WordPress released 2.7 and… it’s pretty dope. Yes, I said ‘dope.’ Anyways, this upgrade is a radical change to previous installations. After messing around with it a bit and finding this ready-to-go theme which already includes this drop-down menu system… I’m a enthusiastic about blogging again. Yes I know, you’ve heard this before. But this time I mean it, I will finish my goal to have this site be able to share my large volume of photos and vid clips I normally just keep to myself.

We are officially without Comcast now… nice.

For internet, went the way of Clearwire. It is a starting company that has grown rapidly in the recent year. Their thing is wireless internet. Coverage area is spotty, but they have the major populated areas covered from Bellingham to Olympia and out on they Olympic Peninsula as well. Lynnhood is well covered on the map, so I gave it a go.

Upon setting it up – just plugging it into a wall outlet, my first thoughts were that this wasn’t going to be very fast and that it was very sensitive to it’s surroundings. The signal strength is indicated by 5 lights on the top of the modem – I tried everywhere, getting more than 3 lights on wasn’t going to happen. I left it on top of the TV where it was had 4 and 5 lights on for brief moments.

After actually plugging it into my router and the computers in the apartment… THIS THING IS AWESOME. I haven’t yet pinged to see how fast it really is. But it passed the ‘real life’ test with flying colors. I had one laptop that I was reinstalling Windows and all the updates since 2000 (yeah, that is a lot), one laptop streaming music, one laptop doing just normal web browsing, and I was downloading a collection of large files on my PC. The streaming music would have paused and several downloads would have failed with my old Comcast connection. I’m happy.

Now as for what to do for TV. Seems that Qwest, Verizon, and anything else that might come through the wall isn’t available in our area. Direct TV seems to be the only answer without crawling back to the dark empire. I tried a gadget I picked up off Woot that advertised free HDTV and expanded cable. It is a funny collection of an antenna, a usb/coax connection with a mini-usb side port for rca s-video out. Many steps were needed for the installation and several updates were required to download to connect. Finally it was up and running. Well, I was able to pick up 4 HDTV signals, none of which worth mentioning; and the usual analog broadcasts out of Seattle. Poor picture quality. Bunny-ears would have been much better.