First, a little love for the house. Any of you who have visited recently should remember the large plastic tarp in front of the sunroom. The wallpaper had been peeled away, spottily, and the ceiling was covered in plywood. I managed to finish the ceiling tonight. Well, nearly finish. The crown molding hasn’t been gotten yet. But, the good news is that we were finally able to find solid red oak beadboard for the ceiling. I tried to do this last night but after about 6 boards the nailgun jammed and I lacked the 3mm allen key to take it apart. So I brought it to work this morning and cleared the jam and finished the job tonight (with 48-6 of the remaining boards). Here’s the result:
I think it turned out pretty well. I hadn’t placed the last and final board in the picture above, which eagle-eyed viewers may notice.
In other news, we recently became a UVerse family. N. was getting sick of me trotting off to the bar for every Eagles game or other Philly/Notre Dame-related sporting event that was not on broadcast television. I’ve also been pushing AT&T for years to invest in our neighborhood and bring the FiOS to the fine people of Oak Park. I will never, ever purchase cable from Comcast (it’s a Philly thing) so we decided to give this a try. So far, so good. We have it hooked up to the HDTV in our bedroom (a 24″ Samsung LCD).
A little primer: AT&T runs fiber optic to these nasty beige boxes all over town. Then when you order UVerse they jumper the fiber to your Cu twisted pair. So, this isn’t my parent’s FiOS, literally. My P’s live on the east coast and have Verizon’s fiber optic to the curb service which gives them a ridiculously sick internet pipe.
The twisted pair comes into our house and heads to a 2Wire wireless router — I think I read that the b/w is 20Mbps. The router is hardwired to our TV’s set-top box and the phone line (for digital voice). Our PC’s connect to our wireless network.
The installation was a bit hairy. It was scheduled to start at noon on a particular day. The technician arrived on time and immediately set to work. However, at 4pm he informed me that he needed to call a lineman to do some work. He waited in our alley until 8:30pm and then said that there would be no lineman that day. I had to call AT&T to reschedule the rest of the installation — even though we had equipment lying all over our house. The next day the lineman fixed the problem and the installation was completed. Despite these troubles, the quality of the installers was much greater than what I’ve seen with Comcast. I’ve been present for two installations in apartments that I lived in and the contractors that Comcast hired were terrible. The second guy told me that he took the job simply to learn how to install cable so he could quit in a couple of months and then start doing it for his friends on the side illicitly. That inspires confidence.
The reason this install took so long is that the guys wanted to make sure that everything was optimal. The lineman told me he was worried that I was too far from the box and that I may see video drop-outs and spotty internet. But we’ve been running for over a week now and I’ve noticed nothing of the sort. Our internet is a steady 3Mbps Down/1Mbps Up (I could get a faster pipe but it costs more) with none of the fluctuations observed in cable’s broadband.
TV:I really like the advanced DVR that UVerse comes with. They advertise the ability to record 4 shows simultaneously. This is true but you have to remember that the unit records, a la TiVo, what you are watching. So in reality you can only record 3 additional programs. Further, if you are watching an HDTV channel you can only record one other program (in HD). Nevertheless, this is pretty cool. The other night I was timeshifting the ESPNHD feed to match the Sirius broadcast of 94.1 WYSP’s Eagle’s MNF coverage when my daughter accidentally changed the channel. Since I was recording the game I was able to tune back to the channel, rewind to where I was before the accident, and continue watching without any hiccups (it continued to record the ESPNHD stream during the channel change).
The quality of the video is very high. The OTA HD is still better for the network channels (I still have my roof antenna) but not so much that I want to switch while watching cable. The biggest improvement is the quality of the SDTV streams. I am assuming that this is because they are all digital on UVerse while my OTA SD is still analog (?). There is a marked difference and the UVerse wins out easily.
We haven’t futzed much with the on-demand service apart from watching a couple of free programs. But I did cancel all Netflix/Blockbuster accounts in anticipation of watching movies on-demand. UVerse provides an assortment of HD movies so that will be nice. I still have the two TiVo’s hooked up to the antenna and they are doing their thing, but the DVR that comes with UVerse is pretty good. I am most happy with the responsiveness of the remote/DVR: when I push the ‘guide’ button the Guide instantly pops up; when I change channels, the channel instantly changes. Software update after software update has made my TiVo a bit laggy. But it is still better than the time we had digital cable from Comcast for 3 months — the box was so unresponsive I was constantly wondering if it was still working. Back then, the Comcast SD picture was terrible too. Comcast may have improved this but I can say with certainty that UVerse provides a sparkling SD stream.