Life was earlier before we were surrounded by all this tech.
"Goddamnit! GET OFF MY LAWN!"
(I'm practicing…)
Anyhow, after discussing it with Ben, we decided that even though we still had a little over a year left on our contract with Cox, it was worth the cancellation fee to tell them to take their shitty television and unneeded telephone service and shove it up their corporate rectum. To that end, we had a visit from DirecTV on Friday, and we're now enjoying basically the same service for substantially less than what we were paying Cox. We're keeping Cox for internet because the alternative (DSL through Century Link) was simply unacceptable as far as speed was concerned.
The worst part of switching providers is that once again I am at a total loss for what is on any given channel. It seems that just when I get used to knowing where to find any given program we change providers—not to mention learning an entirely new interface. Last night I pulled out an index card that I'm now keeping handy to write down our most watched channels so I can just enter them directly in the future instead of aimlessly scrolling up and down the on-screen guide. (Ben told me there was a way to select favorite channels and save them, but the index card is faster.)
We kept Cox for internet, but returned their cable modem after buying our own. This was yet another first-world annoyance, because I arrived home on Friday to discover that even though Ben's laptop was connecting just fine to the outside world, mine absolutely refused to. It would connect to our router, but it wasn't getting beyond that—even though Ben was connecting the exact same way. Finally, after messing around for more than an hour and going through several reboots of both the router, modem, and laptop, we just decided to simply reset the router to factory settings and set the whole network up again from scratch. That apparently cleared out whatever goop was preventing it from connecting, and once again we had connectivity to the outside world.
But what we then neglected to take into consideration were all the sundry internet connected devices around the house, each of which also needed to be reset to join the new network.
Hopefully we won't have to go through all this again for quite some time…
Donald Trump is a bigoted, racist, misogynistic bully and creep who makes fun of war heroes and the disabled. If we don't stop him, we deserve him." ~ Cher