Wednesday…  Which means the week is now more than half done.  Only two days of work left.  Thank goodness!  This has been a really hard week for me…  Not really because of anything in particular at work, but simply the fact that I’ve had to go in to work.  It’s brutal coming back from a nice, long vacation and diving right back into work.

No man needs a vacation so much as the person who has just had one.  ~Elbert Hubbard

Tonight is also TV night for us…  But that doesn’t really mean what it used to.  Used to be there was a lot of good stuff on TV on Wednesdays.  We’d watch Myth Busters or Ghost Hunters or something like that…  But it seems like Myth Busters is only airing reruns these days, and the new episodes aren’t all that great anymore.  Ghost Hunters is just plain messed up…  They’re constantly having seasion premiers and season finales.  And right now they’re showing Ghost Hunters International, which isn’t nearly as good.

We’ve been getting advertisements from Charter for a while now, trying to convince us to upgrade to their newest, greatest bundle.  And it certainly looks good on paper.  The problem is that they never want to tell you exactly what everything is going to cost in the end.  Sure, the advertisement says $70 for six months…but nobody will tell you what it costs after those six months are up.

Well, Terri finally managed to get a competent person on the phone the other day.  This guy wasn’t doing the usual sales pitch…  He was actually willing to listen to her questions and give her real answers to them.  And we found out that if we switched to their great new bundle (5 Mbps Internet & digital cable) we’ll not only save about $60 dollars for the next months (compared to what we were paying) - but when it goes up to full price we’ll only be paying approximately $10 more than we were.

So, of course, we upgraded.

We’ve got a few new channels that we didn’t have before.  I’m not sure how much this will matter to me, as I don’t watch all that much television…  But we’ve also got the interactive on-screen guide thing, which is pretty handy.  I especially like that you can set reminders for upcoming programs.

And we’ve also got 5 Mbps downloads, and 512 Kbps uploads - both an upgrade over what we used to have.  And, amazingly enough, we really are getting the bandwidth we’re supposed to have.  Sure, it varies a bit…  But generally speaking the speed tests come out around what they should - which they didn’t do before.  So I’m pretty happy with that.  Again, I’m not sure that I really need the extra download speed…it isn’t like I’m downloading ISOs all that often…  But there’s certainly nothing wrong with having more bandwidth.

However, ever since we upgraded to the new bundle we’ve been having real issues with our Internet connection staying connected.  We’ve lost our connection for 20-30 minutes every day since we upgraded.  To be fair, it may have nothing to do with the bundle at all.  We’ve had some foul weather lately which may be entirely to blame…  Though the interruptions in service don’t actually match up with any periods of foul weather…  But it’s starting to get pretty annoying.  Not only do we lose Internet, but because we’re using Vonage we also lose our telephones.

Hopefully it’s all due to the weather and everything will work great once the weather clears up.  But I’m skeptical, to say the least.

‘Just Do It’: Couple has sex for 101 days

After 14 years together, Douglas and Annie Brown were a typical couple, approaching middle age while raising kids and leading careers. But where was the time for sex? In an outlandish experiment, the Browns decided to give their marriage a jolt — by having lots and lots of sex. Here, an excerpt from “Just Do It: How One Couple Turned Off the TV and Turned On Their Sex Lives for 101 Days (No Excuses!).”

Finally something interesting on the Today Show!

We watched the end of the new Andromeda Strain mini-series on A&E last night…

For the most part it was a decent series. Enjoyable, interesting, thrilling… Certainly kept me riveted to my television for about 4 hours, which is rather difficult to do.

I really enjoyed how they brought the story up to speed and incorporated modern events.

Cell phones were used extensively to bypass the government’s attempt at censorship. And there was a pervasive sense the government was being less-than-open about what was going on. There was more talk about international politics - the bombing of Utah had as much political fallout as nuclear.

I did not like how they changed the story itself though…

(more…)

We watched the first half of the new Andromeda Strain mini-series on A&E last night…

So far I’m pretty impressed with it.  There are obviously some departures from the original story.  In some regards this mini-series is closer to the book than the first movie, in other ways there’s more of a departure.  But there isn’t anything horribly, painfully, obviously wrong with the mini-series so far.

I’m not sure I like how they threw in the stuff about the singularity and whatnot…  Making it seem more like an alien attack than a government snafu…  But it’s early yet and maybe that’ll turn out to be another lie/cover-up.

I am greatly enjoying how it has been updated to fit our modern world.  The technology doesn’t look quite as dated as the old movie did.  It’s easy to update something like that in your mind as you read a book…but once it’s on film it is harder to visualize a modern setting when they’re showing you technology that’s just plain out of date.

The acting is, for the most part, pretty decent.  There are a couple people I’m not enjoying too much, but that’s true of just about any movie out there.

So far I’m very happy with the new mini-series and very eager to see the rest of it tonight.