Can't remember when was last time I shot with a roll of tri-x.

On a boat trip to the P-town.

Today I had lunch with three coworkers from my previous job. Among them, I am the only one without a child. (granted, I am the youngest too...) So we talked about things and inevitably, the topic turned to kids.

Rich works for Bentley, a local university with student tuition shooting for high 40k a year: in the greater Boston area, almost all private colleges are money crunchers. While we were whining about how much it costs for kids to go to college nowadays, Rich mentioned if he held on to his job long enough, his oldest son, who is 7 years old now, will be able to go to Bentley for free. Hmm... let's do the math: if Bentley charges 50K a year for a four year program by then, he'll be able to save 200K from the tuition! Or that translates into a 50K bonus a year! That's a lot of $.

So that's a no-brainer: take a little bit of pay cut, get tons of vacations, work in a slow-paced environment, and your kids go to school for free. What are we waiting for, everybody who has a high-school-age kid should start monstering for an academia job! Of course, that's when you can find a decent job, your kids are willing to go to the same school you go to everyday, and your boss is not a jackass. :-) But given the trend of the growth in university tuitions, this idea may be really attractive to those who can't afford their children's education.

I am going to build a web site for university jobs and sell it to Monster tomorrow.

Last night my order of the KyLinTV set top box arrived - it's a slick yellow hybrid box the size of a laptop. I said "hybrid" because it has the regular AV output jacks aligned with RJ-45, USB and even a mount for Wi-Fi antenna.

Once powered on, a set up screen (in Chinese, yeah!) somewhat similar to Windows 98 network configuration appears - SSID, WEP key, router, DHCP, DNS server, all that usual stuff. The on-screen key pad is a pain in the arse, and I can't believe the keypad is missing some keys like the semicolon and the plus sign!!! This is even more brilliant than some web sites who say "please don't use special characters as part of your password". Hello?

The set up was a bit of hassle: besides the WEP key, I completely forgot I've restricted my wi-fi access with MAC filtering. So after running up and down a few times on my stairs b/w my desktop, laptop and the set up box, we're finally wired. Now it's the moment of truth: how well can this piece of yellow matchbox performe with my Comcast broadband Internet?

I flipped onto a news piece, my mom standing next to me in excitement - after the 2-week long blockade of Chinese news media, she's dying to see anybody speaking Chinese on TV - now a baby-faced anchorman appears on the screen, and... he started speaking! Alright! It works! But wait... what's that "buffering" stuff on the corner of the screen? Oh, it must be some initial buffering, let it settle down... OK it's streaming again... cool... hey! Why is it buffering again??? #($*%^!(@#!...

So our first experience of IP TV was not good - the video jitters every few seconds, it's simply unwatchable. Going over the manual in frustration, I found a test utility for bandwidth utlization. The minute-long ping test rendered my connection speed at a miserable 0.36Mbps, hell, even Lucent's stock chart is doing better than that. Sigh... not Comcast again.

I had so much horrible experience with Comcast that I was in joy when I found out the state of Massachusetts was filing a class action law suit against them. Helplessly, I dialed the 1-800-comcast (or should it be 1-800-get-grumpy?) number, started ramping with a poor operator girl somewhere in Canada. She finally gave up or got lost in the mix of my sarcastic comments and technical jargons, and called up a technician, who claimed to be looking at IP TV himself and seemed to know the difference between megabits and kilobits. The conversation ended up like this:

Me: Hey Robert, you said you're looking into IP TV yourself right?
Robert: Yes I am.
Me: Are you using Comcast by any chance?
Robert: (after a short pause) No I don't, we don't have Comcast in Canada.
Me: Good for you man. And stay the hell away from it.
Robert: (laughs) I understand.

Oh well. The customer service proved themselves again that they can't do jack about your problem. All over their web site Comcast is promising 1.5Mbps but I am getting only 1/4 of what I paid for. This sucks.

In despair and disgust I flip on the bandwidth test again, the line starts crawling... and this time it stayed higher, the final result said 0.56Mbps. Hmm... interesting, let's do it again, 0.67Mbps, at some point the speed actually spiked over 800kbps, the recommended speed by KyLin TV. Magically the speed kept growing, like a beat up car starting up in a dead, cold winter night. And finally it averaged over 0.8Mbps and viola, the baby-faced anchorman finally was able to speak for more than 2 minutes without being frozen like a pre-historic mammoth caught in an ice-age storm.

Exhausted and still anxious, I went to bed. No dreams about the Internet or TV.

Woke up in the morning, my first thought was "let's check the bandwidth". And this time, the number jumped to nearly 3Mbps. Wow! That's amazing! It must be all my evil neighbors who knew I am getting an IP TV and conspired to slow down my Internet last night! No, it must be all the west coast Chinese parents who were watching the latest security-guard-beating-up-journalists-news last night!

So there it is, I left the house with my parents watching their beloved CCTV-4. And we'll find out how KyLin TV is doing on its first day at work.

Welcome to IP TV.