A Blessing in Disguise

Or How we Got Wise and Hooked our TV up to the Computer...

Last week on "Life on the Outskirts"...I was complaining much about losing our NBC channel reception. We've now been with only PBS for almost a month...

I knew about full episodes online. I tried to watch an Earl that I missed a couple of years ago. It was a miserable stuttering experience. Not worth the effort. Especially for a comedy when it relies on timing.

Then last year I learned about pausing and waiting for it to buffer. A better experience, but still much pausing and buffering. So really I only watched an episode of ER and Heroes that I had missed.

It never really occured to me that I could watch shows on other networks that I hadn't missed on the one network channel that we got. I was seriously bummed that Medium was switching networks. And I just never thought about watching it online.

My husband caught an episode of Medium while he was out of town and thought it was an especially good one. So when he got home we hooked his laptop up to the computer and watched it. It wasn't the best, the lips weren't in sync and even after pausing to buffer several times it would freeze.

We have a wireless connection set up on our desktop for our laptops. We realized that the wireless slows down the connection speed, so we brought the desktop out and hooked it all up to the TV.

And what we got? A little TV bliss!!

We did have to up our internet speed, which costs about $30 more a month (don't even get me started on that - we have ONE option for internet, which the fastest speed is about the speed of the slowest for most other internet providers and costs about 4 times as much [no competition]). But it still beats the cost of satellite.We just have to remember to clear the cache more often.

I feel civilized again.