I think I found my new home!

[Red October1984]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

Interesting advice from someone who doesn't pay for any of it.

I got cable internet. $29.99 for six months of 20 mbps. I moved, so they re-upped the offer for another six months. Then it went to $69.99 per month. I downgraded past 12 mbps to 6, which was "only" $39.99. After taxes, licences and fees I pay around $47.

Just two days ago I had a guy from DirectTV tell me he could get me Internet and TV for "only" $55. I told him I didn't have a television and I didn't need or want one. He told me they didn't carry Internet alone and he couldn't match that.

Come back when you know what you're talking about.

All I did was quote the commercial. Wasn't being serious...

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Red October1984

All I did was quote the commercial. Wasn't being serious...

I don't know any commercials made after about 1990. You should have said so.

Sorry if I ranted. I react badly to people telling me what I "should" do.

[Red October1984]

Originally Posted by Sailor Steve

I don't know any commercials made after about 1990. You should have said so.

Sorry if I ranted. I react badly to people telling me what I "should" do.

It's alright. I'm tough.

Just turn the page and start over. We can't focus on our mistakes all the time.

[Wolferz]

DirectTV isn't all it's cracked up to be. Just like their silly commercials.
It's been my experience that.... the cuter the commercial, the crumbier the product. Suckering in the weak minded with clever ads equals Bovine Scatterings.

You get signal loss every time it rains or snows or a bird takes a dump on your dish. Their internet service is download only because the dish isn't equipped to transmit data back up to a satellite. It can only receive. Making it necessary to have some kind of land line internet connection so, why bother?

All we need now is for Frau to install some web cams in her condo and start a live feed website so we can watch her "getting things done."

I can't wait for the shelf liner episode.

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Wolferz

DirectTV isn't all it's cracked up to be. Just like their silly commercials.
It's been my experience that.... the cuter the commercial, the crumbier the product. Suckering in the weak minded with clever ads equals Bovine Scatterings.

You get signal loss every time it rains or snows or a bird takes a dump on your dish. Their internet service is download only because the dish isn't equipped to transmit data back up to a satellite. It can only receive. Making it necessary to have some kind of land line internet connection so, why bother?

All we need now is for Frau to install some web cams in her condo and start a live feed website so we can watch her "getting things done."

I can't wait for the shelf liner episode.

Lol I lined the shelves in my walk-closet this morning. The ones in the kitchen are pretty much done, I think there may be a couple drawers in the master bathroom that I didn't bother with because they were clean and I haven't really put much in there yet. The half bath vanity cupboard is lined, the guest bath upstairs I'm not even bothering with at all yet... really the only major shelf lining to be done is the linen closet, and that is a relatively tight space and the shelves angle back into a corner so one end of each of them is... a triangular shape instead of squared off. Should be interesting, I'll keep you posted.

Time Warner called this morning and they are supposed to have someone out here by noon. I emailed the HOA last night hoping for some info but so far, no response.

Cincinnati Bell sells DirectTV bundled into their other services. I considered it but only heard negative feedback... my sister has Dish Network or whatever at her house, they considered DirectTV as well when they switched from cable and the guy who sells DirectTV there advised them against it. He said he had switched to Dish himself because DirectTV wasn't reliable enough and the signal was always going out.

At any rate, I wouldn't be allowed to mount a dish on the condo, the only option would be to set it up on a tripod in my little courtyard and getting a clear signal from the proper direction in that location would probably be very difficult. So cable it is. Sometimes the devil you know is the best alternative.

[Red October1984]

Originally Posted by Wolferz

DirectTV isn't all it's cracked up to be. Just like their silly commercials.
It's been my experience that.... the cuter the commercial, the crumbier the product. Suckering in the weak minded with clever ads equals Bovine Scatterings.

You get signal loss every time it rains or snows or a bird takes a dump on your dish. Their internet service is download only because the dish isn't equipped to transmit data back up to a satellite. It can only receive. Making it necessary to have some kind of land line internet connection so, why bother?

Signal loss isn't that bad for us...but the internet is. I've been complaining about my internet ever since we got it. It's better than nothing...but it's slow as hell.

All we need now is for Frau to install some web cams in her condo and start a live feed website so we can watch her "getting things done."

I can't wait for the shelf liner episode.

I want to see the window cleaner episode.

We could call it "Frau Kaleun Gets It Done".

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

I don't know what the conversion is, but mine will probably cost me upwards of $120-130 a month.

Approximately $1.50 to the £ so that works out at about £87 which is close to what I'm paying for Internet, TV and Phone.

Pretty much the same.

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

Approximately $1.50 to the £ so that works out at about £87 which is close to what I'm paying for Internet, TV and Phone.

Pretty much the same.

Yeah, except for me that's just what I'm paying for TV, not the whole kielbasa.

But let me just say that Jerome from Time Warner is AWESOME. He got here right before noon, looked at the two cable boxes already attached to the condo, and said he had no idea what it was the guy yesterday couldn't find because obviously that's where the lines go into the condo.

So then he said he remembered working out here before and that the whole setup regarding how the lines were run just never seemed right to him and "condos are always fishy." He tracked my cables to where they were hooked up to the main line and checked the signal and said it was crappy because the cables were so old and probably hadn't been serviced since the 90s which was the date he found on the tags on some of them.

