[1]: http://www.bigapplejazz.com/woodshedding.html[quote=“jandrese, post:43, topic:22171, full:true”]
I think he was being sarcastic.
[/quote]
(Note: this may qualify as a pointless rant)
That said, MarjaE still has a point. If I want unimpeded high-speed internet (to say nothing of surveillance-free), just what should I do about it? Where I live, my choices are Comcast or FiOS. I think we also had Speakeasy, but aren’t/weren’t they just a reseller for one company or the other?
This dovetails with the fact that we still watch broadcast TV, or rather, what’s left of it. As we live behind a hill (surrounded with tall trees) on the other side of all of the transmitters, we’ve always had trouble pulling in TV signals – e.g. we have three PBS stations in this area, and only one of them came in at all. When TV changed to HD a few years ago, we lost Fox, NBC and the remaining PBS station. (Yes, we have an antenna – it’s in the attic and has an amplifier.)
So if we want to reliably watch TV in our house, or be able to watch video over the internet, we need to pay either Comcast or (more to) Verizon (EDIT: we do have DSL) and I’m not really eager to (further) involve myself with either company. Full disclosure: I worked for Verizon for 10 years, and was finally laid off. (I wasn’t really bitter about it until a few years later: even though they were the ones who decided they didn’t need me anymore, in 2011 they sent me a letter during a telco strike, asking me to please be a scab for them.) But I don’t have a boner for Comcast, either.
And when it comes down to it, I really don’t want to watch more TV, and don’t particularly want my kids watching more then they already do. I would like to be able to watch something when I want, but adding another 2 or 300 channels seems like overkill, not to mention an excuse to watch more TV since, hey, I had to pay for it anyway. So part of me says “fuck it” to both TV and hi-speed broadband, and tells me that what I should really do with that time is go down in the basement and [woodshed][1]. (And for that matter, the kids should be doing that, too, since they talked us into getting a piano…)
