Curse you, Comcast!!

I am so not  having fun with the upcoming digital conversion for TVs. It's not the national conversion that's the problem here. My TVs are fine. It's the fact that my cable provider is taking this opportunity to make some changes to their digital service. Overview: they're requiring digital converter boxes on all TVs in order to get any channel over 30 (in other words, all the good cable channels like Disney and CNN). This means that not only do we have to reconfigure our TVs to include these stupid boxes (we don't use a box currently) but we also lose the ability to record TV shows. The boxes don't play well with the digital converter boxes. The sales guys keep trying to sell my on how many more channels I'll be getting and how much on-demand and pay-per-view I'll be able to get (like that's of any value: we already have Netflix for movies).

I just got off the phone with my third cable guy. It was a 35 minute conversation. As nice as he was, this time I take Jason's view that it's 35 minutes of my life I won't ever get back. The best deal he could make us is $11 more than we'd pay if we switched to Direct TV. I'm pretty sure I know which way the wind is blowing now. Considering we're in for an afternoon of messing with our TVs, there is no loss for us to switch providers now. The up-side of this whole mess is getting DVR service: the ability to pause and rewind live TV, watch one channel and record up to 2 others, and justify the whole shebang as saving us money every month. Cool. That 35 minutes pays off.