Mom logic
Dec 29, 2009 Amy in the Morning
The audio is out of sync for the first 45 seconds, I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m in Buffalo and the computer is cold. 
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
You have to choose
Dec 28, 2009 Amy in the Morning
video management, video solution, video streamingOriginally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
The day my husband almost got the whole family killed
Dec 28, 2009 What's Going On
OK, so it really wasn’t anywhere near that bad. But at least I got you here with an almost-bogus headline. And it really could have been that bad.
Our basement came with a futon and an old mattress. Actually it came with a lot more than that, but over the past three years The Ass has gradually cleaned out the basement. Except for the old futon and mattress. It totally grossed me out that it was down there. I can’t imagine what went on on that thing. Actually I can, and I didn’t like the idea of it being in my house.
But my husband sees the basement as his domain, as the one area in our house that I don’t care about and won’t try to “decorate,” “organize” or “ruin.” He hangs out down there, with his little iPod speakers. He wanted to keep the futon, which is metal and probably not filled with bedbugs. But I begged him to throw the mattress out. He said he’d think about it. Three years ago.
I napped most of the afternoon away today – the result of several nights of going to bed super late. When I woke up, the kids were watching a movie.
Him: “The mattress is gone from the basement. So’s most of the metal from the front yard.”
We had recently had a giant, heavy, metal door replaced, and it had been sitting in front of the house, waiting for us to figure out what to do with it.
Me: “Fantastic! What did you do with it?”
Him: “While you were asleep a homeless guy came to the door, so I let him in and paid him $40 to take away the mattress and the door.”
He said this as if it were the most normal thing in the world, like “The pizza guy came to the door so I paid him.” It’s hard for me to describe what my face looked like when he told me that.
Him, trying to justify what he did: “I think it’s the same homeless guy [our next door neighbor] uses for stuff like that.”
Sorry, but two men being stupid does not make a right. Also, our neighbor is a good 15 or 16 inches taller than my husband and quite intimidating.
I actually know the guy he’s talking about. Every Thursday night we give him our empty cans. I drink a shitload of Diet Dr. Pepper so that’s a bigger deal than it sounds. At one point I even knew his name, and the fact that I’ve forgotten it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s homeless – I forget everybody’s name. My kids know him. When they see him on the street they say hi. That does not mean that I want him in the basement with my husband while I sleep upstairs and the kids watch a movie.
We’ve been together for more than twenty years. Certain rules have worked themselves out over the years, like “You’d better put the spatula back in the same place every time or I will throw a fit.” Or, “If I’m recording two shows at the same time on the DVR and you want to stop one so that you can watch a prison documentary (he’s obsessed with them), you have to ask me which one I’d rather have you stop, because you will never guess which one I want recorded more, so don’t even try.”
I guess now we’ll have to add one more to that list: “If you’re going to let a stranger into the house, wake me up so that I can dial 911 and hover my thumb over the send key, just in case.”
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
How I’m saving $36 a month on my cable bill & gaining TV viewing options
Dec 27, 2009 Money
A couple hours ago, completely by accident, I stumbled across a way to save $36 a month from my cable bill while actually increasing the number of options I have for watching TV. I was googling about something – I don’t even remember what – and I accidentally stumbled onto a site called PlayOn. I downloaded a free two-week trial of their software, which allows you to stream Hulu, YouTube, CBS, Netflix (if you have a subscription) and other channels through your networked XBox 360, PS3, or Wii onto your TV. Then, I downloaded a free two-week trial of Netflix. It was all set up in under five minutes, and I was watching Family Ties.
Truth is, we had been thinking about giving up some of our cable services for a while. We definitely didn’t need all of the premium channels we were paying for. We have two dual-tuner DVRs going at all hours, but a lot of what we record is available on Hulu or Netflix, sometimes the day after it airs. We knew that we could use our XBox 360 for streaming Netflix, and could hook up a computer to the TV to stream Hulu, but I know us, and we’re lazy. We don’t want to hook up a computer and runs wires every time we want to sit down and watch TV (plus, we could only stream Netflix through the XBox that has the XBox Live membership – if we were going to get rid of premium channels, we wanted to access Netflix from both XBoxes without having to pay additional fees to Netflix for the privilege). I was looking for a simple solution that wouldn’t cost much money, but all I was finding were devices. I didn’t want to add another device – the TV in question already has an XBox and a DVD player.
This is the perfect solution for us. Going forward we’ll be saving $45 a month from our cable bill, and paying $8.99 a month for Netflix, for a net savings of $36 (with a one-time charge of $30 for the PlayOn software).
