Cheating On Cable

Internet, Netflix, Television

hdtv_smallHi, I’m TechyDad and I’m a cheater.  I’ve been cheating for years as has been my wife.  My kids have been cheating too.

Confused?  Let me back up a bit.

With the rise of Internet video services, a lot of people have found that they aren’t reliant on cable TV for their video entertainment fix.  At first, there were simply short videos on sites like YouTube.  Entertaining, but no match for the ongoing half hour or hour long series that aired on cable.  Then came services like Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand with many series available to watch and YouTube channels dedicated to longer/ongoing shows.

At this point, many people decided that they didn’t need cable TV anymore.  They "cut the cord" and ditched cable.  Although more and more people were doing this, cable companies kept denying that cable cutting was a major trend.  They just couldn’t see how people could replace them with Internet video.  Although some cable executives have begun acknowledging the trend, to most cord cutters were a fringe group, easily ignored.

Now, however, the cable companies have identified a new threat:  Cord Cheaters.  By the sound of it, you might think this means people who get cable without paying for it.  Or, perhaps, it’s people who somehow manage to get premium channels when they’ve only paid for basic.  That’s not what this is referring to, however.  "Cord cheaters" are people who don’t use the cable company’s Pay Video On Demand features and instead pay companies like Netflix or Amazon VOD for video content.

According to DigitalSmiths Corp’s "Video Trends Discovery Report", only 27.1% of respondents have made purchases from the cable company’s VOD menu.   For comparison, 41.7% pay a Netflix monthly fee and 48.2% use a subscription over-the-top service.  This has cable companies worried.  They’re worried that money is flowing to other companies when it could be going to them.

Of course, the reason that this money isn’t flowing to them is that companies like Netflix are providing a better service.  There is more on Netflix for me and my kids to watch than on all of my cable providers’ VOD channels put together.  In addition, it works smoother, has a nicer interface, and costs less.  Is it any wonder that we "cheat" on our cable company with Netflix?

Even though this report is recent, some cable companies have already seen this coming.  They have tried taking "precautions" in the form of low usage caps and overage fees instead of improving their VOD services.  Time Warner Cable trialed caps as low as 5GB, but withdrew them when people complained about how low they were.  They later brought them back as an "optional service" where you would save $5 a month but get a 5GB cap.  Of course, every 1GB you went over cost you $1 so the savings were minimal, if any.

Usage caps, especially low ones, mean that users who watch videos online will have a hard limit on how much online videos can be watched.  Make the caps low enough and the overage fees high enough and Internet video becomes too expensive to use.  Even a customer does use Internet video, the cable company winds up getting more money.  This is a win-win for the cable company, but a lose-lose for consumers.

Unfortunately, most customers don’t have much of a choice in their ISP.  In my case, my only choice of broadband is Time Warner Cable.  If they decided to implement low caps tomorrow, I’d have no recourse.  They wouldn’t have an incentive to provide me with better service because there would be no competition.

Still, the Internet video genie is out of the bottle and no amount of trickery from cable companies will get it shoved back in.  In fact, when you get right down to it, I find the term "cord cheater" to be insulting. "Cheater" implies that I’m doing something wrong and possibly illegal by paying a company other than my cable company for video services.  I didn’t.  Everything I did was perfectly legal.  If the cable company doesn’t like it, then they need to compete with a better service, not scare tactics and rhetoric.

NOTE: The "HDTV" image above is by jgm104 and is available from OpenClipArt.org.

Introduction To Catan

Games

settlers_of_catanOn Saturday, NHL and JSL got some delayed Chanukah presents from family members that had come into town.  While JSL got a Monsters University playset, I was much more excited over NHL’s gift: Settlers of Catan.

I’ve wanted to get NHL into gaming for a long time now.  We played a couple of games of Nuclear War last year, but never got to play much more after that.  This was the perfect opportunity.  NHL began a game with his Aunt M and Uncle I, but Uncle I had to bow out of the game at one point so I took over his spot.  NHL, Aunt M, and I played over the next two days.  Both NHL and I quickly learned the rules and had a blast building roads, trading bricks for wood or sheep, and gaining victory points.

