First off, I'll echo what I said this morning. Love the broadband net access. I'm downloading an apt-get upgrade right now, with a sustained transfer rate of 384kB/s. This is way faster than my DSL was. Amazing. And it costs less too. I'm totally hooked on that.

As for the tv, well... Came home and did some channel surfing, and was most impressed with the available selection. Did something I historically don't do very often, which is to just scan through channels, looking at whatever is mildly interesting, and then when a commercial hits, surf some more.

Found various bits of interesting programming. A Buffy rerun from one of the early seasons on FX. I'd love to catch up on all that backstory I missed. A TOS episode running on the Scifi channel, with mediocre video quality and noticable compression artifacts. Oh well. Filmed in the 60s, how great can you expect it to be? The Howard Stern show, which is, well, Howard Stern. Most people either love him or hate him. (Strangely, I lean toward "mostly indifferent", but interesting in a freak show T&A sort of way.)

Tried out the search feature, which the installer guy had showed me this morning. Very nifty. Enter the name of a show, and it lists all the times it comes on for the next week or so. Naturally, I entered X E N A, and happily got a whole bunch of entries. Approximately twice daily, it looks like.

But unfortunately, that's where we get to the negative rant half of my review. After some more random surfing, I noticed while browsing through the guide that Xena was about to come on right away. Switched to the appropriate channel (Oxygen network, I think it was), and started watching. A big black bar obstructed the bottom portion of the screen, and on it flashed stupid little messages, ads, urls, and other crap. And it didn't go away. During ads, it simply supplemented the ad with info about the advertiser. During the show, it featured various tidbits about the actors, news, more urls, and invitations to come to the website and chat. GrrrrrrrrrRRRRRRRRR!

That is no way to watch a tv show. A little grey watermark identifying the channel is tolerable, but to have an entire portion of the image cut out, and replaced with distracting garbage is utterly infuriating. And I'm paying how much for this service?

Frustrated, I decided that, like pan-and-scan-and-chop movies, it wasn't worth the desecration to continue watching, and surfed on in hopes of something better. My hopes rose when I found a TNG rerun on the menu. I switched to it, only to discover that the SAME STUPID SHIT was being plastered on the bottom of its screen space.

How utterly obnoxious. At that point, I pretty much gave up on the tv thing, and decided there are more fulfilling ways to spend one's evening. Even with all the whiz bang neatness, I have to question whether it's really worth > $40 / month for this. I dunno. I'm sure there are gonna be cool things to watch which don't feature the image mutilation witnessed on the reruns tonight. I'm still pretty pissed about the needless dilution of what could be a very cool selection of content though.

I'll try it for a few weeks and see. If there isn't enough non-butchured stuff I want to watch to make it worth the money, I'll cancel the tv subscription. But there might be. We'll see.