Domestic Geek

I'll be perfectly honest here about a couple of things.

First, I am not missing having the gazillion Dish stations at all. I thought I'd go through a little withdrawal or something, but I didn't. I'm amazed at how much time and energy I wasted on absolute garbage. There are many days now that I don't even turn on the television.

Second, Psych is becoming one of my favorite shows. When I first saw the preview for it last year, I thought it would be really dumb. A fake psychic detective. Um...yeah. I gave it a chance, though, because it was on the same night as Monk. I was pleasantly surprised. The show is hilarious. The chemistry between the two main characters, Shawn and Gus, is amazing. Yay that, unlike The 4400, their episodes are actually on iTunes.

This brings me to my next point — I need more iTunes gift certificates. I've just used up all the ones I've gotten as gifts or won and I need more to get my Psych episodes through iTunes. Your mission is to sign up as my Blingo and/or Winzy friend and win stuff so I can win, too. Click the buttons in the sidebar, please. It's literally a win-win since you'd win stuff, too.

Remember how I was so excited last week that USA had the season premieres of The 4400 and The Dead Zone on their site last Monday? Well, apparently that was a one shot deal. Jerks. I can get The Dead Zone through iTunes, but not The 4400. Damn it! So not cool.

You know how I said the only thing I was going to miss when we dropped our satellite package down to the bare minimum was Mythbusters and the stuff on The USA Network? Well, I guess it's only going to be Mythbusters now.

Yesterday was the season premieres for both The 4400 and The Dead Zone. I did one quick check of their site hoping for episodes to watch before I sank to bit torrenting them or something and THERE THEY WERE! Woo Hoo!!!! You have no idea how happy that made me!

I hope they keep showing them.

So Marcus and I spent a good part of this weekend ripping some of our DVD collection to our iTunes Server (with a handy little program called Handbrake so we can view them on our AppleTV. What sucks about the iTunes information palette is it is geared towards songs/music. What to do if you want to add metadata to the movie files so that you can see the rating, synopsis, director, actors, etc? You go download a cool little app called MetaX that I found through the Handbrake forums. It can grab the data from Amazon for you and then embed it into the movie file or you can enter in all that info yourself, if you're so inclined. It's pretty darned cool!

Have you, dear readers, been noticing the changes occurring in the way we can get our televised entertainment? With so many networks offering their programs up for viewing online and the reasonable prices to buy programs on iTunes, not to mention that you can get movies online, through the mail or at rental kiosks, I strongly suspect that cable and satellite services as we now know them will soon be a thing of the past.

A few months ago, I wrote how Marcus and I downgraded our Dish Network package. The other day we went down to only the most basic package available. For one thing, we rarely watch live television anymore. The programs we do watch are all on local stations except for just a couple (like Mythbusters or the stuff on USA-Monk, The 4400, etc). I've been watching most of my programming online since the networks keep moving stuff around. I watch 24 on DVD from Netflix. We watch The Office through iTunes. Why would one continue to pay a satellite company for multiple useless channels of crap? I don't need a dozen shopping channels and I shouldn't have to have Spanish-language stations that I can't watch. Even stations I used to watch religiously like HGTV or SciFi run the same old tired programs. MTV and VH1 can't even really be considered music television anymore.

Then there are scenarios where the companies shoot themselves in the foot. Take for instance what happened to my father. In an effort to get him to upgrade to a more expensive digital package, they took away his on-screen program guide. Seriously, is this any way to keep your customers happy?

If they're smart, they'll change their practices and offer a more a la cart service. Otherwise, they'll get left in the dust.