In case you don’t know how to play, the hexagon shaped tiles are laid out in the game area and the number tokens are placed on top.  The arrangement of these can vary from game to game so player’s strategy can shift from game to game.  You place settlements, cities, and roads along the edges of the hexagons.  When the dice are rolled, the tiles below the tokens with the matching number produce resources (wood, sheep, wheat, ore, or brick) for all settlements or cities bordering them.  Resources can be traded or used to produce more roads, settlements, or cities.  They can also be used to collect development cards which produce different effects.

As you build roads, make new settlement, upgrade to cities, and/or collect various development cards, you gain victory points.  The first person to get 10 victory points wins.

At one point, Aunt M thought she had won but came up short.  Then, NHL played a few masterful rounds and seized victory.  He had not only played his first game of Settlers of Catan, but won and boy was he happy.  Now, I think he might be hooked.  I believe we might need to have weekly Catan gaming nights.

What games do you play with your kids?

Financial Organizational Resolutions

Money

n_kamil_Money_-_banknotes_and_coinThe New Year is traditionally a time when people make resolutions.  They pledge to lose weight and hit the gym more.  Or they promise to learn a foreign language.  Some even declare that this is the year they break some annoying habit they’ve been unable to shake for years.  I usually don’t make resolutions, but this year I’m making two.

I’m pledging to be more organized where our finances are concerned.

Receipts

Receipts can be essential to keep track of your finances.  Unfortunately, we’ve been a bit lax in this department.  This means that we our receipts tend to be put in one of a few different piles to be moved around, forgotten about, found again, and finally thrown out.  Clearly, we need a better system.  My plan is to put all of our receipts into a folder, organized by month. At the end of the month, I’ll go through them and tally up how much we spent on various categories.  After a few months, we should have a clear picture of where our money goes.

Meal Planning

Even though we haven’t figured out exactly how much we spend, we know that our food costs are one of the biggest items in our budget.  Part of this comes from a lack of meal planning.  Too many weeks, we try to decide what to make for dinner on a night by night basis.  This often means a last minute trip to the grocery store to get needed ingredients.  While there, inevitably, impulse purchases are made – often with "this sounds good for dinner another night" in mind.  This also can result in food waste – as perishable food is purchased without a clear plan and goes bad before one can be thought up.

By planning the meals for the week, we should be able to narrow this down our grocery store trips to one or two per week, eliminate many non-essential purchases, and cut back on our food waste.

Coupons

Years ago, B and I would pour over the weekly flyers, cut coupons, and take our coupons with us to the grocery store.  I remember hunting through mounds of coupons to find one I knew we had so we could save some cash.  So what happened?  Kids and life happened.  Clipping and organizing coupons takes time.  Remembering to take them on shopping trips takes planning.  Kids introduce chaos and unpredictability into life and can make it tricky to stay organized and can make it more difficult to plan ahead.  However, every time we don’t use a coupon, we’re paying money that we could have saved.  We don’t need to go to the lengths that extreme couponers go to, but using *some* coupons will save us precious money.

What financial organizational strategies do you employ especially in the areas of receipts, coupons, and meal planning?

NOTE: The "money – banknotes and coin" graphic above is by n_kamil and is available from OpenClipArt.org.

Frozen On The Big Screen And In Real Life

Movies, Weather

frozen-winterOn New Year’s Day, we took the boys to the movies to see Frozen.  It was a great movie which kept me guessing and had strong female characters.  The male characters, while important to the story, weren’t essential to the point that the female characters had to rely on them.  The female characters were definitely not damsels in distress awaiting a prince to save them from the danger.

On Thursday, I had taken the day off of work and so the boys and I indulged in some movie watching.  We had watched Star Wars on New Year’s Eve, so we watched The Empire Strikes Back.

