For more fun Lost products see our page at http://lost.tvfantees.com with some of our favorite designs by other CafePress shopkeepers.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they allowed us to watch live feeds online, but the only live video on nbcolympics.com are hockey and curling. No other sports are shown live here! The website does offer a lot of replays, but they are only available for people with a TV subscription. That’s right, you have to log in to Comcast, AT&T or whatever your TV provider is to watch NBC’s Olympic videos online. That is wrong on so many levels. NBC is a free broadcast station! I’ve read of people who tried to log in with their cable account only to be shown a message that they don’t have the premium package. At least it works for us, and we have the smallest Comcast package.

My family in the Netherlands (and I’m sure in most other countries in the world) can watch the games on multiple stations on TV and multiple feeds online. Unfortunately these live videos on foreign websites are blocked for people outside these countries, because of rights issues. It’s unfortunate that there are no alternatives for us here. In Holland I used to be able to switch to Euronews, BBC, Belgian, German or French TV … but here it’s just NBC.

It isn’t even so bad for us here in the Chicago area. On the west coast NBC is apparently showing everything on tape-delay! People in California and Seattle are in the same timezone as the actual Olympics in Vancouver and they are seeing everything 2 or 3 hours late. Even the opening ceremony on Friday was shown 2 hours late. That’s just unacceptable in a time when everyone’s on Twitter and Facebook sharing things. It’s just impossible for people on the west coast to see anything without first hearing the results somewhere. Local NBC affiliates have started to apologize about the matter.

For more people complaining about NBC poor coverage see #nbcfail on Twitter or the NBC Olympics Coverage Sucks group on Facebook.

Today I received my statement for the next period and the total amount due is $135. Obviously, I thought that this was the regular price and the promotion hadn’t kicked in yet, but upon closer inspection it does have the promotion price, but there is a mysterious $50 surcharge for internet installation. Why are they charging me $50 for installation when 1. we’ve had internet at this address for six months and 2. installation is free; we didn’t pay anything for installation six months ago! It’s like they ‘accidentally’ put in the $50 to bring the total amount to what I would have paid if I hadn’t signed up for the new promotion, just to see if I was paying attention. The exact same thing happened a few months ago when my bill was completely wrong. I had paid too much the month before, but to level it out in the next bill they put in a bogus deposit amount just to make the total amount be exactly like the previous amount’s balance. Talk about creative accounting!

I just called Comcast and they acknowledged the mistake and I only need to pay $85 this month. Will I get a new statement? No, they can’t do that.

You really have to pay attention with these guys. I signed up for automatic payments for all our other monthly bills, but Comcast is the only company I don’t trust and I continue to pay them manually each month. If you have Comcast, check your bills and make sure they are not screwing you too!

I find that Comcast can be very unclear about their pricing structure. I’ve called them a couple of times asking what the regular price will be after these first six months and got different answers. The monthly bills I receive are just hilariously complicated; the first one in February was completely wrong and even the Comcast person on the phone did not understand what was meant with the different figures and charges listed. Unlike Dish Network, which clearly states in their ads what the promotional price and regular price is, with Comcast you really need to dig and read fine print to find out what the regular price will be after your promotion ends. It’s all very sneaky. It turns out that starting this month our monthly Comcast bill would go up to about $135.

That’s really too much. We hardly watch any TV besides the basic local channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, etc) which are free with antenna (and in crystal clear HD too). We get about 100 channels in our Comcast TV package and only watch a handful of them. In fact, there are some I’d really like to have but those are not included. I’d like to have SyFy Channel and NASA TV, but those are in the next package up, with 70 more channels. I really wish one could just pick the channels you wanted and pay for those. I refuse to pay an additional $20 per month just to get SyFy and NASA. NASA TV especially should be included; it’s a public channel paid for by taxpapers and you can even watch it for free online!

