I am so NOT ready for this week to begin. Maybe I could hide under the bed and make it all go away.
By the way, a special hi to my parents, who now know this journal exists. Not sure that they’ll ever read it, but who knows?
We watched the Super Bowl last night. The commercials were only so-so, though there were some amusing ones – that helped. I’m vastly amused that AT&T’s mlife.com website that they had been promoting with teaser ads apparently wasn’t live until sometime well into the second quarter. I suspect that whole marketing campaign is going to be a flop – the product that they’re trying to sell is too indistinct.
We also recorded the pregame show on the TiVo, which allowed us to (blessedly) fast-forward through the worst of the blather. The blatant displays of pandering, linking the September 11 events to the Super Bowl turned my stomach. It’s a freakin’ football game, people – this isn’t about freedom, or patriotism, or any of that treacle. All I can say is, thank the gods for the fast-forward button. I also learned that TiVo is great for watching the game itself. The snap, the play, the tackle, fast forward to the next play (ignoring the announcers’ blather), repeat. Made for a much more enjoyable game.
Funniest moment: we switched inputs to let the TiVo build a buffer and surfed around some other channels. Something funny came on and Dan asked me to pause it and rewind – took me a second to realize I couldn’t. The TiVo virus: know it, fear it.
I did have fun cooking last night. I made a nice batch of chicken and dumplings, with an excellent recipe from Cook’s Illustrated. Took a good long while, though – about four hours int he kitchen. It was worth it, I think. That, coupled with a nice white bread fresh from the bread machine was heavenly. Adding the dry milk powder to the recipe really makes a big difference – I now see why so many recipes call for it. Fo dessert, takaza made a delicious mint chocolate chip ice cream with a recipe he got from the net. We’ve mostly made custrad-based ice creams up until now – this method is much easier and very tasty as well.
Looks like we have new evilness on the horizon: After some research, it looks like we can add digital cable for only $13/month. That would give us about new 15 channels that we’d actually watch, plus a whole slew of music-only channels. I think we’ll try it for a few months and see how much use we get out of it. Scary thing is, this will push our Time-Warner bill a hair over $100/month (basic cable + “standard tier” + digital + broadband). Not that big of a deal, but still psychologically significant.
So, today is to be spent prepping for the big coating batch to be made tomorrow and Wednesday, with Thursday and Friday probably spent on cleanup. I can hardly wait (not). Off to work now…
I have my doubts about digital cable. The addition of channels with content you’d actually want is a plus, but if what Time-Warner offers is anything like what Rusty has, ‘surfing’ becomes so slow as to be nearly impossible. I’m not sure I’d be willing to give that up, myself…
Well, we got it all set up last night. And you’re right – surfing is a slow proposition, but it’s not so much the fault of the digital cable as how we have to interface the TiVo with the digital cable box: a wire runs out the back to the TiVo to two IR emitters placed in front of the IR receiver on the cable box; you tell TiVo what channel you want, it sends the signal to the cable box at about the speed of someone pushing in the channel numbers on the remote control. Changing channels takes 2-3 seconds, aproximately. I don’t see it as that big of a barrier for how we watch television, though – now we have two channel guides at our disposal, and that was usually how I surfed anyway.
My greater concern is that with all the nifty new channels, this is going to mean more time in front of the tube and less time doing more productive things. We’re definitely doing this on a experimental basis: if after a month it looks like it’s detrimental (to our free time, our social life, or our health), out it goes. We’ll see.
*he* Dare I ask…they have anything to say about the survey you just posted? 😉
Something more serious now…
Glad to see that I wasn’t the only one that was annoyed by all the stuff connected to Sept 11th. Yes…I’m sorry it happened…yes..I want the government to get the people involved with it. I just really hate to see something like a football game attached to something like Sept 11. It’s almost like a patriotic penis sizing contest. All these companies and groups going ‘We’re more patriotic because we do this…’…it sorta cheapens all that happened.
Big news locally last week was this used car salesman going against Nashville Codes department because he had flags on the antennas of the cars. I’m sorry…it’s says its against the law to have banners of any kind off of non-perment structure…it doesn’t say no banners except for the American flag. Nashville of course backed off once it hit the papers…they are too scared they are going to have some mob make a run on city hall…oh wait…this is Tennessee, where the mob did storm the capitol…
I just love this area 🙂