As the Hoth scenes showed Luke and Han freezing in the driving snow, NHL, JSL, and I huddled under blankets.  I had gone out earlier to shovel snow and it was cold out.  Extremely cold.  The app on my phone said it was 2 degrees out but that the wind chill made it feel like -14.  Yes, NEGATIVE FOURTEEN DEGREES!

So even though I was under a blanket and should have been warm, seeing all the Hoth snow on TV, the recent memory of the movie starring a character who generated snow and ice, and remembering how cold I was while shoveling made me feel freezing cold.

Until the weather warms up a bit, though, at least I’ll have some good songs to sing from Frozen.  Like "Let It Go" (which I find personally applicable in some ways, but that’s a whole other post).  I’ll leave you with the video so you can sing the song as well.

A Look Back at 2013

Blogging, Social Media

The end of the year is typically a time to look back on the past 365 days (366 during a leap year) and review what has happened.  What big events have occurred?  What memories have been made?  What new friends have you met?  How is your life different today than it was on January first?

For my blog, this retrospective usually takes the form of looking through a year’s worth of photos, culling them down into a few hundred, and then somehow trying to shoehorn as many of them as possible into a post.  I think I’m going to take a different route this year.  A more analytics and social media driven route.

I started off with a tool by Vizify which lets you generate a quick Year In Review:

With that done, I wondered if I could improve on it.  Especially in the photos area.  Since many of my photos weren’t posted to my blog, but to Instagram, I decided to make a video of my top Instagram photos of 2013.

Using instaport.me, I downloaded all of my Instagram photos from January 1, 2013 to December 29, 2013.  I went through these and picked out a bunch that stood out to me and then put them into a video.  (The background music is "New Year’s Eve (Instrumental)" by Silence Is Sexy and is available from FreeMusicArchive.org.)

Now, on to the Analytics.  I fired up Google Analytics and asked it to look from January 1, 2013 to the present.  Then, I picked a few analytics from the huge number available.

First, let’s look at general audience analytics.

How did mobile devices do in 2013 versus desktops and tablets?

mobile-tablet-desktop

Clearly, 2013 was the year that mobile took off on TechyDad.com.  I went from virtually no mobile users to nearly 20% of my users on mobile.  Tablet use increased as well.  Desktop use, meanwhile, dropped down drastically.  It should be noted that I’m talking about percentages.  In raw numbers, all segments made increases.  Desktop alone rose by over 30% from its previous year’s total.  Mobile and Tablet increased much more than Desktop did, however, so Desktop’s percentage wound up decreasing.

So mobile and tablet grew fast, but what mobile/tablet operating systems were people using on TechyDad.com in 2013?

mobile-os

Clearly, iOS maintains a significant lead, but Android is holding a sizeable chunk as well.

As far as browser usage went, Chrome was king in 2013 with Safari close on its heals.  Firefox took third place and IE came in fourth.

browsers

All this is nice, but I still believe in the old saying "Content Is King" so what was the most popular content on TechyDad in 2013?  Well, we can look at that two ways.  We can only count posts made in 2013 or we can count all posts.

Top 10 Most Popular 2013 Posts:

