Misinterpretation of Analog vs Digital Cable

I'm a technology person by interest and training, but realized today that I really didn't have a clue about cable TV. I always referred to my basic cable server as analog cable as I don't have a cable box and simply have the coax go right into the TV/TiVo. What didn't help is a quote from my cable company's website:

Just bought a new HDTV set? HD service is FREE with Digital Cable from Time Warner Cable*. Upgrade today and start enjoying an enhanced HDTV experience.

This led me to believe that my basic cable service didn't get me ANY HD channels and didn't get me any digital content. Last week I read that cable companies had to carry HD channels at no additional charge for the broadcast stations, i.e. NBC, ABC, CBS. I saw this and was excited that I didn't have to pay more for cable to get some HD channels.

When I plugged in my new TV, it scanned for channels and found 46 digital channels and something like 69 analog channels. Wow, that was quite promising. This, of course, meant that the basic/expanded cable I have is not just analog, but also carries digital channels. This should have been obvious to me, but it wasn't.

So, with just a new TV and basic cable, I get a number of digital channels as well as some HD channels. The cable companies don't seem to want people to know about this so that they can upsell people on the cable packages that contain lots and lots of channels that many people don't watch. At this point, I can't justify upgrading my cable to get more HD channels.

It's here!

Snow Leopard arrived today and I quickly installed it on my test machine. After that was done, I setup the test machine for email, VPN, and jabber. Then I was off to installing it on my main machine. I had planned to do a clean install (archive and install), but that option didn't appear to exist. There was probably some magic trick, but I didn't find it.

The upgrade went well and when I restarted, everything worked fine. For some reason, I was disappointed with the upgrade. I knew there was nothing really major from a user point of view, but I was still disappointed. So far, so good with Snow Leopard. A few mail plugin I use don't work; since I wrote 2 of them, I get to fix them which will be fun.

Oh and I managed to recover about 15 GB of hard drive space which was a nice benefit.

Damn you, Quicken

Each time a new operating system comes out, I look at what I no longer need and start trying to clean house. One optional install of Snow Leopard is Rosetta which lets people run PowerPC applications. Why would anyone need this when applications have been Intel native or Universal binaries for years? For me, the loan application that has me installing Rosetta is Quicken. I'm now on Quicken 2007, but it still isn't Intel native. Looks like I have to wait until February or so of some year (maybe next) to get a version of Quicken that runs natively on an architecture (Intel) that has been on the Mac platform for 3.5 years.

Is there a better financial app out there that reads Quicken data and handles my portfolio? I have yet to find one.

Bye, bye NetNewsWire

I've been using NewNewsWire for a number of years as my RSS reader as it was easier to use than Safari and a better solution than reading news in Mail. I paid whatever the license fee was and was happy to do it; the program got acquired by NewsGator and became free. It was still maintained, so I was happy. This summer, they announced the end of their own sync service and started allowing people to sync with Google Reader.

I never used Google Reader, so I gave it a try and was very impressed how a web site could work as well as a desktop RSS reader. Since a lot of RSS feeds have links and pictures in them, reading RSS offline doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. I've been exclusively using Google Reader for a few weeks and really have no reason to go back to NetNewsWire.

When NewsGator switched to syncing with Google Reader, they announced that they were going to stick ads in it and give people the option of paying to remove the ads. I don't have a problem with this, but I no longer need the product.

Brent, I've enjoyed using your software, but in my effort to simplify, Google Reader will suffice. While many people will argue that a desktop reader has so many more features than Google Reader, I ask, "do you need all those features?". I don't.

Yes, I am being sucked into the Google world and it isn't half bad (if you believe that your information has ever been private and secure, you are surely mistaken).