Cyclones and Big Red!

After a very busy week of work, a 5-hour band practice, and a rainy-turned-sunny band gig at Thursdays on First (thanks to everyone who came down to watch!) I am looking forward to a wonderful, relaxing 3-day Labor Day weekend! Started out Friday with our development cluster at working being shut down at noon, which effectively meant we couldn't do much, so after the traditional Friday man-lunch at Famous Dave's, headed home and after tying up a few more work loose ends, made some tea and curled up with a book as the weather outside was cold and rainy (high of 63...yeah right!)

Happy Hour at Catch 22 with some friends and a later evening get-together with some others capped off Friday.

And today...the official opening Saturday of college football. It all started earlier on Thursday night with my alma mater Iowa State Cyclones beating Northern Illinois 27-10! And tonight, Nebraska opens at home against Western Kentucky at 6pm. This is my first college football season "off the TV grid", the Nebraska game would have been available on PPV but I can either listen or join one of my Nebraska buddies at one of the sports bars and watch there.

To update my "off the TV grid" quest status - I knew college football was likely going to be the toughest of the things to be able to replicate because it's live so you can't watch after-the-fact videos or buy them on DVD or whatever. I still get the main OTA broadcast channels including ABC which is where many of the games are on, and I am now learning about ESPN3.com which streams MANY of the day's games (including some of the ones that are on regular ESPN). So for me anyway, that leaves the games that are on Fox Sports Net as "unavailable" to me at home. Which will be somewhat of a problem this year, but next year when Nebraska is in the Big 10 and on the Big Ten Network, I see that they are going to provide live internet streaming. The main downside is that these probably won't be in HD - but I imagine that will change.

So far I haven't had to upgrade my internet connection speed, but it is probably inevitable if I can start streaming HD and doing things like Netflix. But even a $10 or $20 increase in my ISP bill is still an $80 savings over what I was paying for satellite (and internet speed-ups benefit all my internet usage - working at home, browsing, email, etc.).

Otherwise we haven't missed having "grid" TV at all - most of the TV we've watched in the summer has been DVD/computer video stuff, including catching up on some seasons of TV shows we had missed.