October 1, 2001

I hate ISP’s that can’t provide good enough service to see that their customers have uninterrupted Internet access! When it happens to be a “major” ISP – that’s worse!! I have Prodigy access (it’s one of those three year deals so that I could buy a computer and get $400 off …) and recently they’ve been very consistent in their service outages. It happened a few weeks back when there was a long weekend and there was no access for the whole week and then it happened again on Friday. I am sick and tired of not having Net access for the whole weekend and wondering who might be trying to contact me and wanting to do research on something or other and then remembering that I don’t have any Net access. Guess I should talk to Prodigy customer service today and see whether I can get out of their stupid contract since I see no point to having Net access with no actual access.

Since I had no Net access over the weekend, I kind of stayed completely away from the computer :p I did spend some time Friday evening working with the new ATI all-in-wonder Radeon card that I got since I just got rid of my satellite connection from Dish Network and instead wanted to set up a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) on my desktop. I removed the 17MB hard disk that’s inside the DishPlayer 500 that I got from Dish Network as part of the promo I signed up for and put it on my desktop and then set up the ATI card. Things actually seem to be working pretty well and I can get about 5 hours of good quality recording on the 17MB drive 🙂 Of course, I’m still having problems setting up the recording stuff but that seems to be mostly due to the settings I choose and I haven’t made a serious effort to look into the recording aspect since I was too busy watching TV :p

Speaking of TV, I watched two new shows yesterday that I found very interesting and engrossing. Both seem to be taking a leaf out of the world of movies and trying to make TV shows look like mini-movies and while they might not have succeeded all the way, the shows were still interesting enough for me to want to know how things progress. The first show was on ABC yesterday and it was called “Alias”. It’s about this girl who believes that she’s working undercover for the CIA only to find out that she is actually working for the “enemy” and that her Dad (whom she’d believed all her life to be a guy who sold aircraft parts) is part of the same group. The episode ended with her going over to the CIA and agreeing to work as a double-agent only to discover that her Dad is a double-agent for the CIA as well 🙂 Interesting stuff ..

The other show comes on right after “Alias” but is on NBC. It’s called “UC: Undercover” and is about the life of undercover agents. This show actually said that they wanted each episode to be a mini-movie and the previews seemed to show that there were plenty of action-packed sequences but I missed the opening since “Alias” ran on for an extra 10 minutes but the rest of the show had only one action sequence a la John Woo but it was interesting enough (and they left a cliff-hanger at the end …) for me to want to know what happens next week. Unfortunately, I’ll be flying home to Sri Lanka (at least I hope to …) on Friday and I’m gonna miss the next episodes of both shows unless my PVR works :p

Tags:
Posted by Fahim at 8:37 am  |  No Comments