I’ve got a list of stuff I want to blog about. I’m not sure how far I’ll get, but I’m going to try to cover a bunch of stuff.
Sports & streaming
My last post, from two weeks ago, went into a lot of stuff around my plans for watching sports on TV this fall. Not much has changed there, except that I gave in and signed up for another one-year Paramount+ subscription, since they just started a 50% off deal. So now I can watch any of the CBS NFL games on Sunday, though that’ll mostly be the Jets rather than the Giants. And I can also watch the new season of Strange New Worlds.
I’m still not happy with Paramount, after the Colbert thing, and the more recent Bari Weiss thing, and… other stuff. But I guess my protest against them is only going as far as refusing to pay full price for a Paramount+ subscription.
I’m still holding out on Fox though. I haven’t even really been tempted to sign up for a Fox One subscription. That would be a step too far.
My plan for tomorrow, the first Sunday of NFL season, is to try to watch NFL RedZone (via NFL+) and see if I like it. (And, of course, annoyingly, this is the season when they’re going to start running ads on RedZone. Oh well.)
My eyesight
I had a little incident about a week ago, where I got a new floater showing up in my left eye, and that brought on a migraine. I wasn’t sure if this was the return of my migraines from ten years ago, or something else. Long story short, I saw my eye doctor and she sent me to a retina specialist, to see if I needed laser surgery. And that specialist poked and prodded my eye and decided I don’t need surgery. Which is good, I guess, but it also means that I’m stuck with the floater, which hasn’t quite gone away. I don’t notice it most of the time, but it’s somewhat noticeable when I’m working on a computer (and unfortunately, I make my living sitting in front of a computer). So we’ll see how things go. Maybe it’ll go away?
Switching cell phone service providers
I’ve been a Verizon customer since I got my first apartment after college. Back then, it was Bell Atlantic, and it was for a POTS line. And when I got my first cell phone, it was on Bell Atlantic Mobile. That all got smushed together into Verizon at some point. So, basically, I’ve been paying a Verizon bill every month since 1989 or thereabouts.
So there’s a lot of inertia there, and it wasn’t easy for me to talk myself into considering switching to another provider. But there have been some issues that had been pushing me in that direction for a while now.
First, they cut the copper to my apartment building (in 2018) and cut off the POTS service. After that I switched to a home cell service thing, but cancelled that last year, and “parked” my home number with Park My Phone, forwarding it to my cell #.
Then there was the issue we had in the office, starting about a year ago, where Verizon cell service deteriorated to the point of being essentially unusable. (It’s gotten better since, but still isn’t great.)
And also, I’ve found out that the Verizon discount I get through work is limited to my old “legacy” plan and doesn’t apply if I switch to a new plan, with a higher data cap (or unlimited data).
So, after a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally decided to switch to Consumer Cellular. They’re an MVNO for AT&T, and I knew from coworkers that AT&T service in our building is fine, so that was one selling point. (I have, in fact, found out that it’s not just “fine”, but significantly faster than even my home internet service.) And it’s a lot cheaper, even with a bigger data plan. With Verizon, I was paying about $65/month for 5 GB. With Consumer Cellular, I’m paying $35/month for 10 GB. There doesn’t seem to be any downside, as far as I can tell.
Well, that’s about half of the stuff I wanted to blog about. Maybe I’ll write more tomorrow, if the football is boring, and if my left eye isn’t bothering me too much.