I’ve read a few times that you can call Comcast and negotiate about the price. I can’t believe this is common practice here in the United States. I’ve haggled on the price of souvenirs in Egypt and India, but never on that of my cable television bill. But apparently it’s quite normal to call your TV provider here, tell them you will leave if they don’t lower your monthly costs and they’ll give you an offer. I called them this morning and told them that I wanted to cancel my TV package and just have internet. Immediately they had another promotion to offer that I could take advantage of. For just $69 per month I can continue to have the same TV and internet service for the next 12 months. With surcharges this comes down to the same price I’ve been paying per month. It’s not really an option to cancel TV and keep internet, because that would be about the same price. It’s really a ‘buy one get one free’ deal. *sigh*

So now we’ll have Comcast for another 12 months and I’ll have to watch my SyFy shows online. Not all shows are available online for free, but I’ve figured that buying those that are not free is still cheaper than paying for the next package at Comcast. Comcast really needs get their act together. More and more people are canceling their cable TV since websites like Hulu are offering TV shows online. I would pay Comcast the same for less channels if I could pick which ones I wanted. I know it should be possible technically, they’re just trying to hang on to the old ways for as long as they can.

Fast foward to 3:05 in the following video to see the segment:

These last few months we’ve been using our Playstation 3 to feed TV shows and movies from Hulu and Netflix to our TV, using PlayOn as a media server. This way we are able to watch almost all of the shows we want to watch for free and in pretty good quality, but I still miss watching the news on CNN and shows on some other channels. More and more people are giving up their cable subscription in favor of watching TV online. With the tough economy cable TV seems like a luxury to many, especially with services like Hulu.

We signed up at Comcast.com last week and were disappointed to find out that the earliest the technician could come by would be 3 weeks later, on February 20nd. Due to the planned digital transition on February 17th they were apparently fully booked with people who needed to get cable on their analog TVs to be able to continue watching TV after the 17th. I called Comcast a few times to ask if anything opened up but even last Wednesday the earliest day had already moved back to the 28th if we wanted to reschedule. But then on Thursday Congress voted to delay the transition to June 12th after reports that millions of U.S. homes are not yet ready for the switch. A half day later I got an email from Comcast that our appointment was moved up by two weeks to the next day. Gosh, apparently the announcement of the postponed transition made many people cancel their cable appointment.

The cable guy came right on time yesterday. The email had given a window of three hours between 1pm and 4pm, but in the morning we still received a phone call with an automated message that the technician would arrive between 1pm and 2pm, which was nice. He had to do quite some rewiring to make the outlet work in the room where we wanted to have TV. He drilled a hole on one side of the house; ran a cable from the outside cable box through the crawl space under the house to the other side; drilled another hole to make the cable go outside; and a couple of feet higher he drilled another hole to make it go back in into our living room. Holy smokes! I thought this was quite funny; most homes in the Netherlands are made of concrete and stone and you wouldn’t be able to rewire this easily. He was busy with the wires for about an hour and then set up our TV and internet connection. He explained how the remote of the TV box worked and then left. But 5 minutes later as I was flipping around the channels I noticed that none of the HD channels were working. Upon calling the Comcast helpdesk I was informed that I didn’t have an HD receiver, which is apparently $9 per month extra. D’oh! Why did no one tell me about this? I signed up for the digital package with half the channels in HD and they gave me a non-HD box. The technician could have said something too, he saw our nice Vizio HDTV. Now we’re going to have to go to a Comcast shop to trade in our box.

I’m looking forward to watching our new TV channels in HD. Hulu and Netflix are great, but I do want to check out cable TV for at least a few months. We’ll keep track of how much we watch these channels through Comcast and go from there. One thing I’m worried about is the 250 GB per month cap that Comcast introduced last October. This means that if you watch a lot of HD shows and movies online you could get in trouble and have your internet connection suspended. I’m going to have to keep track of our bandwidth and see how much we’re using. I saw that we have Comcast On Demand on our TV box with free TV shows and movies as well, including recent episodes of popular shows. If that works well we may not need to watch as much online as we’ve been. To be continued.

