Happy New Year!
I finished the year with some big changes. After living for over twenty years at our last location, we’ve moved to a new part of our home state. There are several reasons, but mostly, we’re moving to be closer to my work. But there are challenges.
I’m the primary income earner in our household. But, the opportunities at our last location were somewhat limited for programmers like me. There are a handful of companies that employ more than one or two programmers. I’ve worked at one of them. I wouldn’t work for another. The rest don’t offer much in the way of a challenge or compensation.
For these reasons, I’ve been working remotely for five out of the last six years. Living mostly out of hotels, it has been a worthwhile sacrifice because it has allowed us to send our kids to the college of their choice (schools in the University of California system) while incurring minimum debt. For the last three years, I’ve been working for a company near our new location. So, all things considered, we moved.
And then, (after we sign ALL the documents related to purchasing a home), the client that is paying for the development project that I’m working on has some financial trouble. Almost overnight, he has stopped paying his bills. Which puts my employer in the tough spot of trying to pay us what he can without going broke himself.
For sure, that has added some stress onto our move. However that is not the worst of it. Worse, than having to worry about where your next paycheck is coming from, is the fact that we are having to make do without… television.
When planning on moving to our new place, our thought was to use the internet as a source for much of our television watching (we only watch a handful of channels anyway), supplemented with over-the-air (OTA) broadcasts of the main television networks.
So, we have set up the HD television (which we are borrowing from our youngest daughter; long story there!) and perform the “auto-scan” of channels.
Nothing. As in “no channels found.” How can that be? This is one of those new-fangled High Definition digital flat-screen TVs. They get everything, right?
It turns out that our new home is about 100 miles from the transmission towers used by the broadcast stations in this region. To make matters worse, we are in a television “shadow” such that most television signals simply pass over the top of our area, without giving the people here a chance to catch the signal. So that’s why all the neighbors have satellite dishes on their homes.
On the plus side, it has allowed us to find some new shows like Misfits and some old ones like Corner Gas. Also, since most network shows are available on the networks’ websites, we will still be able to watch most of our shows. Just a day later than most people.
Maybe this will make me read more books…. Nah!