Matthew Botos

Part of my grand simplification plan was to drop my VOIP phone service and just have a single cell phone line. Only it’s not quite that easy; it seems I’m still on a one-year contract. To Packet8’s credit, though, they did find a cheaper option than canceling outright and paying the termination fee.; it’ll just take a few more months to cut the cord.

There also turn out to be a lot of hidden costs in VOIP now that it’s gotten popular enough to attract regulation. A $20 plan quickly climbs to $26 with taxes, 911 fees, and other surcharges. That’s a 30% increase you’ll only find alluded to in the fine print and on your first bill.

It’s nice to follow-up my previous post on Comcast and Verizon by reporting that they’ve both managed to get their acts together without any more effort on my part. My usual selection of cable channels is back, and the DSL is up and working.

Also, though I’ve swapped between DSL and cable at least once before in each direction, it’s still a bit of pain to reconfigure things. We’re not quite yet at the point where generic Internet comes out of the wall as water or electricity, no matter who’s providing it. If you could do that, and get decent pricing without committing to a one-year contract, we might see some real competition in high-speed Internet pricing.

Between getting HDTV and DSL, I’ve had a first-hand chance to experience the service of rivals Comcast and Verizon. They’re both obviously trying to up their level of customer service to win and keep customers in a competitive and saturated market. They still come up short sometimes, though, and occasionally in amusing ways.

Comcast first; after installing HD but screwing up my old channels, they promised to return 3 days later to fix it. They’ve narrowed their window to 2 hours, and I figured I was safe with the 2nd window of the day. I got a call with ten minutes left to say the tech was on the way, and another call at the end of the window to check on his arrival, which hadn’t happened. When the ETA came back as 45 minutes past the end of the appointment, I had to reschedule. I pressed them about an appointment guarantee, and did get a $20 credit.

Verizon should’ve had no trouble with DSL; I’ve had it at this address before. Their tech was outside first thing the day they said it’d be ready, and knocked on the door to let me know. After clunking through their install CD and an hour with tech support, they promised to send someone out Monday and I gave them my cell as a contact. I never heard anything, but found a message on my home phone that everything. The tech had come out, checked the line, and needed to know what the modem was doing. Aside from calling the wrong number, so far so good. Then he started rambling about how everyone else he was out to lunch except him, so he was just going to be sitting around waiting.

Both get mixed reviews so far; we’ll see how they fare with actually getting things to work.

I finally got a chance to sit down and watch a movie on the new DVD player and HDTV Sunday night. It was a much better test that watching isolated clips or freeze frames. Some scenes aren’t as clear or detailed as others, and watching a whole film gives you a better balance.

The result was pleasing; the upconverting on the DVD player did a good job of filling in higher resolution and large size of the TV. Keeping up with action sequences was no problem, and the text in the menus looked clearer. It should be good enough to keep me from thinking about HD DVD and Bluray for a while…

After getting an HDTV, Comcast surprisingly offered me an late Saturday afternoon appointment two days from when I called and also didn’t scoff at the request for two CableCards for my Tivo Series 3. The tech figured out the Tivo quickly enough for not having used one before - another point for the Tivo interface - and had the HD working soon enough. There seemed to be some missing channels elsewhere, but being an hour late to meetup with friends, I had to leave it for later.

Later ended up being 11:30 at night. The HD channels looked great; you could see every hair, pore, and bead of sweat. Below them, however, was a pretty big gap until the basic broadcast channels; all the typical “cable” channels had dissapeared! Comcast staffs their empire 24-7, but while they sent commands to the CableCards, it didn’t fix the problem. So I’ll be waiting for another tech to come out Tuesday morning and enjoying the new HD channels in the meantime.

Ever buy a DVD, put in the player you paid for, and have it tell you that you can’t do what you want? A wonderful “feature” called User Operation Prohibition (UOP) lets the disc enforce restrictions such as not skipping the FBI warning, or more sinisterly, the movie company’s previews. While it’s easy enough to find software players that ignore these artificial restrictions, doing it in a hardware player is a bit tougher.

Fortunately, dedicated hackers are on the job; Tom’s Panasonic firmware site offers firmware updates for several Panasonic players that disable this annoyance as well as free you to watch DVDs from other regions of the world. It works like a charm; I bought an S52S player this afternoon, burned a CD, and now have total control of my DVDs!

After watching the HDTV market for years and blogging a good bit about prices, I finally decided they were at a point where I was willing to take the plunge. Shopping and consulting with Brian and Merle led me to the Samsung HP-S4253. This 42″ flat-panel plasma does 720p (720 horizontal lines drawn progressively, or all at once) and has more input options than you can shake a stick at.

The EGL freight service used by Amazon got it to me in a week, but overshot their 5-hour window by a good 2 hours. Jerry was kind enough to spend his Friday evening helping me set it up and enjoying the huge picture. The unboxing wasn’t as intricate as other products, but did feature a nice tray for the TV with two plugs that allowed the rest of the box to be lifted off. Samsung also had the good sense to provide two bona fide handles to help move the 90-lb monitor.

Plugging it in was easy with digital cables; HDMI into the monitor and a single optical audio out to the receiver. Stripping out all the old analog cables made quite an impressive pile. Not to blow my own horn, but I was also impressed with the size of my center channel when compared to my main speakers. I forget how huge the thing perched on top of the TV has been, but it makes sense with upwards of 50% of front audio coming through it. After finding it wouldn’t fit on the top shelf in front of the TV, I rearranged things to fit it below.

The final product, as Jerry noted, really completes the look of my bachelor pad. It’s a vision that I’ve had for at least six years, and there is a certain materialistic and technophile satisfaction in seeing it realized. Plus, “it really ties the room together”.

View the HDTV photos

After setting up the Tivo Series 3, a few recordings were missing from my Series 2 Tivo. It took me half a day to realize it, but clicking through the setup on the new box had managed to work through the menu to delete recordings on the old one! Tivo boxes and remotes are all interchangeable by default, hence the crosstalk.

There is a procedure to uniquely pair the remote to the Tivo which you could do on the older Tivo before setting up the new one. Alternately, you can cover the sensor in the middle of the old unit until the remote is paired.

My Christmas cactus started to bloom this week, so I snapped a few quick photos.

View the Christmas Cactus photos

I wasn’t going to take unboxing pictures of my new Tivo Series 3, but the packaging was too cool not to. Tivo went for a classier black box this time, with the color not popping out until you open it up. Like their on-screen interface, they put ease of use first in the packaging, with a quick-start poster and instructions for your cable guy.

What really impressed me is all the cables they include, especially in an HD world, where everyone wants to sell you overpriced HDMI cables. The only thing they left out was an optical audio cable, but otherwise it’s a pretty complete set for your money. The box itself is wider than the Series 2, and has a glossy black finish, silver faceplate and Cylon display slot.

In the back is a rich selection of ports for all those cables; one particularly neat detail is the built-in dust cover for the optical audio out. I had to clear some room in by equipment rack for the new addition, so it got to sit up on a pedestal for a few days. During the power-up and setup, the fancy new display gets put to good use.

View the Tivo Series 3 Unboxing photos