Are you receiving?

We have been talking about cutting the cord for weeks. Yesterday we finally did it. Cable TV was costing us over $1000 a year! The cable packages are set up to have you pay for over 200 channels when you really only want 20. Sure the UI is convenient and I will certainly miss a few channels but there was something strangely liberating about saying no to paying for over inflated cable costs.

I’ve already setup NEXTPVR and it seems really awesome. It has a built in TV guide, recording, streaming and it is pretty easy to use. Really TV comes down to content availability. Our Over the Air setup will give us all the local stations in beautiful HD completely FREE after the initial antenna setup fees. Add in Netflix and Kodi and there will be tons to watch and our Rogers bill is cut in half. (We will also be cutting our home phone line) Actually. It feels pretty good. We will be keeping cell and internet with Rogers. For now.

The setup of the OTA was pretty quick. The guys used existing cable lines in the house. So after the antenna was up it was just a matter of joining to the main cable hub and having the TVs scan for new channels. With the initial setup we were getting two channels from Buffalo (Bounce and CW). We had the option of pointing the antenna toward Hamilton instead to pick up CHCH. After some review of the content on the channels I got on the roof… over and over and over until I decided to look up the correct heading for CHCH. TVfool was awesome. It told me the exact heading for CHCH which was 182 degrees. With the help of a compass app I got the angle right and CHCH came in perfectly. After a day of use I’m pretty happy with the switch over. Sure it is odd dropping from over 200 channels down to 8…. but I don’t feel we’ll miss a whole lot.

Fall is upon us. It is getting colder. It seems the local wildlife is well aware of this and mice have moved into various walls of the house. We’ll take some steps this weekend to keep the rats out.

Congrats to bdot who got a raise and the job title she was looking for. Glad to see someone is having some success.

Had some computer trouble last night. My C: drive. The operating system drive filled up. 0 bytes free. (It was a 60G drive) I guess when I bought it I thought 60G would be enough for a OS partition. Well it isn’t. I’ve been struggling to keep space free on that drive for months. Finally gave up last night as the OS couldn’t do anything. So, that meant a drive wipe and complete reinstall of Windows 7. Hours of patching and reinstalling and then finally upgrading to Windows 10. Ugh. What a process. Now the OS is happy (hopefully?!!) on a 500G partition. I guess I should have dealt with this ages ago. Fortunately my apps were on another drive. Steam took care of all my games.

Just heard of another shooting at a school in the US. Gun rights > Human lives. How very sad.