don’t typically watch a whole lot of tv anyway, so after convincing Susan we could save quite a bit of money, we decided to give it a shot.
The first step was to see what major networks were in range of our house. Using a couple tools on the internet, I found ABC to be the furthest one out at around 40 miles. This is important as someone is addicted to Once Upon a Time, no ABC meant no deal!
The next step was to test an antenna with at least a 40 mile range. There’s some pretty neat antennas out now-a days, including ones that are paper thin and can actually look like part of your decor. I saw Best Buy had an antenna with a 50 mile range and figured if I wasn’t able to get all the stations I needed *ahem* ABC *ahem*, I’d return it and for go this great idea. After getting the antenna home and hooking it up to the tv, I was able to get 18 channels (most in HD), including ABC!
One of these days I’m going to actually figure out WTF is up with our coaxial cable wiring. We have a dish in our backyard with three lines attached to it. Our cable box has a 2-way splitter and a 4-way splitter (the 2-way feeds into the 4-way). Inside our house, we have a wall jack in each of the upstairs bedrooms, the upstairs tv area, a wall jack and a line in the living room, a wall jack and TWO lines in the master bedroom. Hauling my old school CRT around I determined neither upstairs jack worked nor the wall jack in the master. Outside there are two sets of three wires cut. One set comes from the satellite and one set obviously goes to the wall jacks. I still don’t know why 2 working lines were needed for the living room and bedroom, but that’s what I got…
Before venturing off into the attic I wanted to make sure I got my wiring figured right. The plans were to keep the one tv upstairs and the other for the master. I disconnected the 4-way splitter from the 2-way and wanted to get one of the lines that went to the master. I must have been lucky as the first cable I tried happened to be the right one. After marking each end of the cable, I saw the upstairs jack was already marked (isn’t that convenient?). I moved the incoming line to the 4-way splitter that way I could hook up the modem to whatever line I wanted and both of the tv lines to the 2-way splitter.
Once the wiring was figured out I was off to get a 50′ line to run from the attic to the cable box. We don’t have a full attic and a tall person doesn’t belong in ours. It wasn’t easy and the A/C unit didn’t make it pleasant going in and out of the attic. Once I started the mounting process I found out there was enough slop that I couldn’t use my ratchet wrench for the lag bolts, no it wasn’t metric because I tried that to and didn’t have much luck. I also thought to myself, gee I better not drop one of these bolts in the 6 inches of blown insulation, but happened to do that at least 5 or 6 times, almost gave up looking for the last one I dropped… 🙁 After a dozen trips in and out of the attic I finally had the antenna mounted. Using an app on my phone, I pointed in the direction I thought would be good and went to program the tv’s. Lo and behold I managed to pick up 22 channels including all of the major broadcasting networks, success! I was really happy to not have to play the adjust, scan, adjust, scan, adjust, scan game!
Along with the antenna, I also got a set top box. I went with Roku XS. It lets you stream HD content to your tv from a few different sources, including NetFlix (which we had) and HuluPlus (which I signed up for, $7.99 / month). So, after taxes and fees and all that fun stuff, we were paying close to $85 / month for cable television, add $5 for HD channels on the second tv and figuring the $8 for HuluPlus let’s say that’s a savings of $80 per month. That’s almost 1000 dollars a year we’ll be saving by dropping cable, I know there’s a better way to spend that money… such as say a new triathlon bike! 😉
Speaking of which, my triathlon training has officially started a couple weeks ago. Watching the Kona coverage (the Super Bowl of triathlons) last Saturday has got me pumped up and I can’t wait to get to the starting line to see how my training pays off!