TV of the direct variety

Perhaps some day I will write an epic poem about my month-long struggle to have DirecTV installed. But a picture of the results is worth 1000 words:



On the left is my neighbor's apartment. I happened to look up at it a month ago and notice that it had sprouted a satellite dish at some point. (Their other neighbor, not appearing in this picture because I couldn't get a good angle showing all three apartments, had also sprouted a dish.)

On the right is my apartment, now featuring my satellite dish, finally successfully installed Friday evening at about 6:30. Yes, there were men standing on my third-floor balcony railing in the dark, and yes, they were both wearing work shirts with the name "Jesus" on them despite the fact that their names were Manny and Carlos. No, despite the DirecTV commercials that preceded the current "celebrities reading letters" campaign, I didn't feel the need to hug them after the installation was complete.

I do feel a little like hugging them now, now that I've been using the DirecTV version of TiVo for a couple days. I can record two shows at once!

A little trip

I like road trips, comic strips, and trains, and I managed to combine them all into a 3-day trip to northern California this past weekend. I even took some pictures.

No, wait, maybe the revolution will be televised

My cable company, Adelphia, is adding a couple of must-carry over-the-air stations as of December 1st, which is causing them to move a couple of premium channels to their digital lineup; they're also changing the names of their packages, including "Basic Service" becoming "Adelphia Classic Cable."

They sent me three separate copies of the letter announcing this. No wonder they're still in financial trouble!

Baseball is played in a park...

I have a computer program that attempts to pick winners of NFL football games. It also allows the entry of various game statistics, such as rushing and passing yardage, and then keeps track of each team's stats.

So every Monday, I enter the data from the football game summaries in the Los Angeles Times, where the summaries are helpfully divided into "NFC," "AFC," and "Interconference." And every Monday, I have trouble finding the Seahawks game summary, because I can never remember that they were moved to the NFC.

The revolution will be televised when it goes to pay-per-view

Two people, independently of each other, have told me that I, or a character very similar to me, play a very important role in "The Matrix: Revolution."

Unfortunately, I'm probably going to be too busy to see it for two weeks or so. If only we actually were living in the Matrix, and I could have power over space and time!