We started watching 3:10 to Yuma. And every so often I would switch back to the TiVo input to see if the firmware update had completed (it hadn't). After about an hour into the movie the cable card still hadn't finished the firmware update, so at this point Kenny decided to try a new tactic and started switching around cards. After a little over another hour he finally got it back to working the way it was yesterday. Which is on one card we don't get a lot of the HD channels we're suppose to get, and on the other we don't get the regular NBC station, but we get the digital one not do we get any encrypted digital channels. So one of the two cable cards has significantly less HD channels available than the other. At this point it was dark outside and around 6:30 so Kenny left and said he and his supervisor would be back tomorrow afternoon to try and get this problem fixed. That's right, Kenny was here for four hours. I offered to let him crash in the guest room, but he turned us down, said thanks for the drink and headed out. Just an FYI: Kenny is an online gamer (he plays Call of Duty 4) and has been in the military previously (he's a big dude). Come on, he was here for four hours, what I suppose to do, ignore him?
Later in the night Ginger was researching the problem online and she thinks she knows why we're missing some of the channels. Seems that Cox doesn't have enough frequency on the line for all the channels, so some of the channels share frequencies and require a message upstream to tell it what channel to send downstream (not sure how this works unless there's a multiple cable wires to each outside box, because otherwise it would seem like you would be messing up your neighbors channels if the signal originated at Cox). If we had a Cox cable box, it would be able to send that signal, but since we're going through the TiVo it doesn't. Not sure there's anything that can be done to fix that. It would be nice if they had a web page you could access to change the content of the channel, one that maybe you could only operate if you were inside their network and originating from the IP address of your residence, but they don't. Not sure what the result of tomorrow will be. Kenny said he was going to bring several cable cards tomorrow, so hopefully the second card will actually be working by tomorrow night (although based on the info Ginger found we probably still won't get all the HD channels).
So after Kenny left I finished watching 3:10 to Yuma. Wow. That's about all I can say. It's a really really good movie. It's a western, and typically I don't like westerns. The acting is spot on, the story is tantalizing, slowly revealing bits about the characters as the it progresses. I honestly can't remember the last movie that I watched that was this good and suspenseful. And it's not because of crazy special effects either. I mean for the most part the movie is just people on horses with guns, but the story is really made by the actors selling their roles. Russell Crowe plays the bad guy Ben Wade, a renown criminal gang leader. Christian Bale plays Dan Evans, an injured civil war vet who is down on his luck and attempting to make a living ranching. Wade gets captured (without his gang) and plans are made to take him to the town of Contention where the 3:10 train will take him to Arizona territorial prison in Yuma where he will receive a quick trial and be hanged. Evans is desperate for cash to save his farm and volunteers to join the party escorting Wade. The movie then deals with the group trying to evade Wade's gang who is bound and determined to free him. From reading that description given current movie storylines you probably think you have an idea of how the film plays out, but it's really more about the interaction, similarities, differences and motivations of Wade and Evans. Overall I can't say enough good stuff about this movie.
4 comments:
i'm amazed at how much hassle one person can have with his tv feed.
it's a nightmare. over here - you plug in your box, you plug in your tv, you connect them up, it does a 5 minute search for the channels and stores them, and hey presto robert's your mother's brother.
your seems unnecessarily overcomplicated.
i have 3:10 on my list of movies to watch very very soon. looks engrossing.
Cox switched to SDV (Switched Digital Video) back in October. Every month now in our bill it gives a notice about Cable Cards, which I don't really pay attention to since I have a box. But, I think the gist is that you need a device that supports the 2-way communications. However, I also thought that they were only switching the niche channels like the Latino networks in the 400s, and some other international flavor channels.
Bottom line is that I think you're screwed.
Cox sucked all the way back to when they were Media General or whatever the hell their name used to be.
Time Warner may be expensive, but I've never had this degree of problems with them. Some of the early DVR boxes had trouble, but that is the price of being an early adapter.
To be fair one of the reasons we're having so many problems is we're using a 3rd party DVR instead of Cox's. I feel certain that if we were to use their DVR we wouldn't have this many problems. And the shared frequency channels would also work since the Cox box (heh, that sounds funny) would be capable of the two way communication. The problem is we like the TiVo interface, so we want to use the TiVo HD DVR since we've already paid out the nose to get it (versus having to pay yet another additional $16 a month to rent Cox's DVR).
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