Creative Fray

It was march of last year (2008) and I had changed jobs and was moving into a new apartment. The apartment was a small one bedroom but well layed out and brand new (I like new). My new job meant that I’d be working from home so the place where my entertainment center would be going in the new place was suddenly the home office. My TV was a 12 year old 25″ tube TV. All the control buttons were gone off the front and the remote was begining to no longer work not to mention, the entertainment system wasn’t going to work if I moved to a flat screen TV anyway so it wasn’t hard to part with either in the subsequent garage sale. 

In addition to losing the space for my TV I had already decided to drop cable (in my case satellite) when I moved because being glued to the TV all day would be too much of a temptation when working from home 24/7. I’m the type of person who will channel surf until they find something even if they aren’t super interested in it, and there goes the whole day. 

But just because I was cutting the cable didn’t mean I was giving up my shows that I was really interested in. Three things online had made it possible to make this shift rather painless… 1. ABC.com, 2. Hulu.com, 3. iTunes. With the introduction of full episodes online of practically all my favorite shows it assured me that I would be able to see them, I just had to wait a day (or in some cases 8 days-House!) The 24 hour delay was well worth the cash I was saving. My DSL bill was half of just my cable bill and now it essentially provided both and with far fewer commercials than I’d lived with before. 

I travel a lot with my new job and so iTunes is great as well for when I need to watch last nights episode of Grey’s and be on a plane to Portland all at the same time. 

With half of my living room now a home office and my powermac and 23″ cinema display right there  in the room I in effect had a 23″ HD TV sitting right there. At night I would simply swivel the monitor and speakers to face my couch and I was there! I got a USB IR sensor so that I could control the mac with my Apple remote while sitting on the couch. It wasn’t a bad set up to say the least.

The best thing about not having cable has been that I spend less time watching TV just to fill time and more time doing other things like work and pursuing creative endeavors. 

When I moved from Longview to Nashville I got a 2 bedroom apartment so I could have an office that wasn’t right in the middle of my living space. However this meant that my “TV” just got religated to the other room. I spent several months watching all my shows on my laptop. During that time I found an insane deal on a 32″ JVC LCD but I only used it for watching DVD’s, all my shows were still showing on my laptop (generally sitting on the coffee table so I could still sit on the couch). 

Then it was Oscar time and was trying to figure out how I was going to watch it live. I knew they would have it the next day online but live broadcasts are only worth watching if you know half the country is watching with you. To watch the next day would be pointless because I’d already know the results. So I scampered off to Walmart of all places and picked up a $30 amplified digital antenna. There it was ABC in all its HD glory. It was great! Not to mention that now, if I was home and could remember, I could watch my shows in real time and on my TV instead of my laptop. 

The final piece of the puzzle came a couple weeks ago when I finally got around to purchasing a Mac mini to connect to my TV. That was the absolute point of no return for me. I will never have cable again and I don’t miss it.

If you want to find out how I set up my Mac mini in the living room check out my previous post here.