It's been about two full years since I've actually watched a tv show on cable here in Victoria, commercials included. I did today, and what do you know, that god-forsaken Money Tree caterpillar is still pumping out new ads. I just about threw my remote at the screen.

Why does anybody have cable anymore? Everything is free online (albeit not legally), without commercials, in high quality. The internet is everything that cable and satellite want to be, but aren't. I got cable just this week because Shaw, the drug-pushers that they are, actually finagled with my bills so as to save me money for getting cable. What they do, in addition to the 6-month promotional offer, is extend my existing 6-month internet promotional ($10 per month) to a full year. After the math is done, I'll have saved 30 bucks a month for six months, so long as at the end of November, I cancel the cable and keep the internet. Or to put it another way, refusing the cable promotion would actually cost me 180 bucks.

The logic, I assume, is that enough people just end up keeping the cable TV to justify the loss leader of extending the promotions, thanks to the fact that television is addictive. So now it's in my house, and this time, I'm not watching it. As long as that money tree caterpillar keeps showing his face, this addiction should be easy to fend off.

In other news, school starts on Thursday.


Oh and one other thing. Any readers out there who also have blogs with blogger.com? Notice how, when you press the publish button, it says "Your blog post published successfully!"? As though the website has something to brag about... Imagine if your car displayed that message on the dash, "Your engine has started successfuly!" every time you turned the key... in a very real way, wouldn't that give you less faith in the machine?

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