He also couldn't figure out why mine were running to a box way around the corner and down a hill and whatnot when there was another box right across the yard. So he calls his "underground guys" and tells them he needs them here ASAP to hook me up to the box across the yard. Then he did all the interior work and put the lines down outside so all the underground guys have to do is come run the little slit through the yard and bury the cables. They got here before he left so he was able to show them exactly what needed to be done.

In the meantime he also called his dispatcher and told her he was getting me hooked up and needed one of the techs to come out and bring my new cable boxes and get those set up and get the whole house DVR thing working. That guy will be here between three and four today.

He said when that guy gets here, if he has any problems, tell him the tap box is the one straight across the yard behind that bush. If he still can't figure it out, I can call him and he'll explain it to the other installer himself.

Can't get a line run to the bedroom today, unfortunately, since that's gonna be more complicated and this is already complicated enough. But at least I'll have working cable into the condo. Jerome said there was an old splitter on the line running into the room directly under the bedroom, like maybe there was a line running up the wall to the upstairs at one point... but there's no jacks up there so it's a mystery. The wall doesn't look patched either where a jack was taken out so maybe someone intended to run a line but just never did.

[Wolferz]

The American dream of home ownership.

You have to be asleep to believe it.

You burn up your pay buying a home and the little piece of terra firma that it's sitting on, only to discover that you're still paying rent in the form of property taxes. Nothing proper about that whatsoever.
And you, my dear Frau, are also burdened by a bunch of stuck up fellow condo owners who want to dictate what your property looks like. It's kind of like being in the military where the order of the day is everyone looks the same no matter what.
Ah, life in these united states. What a nightmare!

But, still, it's nice to dream. Even if the dream doesn't really come true in the truest sense.
If I was to buy one of those condos, there would be a Rebel flag flying 24/7/365.
It's not all bad I guess...
A little further south of you in the city of Lexington, they have grass police who enforce the city ordinance on how high your bluegrass can grow..

[Sailor Steve]

Always nice when you find one of the good ones

I've actually had that happen a couple of times with the legal system.

[Jimbuna]

Originally Posted by frau kaleun

Yeah, except for me that's just what I'm paying for TV, not the whole kielbasa.

Oh...that is a bit expensive sounding then

Well done on the cable situation...you obviously came across someone with the required level of skill and expertise

[Wolferz]

I hope your previous tech gets a reprimand for being too lazy to do his job.

Dang kids! You can't have anything these days.
Here at my home, I've had my share of ignorant techies come to work on my cable. To their surprise they discover that I know as much about what they're doing as they do. Some of them more.
Well, not to toot my own wind instrument, I do have a degree in Electronics.
Considering what we pay per month for our service, they have no choice but to bend over backwards and crab walk for us. The wife added an extra layer of co-operation by befriending one of the ladies in their offices.
The best tech they ever sent was a former pro wrestler. He really knew his shtuff and allowed the stepson(a huge wrestling fan) to quiz him on the industry at length. A very nice fellow indeed.

[frau kaleun]

Nothing that was done required HOA permission... or rather I just assumed that it didn't, and it won't matter now because Jerome said that once the underground guys were done no one would ever know they'd been here. And he was pretty much right:



You can just barely see a line snaking across the grass where they buried the cable... and other than a little dirt on the sidewalk where they dug to go under it



that's the only sign that anything was done. And I've already swept away the dirt.

All in all I've had great experiences with Time Warner, other than the guy who was here yesterday - and to be fair, he came only to flip a switch to give me a hot cable and then do stuff inside. He woudn't have been able to do what needed to be done even if he'd known exactly what that was going to be, and at least he *did* realize that they needed another type of service crew out here to get me hooked up. Jerome was able to look at the cables and know they were bad and that the original hookup wasn't gonna provide great service, and from that point on he took care of everything.

The last Time Warner guy I had in my apt came to replace a bad box and after he got it hooked up he sat there on the floor with his laptop and looked up my model of TV online and got the remotes and went through all the settings both on the TV and the new cable box to optimize everything for my particular setup. He was great too, and even the people I've dealt with over the phone have all been topnotch as far as attitude and service. That's one reason I've stuck with them all these years. My friend in NKY has been stuck with Insight since she moved there and says she would kill to have Time Warner again. So it's all relative.

The inside installation tech should be here within the next hour and then I'll have cable in two rooms at least. And then I won't get ANYTHING done, lol.

I wonder if I could just put an outlet in the upstairs bedroom myself and snake some cable down and run a splitter off the hot line that I'll have in the living room. Not sure how that would work with the whole house DVR thing, though, as all the boxes have to be able to talk to each other.

But according to Jerome that's the reason he ran only one line from the tap box to my condo, and then ran splitter off the main line into my condo to the other hookup... so the "talking to each other" part would already be set up and no additional connections would have to be run to handle that.

I dunno. Another job to consider on another day.

Just about got all my extraneous computer crap off the floor and into the chest in the office, buying that thing was really a good idea. Almost getting to the point where I can start moving boxes of books in here, which will ease things up in the other rooms considerably.

But I started putting clothes away in my closet upstairs this morning and what I didn't get to yet are still piled on the bed so maybe I should finish that first if I don't want to end up sleeping on the floor tonight.

[Wolferz]

Prioritize dear girl. Prioritize.

NO wire hangers.

[frau kaleun]

Originally Posted by Wolferz

Prioritize dear girl. Prioritize.

NO wire hangers.