A lot of the reviews on Amazon complained about the bad packaging of these DVDs – apparantly lots of folks got their boxset with many of their discs scratched – but I’ve inspected all 54 discs and they look okay. Last night I finished the first season, and all discs played fine. It’s great to know that the show is just going to get better, so I have a lot to look forward to. I must say that I’m a bit disappointed about the image quality of the episodes so far. The picture is very grainy, almost like they were transferred from bad VHS tapes. I hope that this will get better in later seasons.

The first few episodes of the first season were a bit simple (Jack brings disease through Stargate), but as the season progressed the stories became more interesting. My favorite episodes were The Nox, Enigma and Solitudes, and the season finale three-parter was especially exciting (minus the lame flashback episode inbetween) with a major cliffhanger. Now I can’t wait to see the rest of them.

21 episodes down, 190 to go!

Unfortunately, The Daily Show will only be on twice per week, and it looks like it will be the ‘global edition’ that we also get on CNN International. This is a compilation show of the best clips of the week with a short introduction by Jon Stewart. It’s probably the same episode that they show twice. I think this is too bad, they should just show the original episodes four times per week.

I’m also disappointed to see that they didn’t include The Colbert Report in their programming. No truthiness yet for the Dutch, it seems. I think The Daily Show and The Colbert report could do well here; there’s nothing like it on Dutch TV and both shows give a great perspective on US politics and the news.

European Commissioner Viviane Reding said today “We don’t want an American style of television, with permanent commercials”, and this has been quoted throughout the media today. But, what does that mean? American style with permament commercials?!? A typical half-hour of television in the United States has 22 minutes of programming, 6 minutes of commercials and 2 minutes of local programming (source Wikipedia). This comes down to an average of 12 minutes per hour, which is exactly the same as here in Europe. So what is she talking about?

American style of television is to have more, shorter commercial breaks, which is exactly what the European countries decided to follow today. Personally, I prefer that a lot more than the two or three very long commercial breaks per hour that we now have on Dutch television.

Much of our programming comes from the United States, and those sitcoms and series are made to have four commercial breaks in them. Until now Dutch television was forced to change this and place their breaks in different parts of an episode, which often doesn’t work; the commercial breaks often end up in awkward places or in the middle of scenes.

An exception to the rule that was agreed today, is that children’s and news programming may not have a commercial break in the first half hour.

Day by day the location and dangers of space have tested the endurance of these seven heroes; the men and women have had to form their own cooperative space station society, preparing for dangerous challenges, and using their collective wits to make surviving, without the comforts and conveniences of Earth, a little easier.

It’s the ultimate reality TV show, and only six will return to the surface this weekend, while one, one of the seven astronauts, will be left behind at the station.

Deprived of their family, friends and gravity, the seven astronauts have thus far performed outstandingly in all challenges. Highlights of the mission so far have been the three enduring spacewalks, heartwarming challenges, in which we all saw how Piers and Mike bonded as they were instructed to perform the most difficult of maneuvers in their space suits.

We gasped when Piers’ emergency jet thruster backpack started to loosen on two connection points; we laughed when Mike’s tether was entangled with Piers’; and we wiped away a tear when the station flew over the British Isles and Piers said: “Wow! Oh, my goodness. It’s a beautiful day in Ireland.”

The purposes of the exciting challenges in this multi-million dollar reality show have been to test new safety and repair techniques, as well as to deliver supplies and equipment to the station.

Today, the crew will undock from the station and start their perilous journey back to Earth. Will the NASA astronauts survive their re-entry in Earth’s atmosphere? The Shuttle has been cleared for re-entry, but will it’s heat shield withstand the tremendous energy that will be unleashed upon it to safely bring our six heroes back?

Tune in Monday at 9am GMT for the grand finale, when Space Shuttle Discovery breaks orbit for a landing at the Kennedy Space Center.