Week One, a recap

We made it! Contrary to popular belief, there is life after cable and so far, it has been a very easy transition...after all of our drama was over that is.

I spent all of last Wednesday setting up my new TiVo, arranging my A/V closet, and cancelling cable.  I then had a few minutes before Erin got home to test out the signal and watch some TV and everything was working great.  Erin got home and we sat down on the couch with our freshly cooked Jack's Pizza and flipped on ION+ for our favorite guilty pleasure, Criminal Minds re-runs. Well, we were about 5 minutes into the show and the picture started to pixelate and then went out completely.... oh bother. I couldn't even look at Erin and was waiting to get a piece of pizza in the face not to mention a breakdown about how this totally wasn't worth saving $80 a month. So, I assured her I would fix it and started troubleshooting the problem: 1. All other channels were fine and 2. Upon checking all of the connections, everything looked fine, but ION+ was still not coming in.  It was a stormy night so I decided that was the problem because ION+ is the farthest network from us and the only one we were having trouble with. So our first night without cable was spent watching Iron Man 2 on BluRay. Well the next day, I went into the closet to plug something into my receiver and voila, my signal booster was unplugged!  It must have fallen out when I was fumbling around to put in the new TiVo. Awesome!  Now everything is hooked up and churning out crystal clear, beautiful, and most importantly, free HD.

Other than this little mishap, the rest of the week went fairly well.  We set up all of our shows to record automatically on the TiVo, set up our free 6 month membership for Hulu Plus, and everything is going great. We even got to watch one of our favorite Food Network shows: Food Network Star by hooking up my laptop to my TV and streaming it via the website.  Best of all our favorite, Jeff Mauro, moved onto the next round. The only problem with this method is that we have to wait 5 days from the original broadcast before it is available, but this is really only an issue one time, now that we are on the new schedule. We just have to be careful not to hear/read too much on Social Media Networks or at the water cooler.

We are 7 days in and going strong!

Thanks for reading,
Michael