Filed under: We got our AT&T U-verse service installed today. It took a couple of hours, but the tech did a good job. We decided to only get the TV service and not the DSL because Wanda’s employer pays for our Internet access through Time Warner. I was sick of maintaining the separate media centers, and getting direct HD content is nice.
It has an amazingly clear picture (even with SD channels), and I like the menu interface much better than Time Warner’s. A few drawbacks include having to pay for each TV receiver (though that’s standard with other digital providers too), the menu includes channels that we don’t get in our package (so I have to scroll through a lot), and currently we can only watch recorded (DVR) shows on one TV. However, the tech said that by the end of the month, AT&T should be rolling out the “Home DVR” service, which lets you watch recorded shows on all TVs (it’s a simple software update).
One cool feature that we won’t get unless we sign up for DSL is the ability to record shows remotely. That would be cool, but it’s hard to complain about free broadband.
The technician was from Milwaukee. He said they’ve been busy lately due to the dispute between our local Fox affiliate and Time Warner (that means no Fox on Time Warner). He said AT&T was bring people in from other regions so they could keep up with demand. We didn’t switch because of the Fox thing, though. I wanted a maintenance-free, quality solution, and I didn’t like Time Warner’s DVR interface. AT&T’s interface is very decent (albeit a little slow). It’s based on Windows, so getting used to it was pretty easy because it’s very similar to Media Center.
We have U-Verse. Saved us a lot of money from Time Warner here in Milwaukee. My employer pays for our high-speed internet as well, but we just get reimbursed on our check every month, so I was able to get the U-Verse internet as well. I took the lowest grade (out of 4) knowing I’d have to upgrade to a faster level, but so far the $25/month level has been great, even for tv torrents and whatnot.
My only gripe is the interface. I feel I was spoiled by Media Center (even though it’s based off of MCE), I liked the “recorded tv” area better on MCE.
P.S. I viewed the source on your blog, see you’re running wordpress. It’s a fantastic piece of software, eh? I recommend the subscribe2 plugin, as well as the Flickr integration by Tan noodles. If you upgrade to WP 2.62 and install the latest of those two plugs, I’m sure you’ll be happy you did.
I liked the Media Center interface better (even though the Motorola boxes run Windows). However, I don’t compare it to a media center, since I wanted to get rid of those anyway. I compared it to Time Warner’s DVR, which I think has the worst interface of all the available services.
Wanda’s employer pays for Internet access also, but she didn’t want to submit the reimbursement every month, so we still get Internet from TW (which has automatic payment through her employer).
Yeah, I’m running WordPress 2.62. WordPress is great – I just wish it was more agnostic in the area of being a CMS instead of being focused on blogs. There are workarounds, and WP still rocks, but it would be nice. I’ll check out those plugins you mentioned.
It is my experience that anything that is purpose-agnostic ends up having way too much crap that I don’t need. There are a lot of great CMS’s out there, but all I needed was a solid blogging tool that allowed me to extend if needed…anything else can be worked around.
In the end,I’d say it’s one of the best free pieces of software I’ve used…does a great job fulfilling its purpose of providing customizeable blogging tool that anyone can use.
The fact that I love WordPress so much makes me want to use it for other, non-blog projects, without having the admin pages blog-centric. I suppose it’s possible to extend it in such a way, another reason why WP is great.