Cutting the Cord, three weeks in

Canceled DirecTV yesterday. When Lori called to cancel, they asked why.  She said we were trying to save money and they offered to continue the subscription, but for $30 less per month.  So if you have DirecTV, definitely call and try to cancel.

Last week DirecTV's DVR didn't record Survivor for some reason. We plugged in the laptop and went to CBS.com and watched it.  This week it recorded fine.  We're watching tonight.  It'll be interesting to see tomorrow if it will let us watch recorded stuff off the DVR or not.  We made a list of everything that was on it.  When we turn it on this morning, it just says that nothing's authorized, so we can't get to recordings on the DVR or any channels, not that this was a surprise. The iPhone app registers an "unknown error" - guess they never bothered to write error handling for lapsed accounts. The DirecTV2PC app on our laptop also loads up, shows the shows and then responds with a generic "An error has occurred." alert if you try to play anything. Not surprised, but thought it was worth a shot.

Thanks to the way CenturyLink and DirecTV do their billing, we haven't purchased our Roku yet. We had to pay for this month and then wait to figure out who's going to send us a refund.  When I had been researching the Roku, I started getting ads from Amazon advertising it for $10 less than it was listed on their site.  But when I'd click through the ad, it would show the full price and not the advertised price. An email this morning from DirecTV confirms end of service, but it's all about additional ways they might bill you for more stuff.

Hulu Plus charges sales tax. Whatever. Still, a little bit of a surprise.

Our daughter's had frustration with the Wii remote going to sleep while she's watching Netflix.  She's not remembering to wake it up and getting deeply frustrated when her little brother interrupts her and she wants to pause it or rewind a little bit.  Often the Wii will need to be restarted or the Airport Express will need to be restarted before it will play well without stuttering or the app crashing.  May have to move the router and printer over and wire in the Wii directly or try to encourage more devices to plug in downstairs.  Or buy another Airport Express, but that's a last resort.  (We have to keep unplugging the router and plugging it back in before we print, so maybe it's just a problem with the refurbished router.)

Our big TV was someone's cast-off about 8 or 9 years ago and they had lost the remote. Thanks to Sony and Samsung's website, it was super easy to set up the Blu-Ray and VHS remotes to control the TV.