Daily Archives: 29.Mar.04

Congress May Force Cable Companies to Offer a la carte Plans?

Yes this is lifted from Slashdot, but I was excited to see Congress following up on my idea (!) is looking into outrageous Cable TV rates and is threatening legislative action. Might as well get my Comcast bashing all done in one day. On the idea of cable channel packages,

“When I go to the grocery store to buy a quart of milk, I don’t have to buy a package of celery and a bunch of broccoli,” (Senator) McCain said. “I don’t like broccoli.”

I love the a la carte idea. It will cut my cable bill in half. Except they will probably charge $2/mo/channel making their packages look like a bargain.

Wrong Sci-Fi channel feed for the West Coast

When we moved to Marin from San Francisco, one of my early annoyances was constantly missing Stargate SG1 on the Sci-Fi channel Friday night. (When we stayed home of course. I mean we go out. Sometimes. Okay, not often. But hey, we’re married. Dinner and a movie are cheaper at home.)

I did some cursory troubleshooting to see if I was missing it by an hour (i.e Central Time Zone), but no. I was always very late. It wasn’t a big deal as Season 7 had Daniel’s replacement (who just wasn’t the same), and the story lines were somehow lacking. Daniel has since returned and since I haven’t been watching I have no idea how or why that happened nor what happened to his replacement. Anyway, I let it go figuring I’d figure it out with the reruns.

Then, at the beginning of this month, Tripping the Rift, started on Sci-Fi. I had seen the short demo version a couple years back and was interested in seeing a real show. The Sci-Fi channel said Thursday 10:30 pm, which makes sense, its pretty bawdy, but at 7:30pm it started. So once again I decided to find out what was going on. After visiting the Sci-Fi channels channel lineup, I realized they offer many different feeds (east coast, west coast, etc.) and I was obviously seeing the wrong one.

So I called Comcast twice, both times explaining the problem and I was assured a call back. Nada. I called again today and the operator told me there was no call history for the past month. Nice. I asked for a Supervisor. She took down my story and has assured me a call. We’ll see.

I’m pretty sure this is only happening in my little service area. But if any other Marinites are having this issue, let me know.