We did the following things:
- We canceled our premium cable channels. We can access the same movies and shows via Hulu or Netflix. Yes, we may have to wait a little while for some of them, but they usually sit on the DVR for weeks anyway, so who cares? Savings: $33 a month
- We’re turning in one of our two DVRs. At this point we’re basically recording the same stuff on both. We’ll survive just fine with only one. Savings: $12 a month
- I dug our HD antenna picture frame out of the closet and hooked it up to the TV, so that we can watch local channels on that TV
- We’re purchasing the PlayOn software for $30, which allows us to stream Hulu (including my queue), Netflix, and other channels to our networked XBox 360
- We’re subscribing to Netflix for $8.99 a month, which will give us instant access to TV shows and movies that we used to watch on our premium cable channels. That’s on top of being able to get two actual DVDs in the mail at a time
Of course, there are a few downsides:
- A computer running the PlayOn software has to be on if you want to use it to watch TV
- I’ll have to teach the kids how to access shows from the XBox (not to mention anyone who babysits, housesits, or stays with us)
- If our internet goes out, then we won’t be able to watch most TV upstairs (just what’s coming in from the HD antenna)
- I’ll have to pay attention to things like Hulu subscriptions and Netflix queues (and it looks like we’ll have to share the queues! Gah!)
- Unless we buy a universal remote for the XBox 360 (which I’m sure we will eventually) we have to use the XBox controller to pause and fast-forward – a little annoying
- Sometimes the quality isn’t quite as sharp as it is with cable (then again, our cable often skips or pixelates, so that’s probably a wash)
- Some of the shows and movies I want to watch on Netflix are only available through the mail, and I promise you I will bitch and moan every time I have to lick an envelope and go a block out of my way to a mailbox
But the advantages are huge:
- After taking into account the start-up software and Netflix cost, we’ll still save $400 a year
- We don’t need to connect a computer to our TV to stream Hulu
- Instead of randomly stumbling upon movies we want to see when they happen to be available on premium cable channels, we can organize our viewing options with queues on both Netflix and Hulu, and even get alerts from Hulu when new shows have been added
- I feel better giving Time Warner a little less money every month
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 1 (for the XBox). Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Hulu, Netflix, PlayOn, streaming video, Time Warner
Never believe the customer service guy who has bad news
Dec 27, 2009 How To Piss Me Off
I just got off of the phone with Time Warner Cable. I wanted to cancel our premium channels. For as long as I can remember we’ve been paying about $33 a month for four sets of premium channels (HBO, Cinemax, etc.). We don’t use them anywhere near enough for that to be worth it, but we like things to be easy. We like to just record Entourage and Weeds and watch them soon after they’ve aired. The included on demand channels were handy – that is, when they happened to have something we wanted to watch. Again, convenient when we used it, but not worth $33 a month.
So, I did an online chat with Time Warner to make sure that I was reading our bill right: that if we canceled those channels we would save more than $30 a month. I was afraid that it was some kind of package, but no, the chat confirmed that I was reading the bill right.
So, after consulting with The Ass (who never needs to be convinced to save money) I called Time Warner to cancel. Easy enough, right?
But wait: this Time Warner guy on the phone was telling me that I would only save $5 a month! What?
Luckily for me, I had clicked the box that said “Send me a transcript of my chat session.” When I told phone guy what chat guy had said, he put me on hold and then came back and apologized. I was correct, he said. I canceled the channels.
See, the thing is, when I went through the automated list of choices at the beginning of the call to route me to the right department, I had to press the choice for canceling service. So before I even spoke with someone that person knew that I wanted to pay Time Warner less money each month, and it’s his job to stop that from happening. And if I hadn’t just had that online chat, I might not have pressed him. I might have just accepted what he said and kept the channels.
So the lessons? Oh, there are many.
- Take a good look at your bills and ask yourself if you’re paying for something you don’t need. When we signed up with Time Warner about seven years ago, we thought we needed those channels. Needs change, finances change, but we didn’t re-evaluate until now. If we had used the channels for a few months and then asked ourselves if we really needed them, we would have saved over $2,500 by now.
- Get it in writing. Whenever you’re able to tell someone “I have it in writing” you’ve got a much better shot at getting what you want.
- Don’t accept what the first person tells you if it isn’t what you want to hear. From now on, if something like that happens again, I’ll say ‘Thank you,” hang up, and call back again, hoping for a different person. Customer service reps are human, and whether they’re being purposely deceptive or don’t know what they’re talking about, you should confirm that what they’re saying is correct. But don’t ask that first person to connect you with someone else: that will give them a chance to circle their wagons.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
