Versus HD on Comcast

Was really looking forward to watching Philadelphia play Montreal tonight on Versus HD, but it is unwatchable. For starters, the picture quality is horrible. The picture has a yellowish tint which no other channel has. It also is slightly pixelated...guess they are doing the extra compression to squeeze more down their limited infrastructure. But the biggie is the picture keeps stuttering. THis is going to give me a headache.

As far as sound quality...this sounds like it is being transmitted over a AM radio. WTF is going on?

It really should tell you something when I am seriously thinking of switching to FiOS as soon as they run the line from the street to my house even though i work for Comcast and get their service for free.

Verizon FiOS

Verizon ran FiOS down the street this week! They only ran the lines on the telephone poles and not to houses yet. I would assume they will be hitting the houses in the next week or two. That 20/20 package sounds very good.

Attached Storage

I have been hunting around for some sort of attached storage device. Sure I can backup my music, movies, and photos on DVDs, but that is a pain. It would be great to have something i can access from all of my computers. And we run Ubuntu, Windows XP and OSX. Oh...and i want RAID support so i do not have to worry about losing everything.

I refuse to give M$ any more money so that rules out M$ Home Server, which does not support OSX or Ubuntu anyways.

I looked at http://www.drobo.com. That is a pretty cool device, however, look at the price.... $499 for the base unit, and $199 for the Ethernet add-on! BTW- that is without any hard drives! So $700 just to get started. Plus it does not really support Linux anyhow. Perhaps if the $499 included the Ethernet add-on i would just get it and hack the Linux support via the info on their forums.

I also saw http://www.freenas.org/ which looks like it may be the thing. However, a bit intimidating at first glance.

I guess i am really looking for a simple appliance i can just plug into my network and go. And i do not want to have to spend $1000 for it either. Perhaps i should just wait a bit and hopefully with more competition prices will drop.

Comcast Outage

Nothing like waking up in the morning, making coffee, sitting down infront of the computer and not being able to access half the internet. I can get to a couple of sites, but the one i want to hit the most: http://www.mythos.com, i can not.

I have been on hold with Comcast for over 35 minutes now...