  1. The Facebook-McAfee Lockout – B got locked out of Facebook and I turned my investigation into a post.  A ton of traffic from Reddit made this post’s traffic skyrocket.
  2. Designing a Car on Disney’s Test Track – After a trip to Disney World, I wrote about being able to try out the new Test Track and how incredible the design options were.  I still look forward to introducing this to my kids.
  3. It’s Time To Meet The Muppets in My Muppets Show – I love trying out new games for my phone or for the boys’ tablets.  Mix in a love of the Muppets and this game was virtually assured to be an instant win.  They’ve kept it fresh by adding in new stages which means we still play it to this day.
  4. Paid App Do’s and Don’ts – After being frustrated by a couple of apps which made gameplay near-impossible unless you paid them money or bothered your friends on social media, I wrote this guide showing how some apps did it right and others didn’t.
  5. Like Bow Ties, Doctor Who Legacy Is Cool – I love Doctor Who.  So does the rest of my family.  A game where you help the Doctor battle his enemies is very nice, but the graphics and gameplay take this from "very nice" to "excellent."
  6. How I Did NOT Give My Son Autism (And How I Did) – After reading an article online where a mother blamed her child’s autism on every single action she took while pregnant, I felt the need to write a rebuttal.  Spoiler alert: The only way I "gave" my son Autism is via genetics.
  7. Prepping a Tablet For Children – My boys used some saved up money to purchase tablets for themselves.  (Well, one tablet they shared the cost of and one that B got as part of the Verizon Lifestyle Bloggers.)  Obviously, we weren’t going to just let them use the tablets fresh out of the box.  Instead, I found apps to help lock them out of certain areas and protect the tablets from what could have been innocent, but destructive behaviors.
  8. Vine vs. GIFBoom – Before Instagram came out with their video solution, I was tempted by the lure of Vine.  I tried it out but was underwhelmed.  I found another option at the time in an app called GIFBoom that lets you make animated GIFs.  Since that post, though, Instagram’s video option has been released and I’ve grown to like it.
  9. The Playground Dalek – Run for your life!  The Daleks have invaded my kids’ playground!  Since this post, my boys have fallen in love with Doctor Who and now see the Dalek on the playground as well.
  10. Asperger’s and the Emotional Cage – Here I talked about how neurotypicals can sometimes mistake an Aspie’s inability to fit words to their emotions for a lack of emotions.  I’ve found that it’s much easier for me to express emotion via writing (where I can edit and rewrite) than via speech (where the words must flow in real-time).

And now including all posts.  (Obviously, I won’t add comments to the posts that appears in the previous list.)

The Most Popular Posts in 2013 (Counting All Posts):

  1. The Facebook-McAfee Lockout
  2. Freeware Review: Shape Collage – This one surprised me.  A freeware review that I wrote over thee years ago took the number 2 spot.  I guess it just goes to show that content doesn’t necessarily go bad just because it is older.
  3. Designing a Car on Disney’s Test Track
  4. Gimme Free Stuff: A Guide For Review Bloggers Just Starting Out – Another case of older content holding up.  This post from 2010 was targeted towards new bloggers who seemed to think that they could just demand "free stuff" from companies by virtue of the fact that they opened a blog.  I tried to give some advice on how to get review opportunities and how to properly pitch companies.
  5. It’s Time To Meet The Muppets in My Muppets Show
  6. Paid App Do’s and Don’ts
  7. My Most Controversial Post Ever: Nutella vs Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter – I pitted Nutella and Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter in a winner take all battle royale.  We still keep a good stock of Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter but haven’t bought Nutella in awhile.
  8. Like Bow Ties, Doctor Who Legacy Is Cool
  9. How I Did NOT Give My Son Autism (And How I Did)
  10. Duncan Hines Apple Carmel Decadent Cake Mix and Vanilla Glaze Review – This was a review I did of Duncan Hines cake mixes and glazes from 2010.  It’s amazing sometimes what posts keep bringing in the traffic.

What were my favorite posts of 2013?  From a quick look over my archives list, I’d have to say some of my Asperger’s posts like Asperger’s Syndrome Resources, The Challenges of Asperger’s Parenting, Obsessions and Asperger’s Syndrome, The Upside of Asperger’s, An Open Letter About Asperger’s Syndrome, and How I Did NOT Give My Son Autism (And How I Did).  I’d also include Rotten To The Common Core – my first post on Common Core, Doctor Who Geeklings Are Born – my first posting of my kids becoming Whovians, and Doctor Who? Doctor TechyDad! – where I revealed the Doctor Who costume that I made.  Finally, I’d include a pairing of posts where I discussed the self doubt that I face nearly every day, how Wil Wheaton’s book – Just A Geek – helped me realize this, and how I’ve been trying to turn that voice on its head: The Voice Of Self Doubt and Self-Doubt and Self-Achievement.

It’s been a very exciting year and I can’t wait to see what 2014 has in store.

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