The Florida portion of our vacation ends tomorrow when we start driving back to Texas. WIll be fun to get home. I love my family, but I can only stand them in small doses at a time. So every year we head off into the chaos that is Christmas and hope to emerge at the other end of our vacation intact and re-fueled for the new year.
I switched to the Dish Network and Verizon DSL right before I left for Florida. Since we will soon be paying that $24,000 a year I mentioned earlier for my daughter’s education, I wanted to downsize costs without sacrificing the quality of life we’ve come to know through Cox Cable. The Dish Network is cheaper if you get the highest channel package, plus they throw in four room DVR. That was the selling point for my wife, so now she can clog up her own DVR with those wonderful HGTV shows. Dish also gets the UPN so that I can finally watch the Chris Rock Show. Cox Cable and DirecTV don’t carry the UPN in my neck of the woods.
I’ll be sacrificing some download speed getting Verizon DSL, but the upload speed is actually faster through Verizon and that’s a selling point for an online league commissioner. Since Cox Cable costs almost twice as much as Verizon’s best package, I’ll sacrifice the download speed. I also purchased the wireless version of the modem. I could use my Linksys wireless router, but the last time I used Bell South DSL, configuring the router wasn’t a trivial process.
Some Christmas vacation technology fun! Speaking of technology fun, I finally saw enough HDTV to appreciate how good the picture and sound is compared to regular TV. My mother-in-law has a brand new 50 inch plasma TV, and we were watching the Colts/Seattle game on regular TV. I was looking through her Brighthouse channel guide and noticed the HD channels. So I switched to the CBS HD channel and was blown away. The picture is so clear that I am not sure that I really need season tickets to football games.
Now I just have to build up enough points with the wife for such a mega-purchase…
