Good Morning Internet

I started two exper­i­ments last week, which I talked about on my last pod­cast episode. The goals are to go a month with­out eat­ing out or watch­ing tele­vi­sion. The ideas seemed sim­ple and I hoped they would save me money and open up hours of time for cre­ativ­ity and productivity.

Over the course of one week­end, I’ve already bro­ken all my rules. This is going to be a lot harder than I thought.

I think I picked the absolute worst pos­si­ble set of 30 days to try these exper­i­ments. Almost imme­di­ately, I added an excep­tion to the “no TV” rule for World Cup games. I still think that’s a valid excep­tion, see­ing how the World Cup comes around once every four years. But that some­how acted as a gate­way to me watch­ing five episodes of Mad Men this week­end, too.

Simul­ta­ne­ously, I failed on the “don’t eat out” front. Like the World Cup, I was lured away from my goal (Ha!) of avoid­ing restau­rants and sav­ing money by Dukem, an amaz­ing Ethiopian restau­rant in Mt. Ver­non. I jus­ti­fied the expense and vio­la­tion of my newly-formed rule with two excuses. First, I was out with friends. Sec­ond, it was Fri­day and the first day of the World Cup. If those weren’t rea­sons to cel­e­brate, I rea­soned, noth­ing was.

The flood­gates opened. It was Hon­fest in my neigh­bor­hood all week­end, and my willpower suc­cumbed to the food ven­dors. Guilty and slightly depressed about fail­ing, but also angry at myself for choos­ing the most incon­ve­nient month for these exper­i­ments, I went home and sunk a few more hours into World Cup view­ing, men­tally re-writing the rules to add an “except on week­ends” clause to my rules.

But this morn­ing, with renewed resolve, I’m tack­ling my goals again. I will bring my lunch with me to work every day. Episodes of Mad Men and the queue of TV shows I have lined up on Net­flix will have to wait. I’m going to cook for myself every night. The take-out menus have been placed out of sight to pre­vent fur­ther lapses.

Sure, I stum­bled hard this first week­end. But for the rest of the 30 days, I’m going to buckle down, focus, and see if I can spend more time cre­at­ing things while wast­ing less money and time.

Except for World Cup games. I’d hate myself for skip­ping those.

Oh, and new episodes of Futu­rama, of course.

I’m screwed.

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So instead here are three four videos.

Update: If, for some rea­son you’ve deprived your­self of the joy that is Futu­rama, I added a fourth recap video that should get you up to speed. Because I love you.

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I have a brand-new open­ing to my show fea­tur­ing America’s Radio Sweet­heart (and Sound of Young Amer­ica host) Jesse Thorn! It makes me sound far more pro­fes­sional than I deserve.

Also dis­cussed in this episode:

• There is a recy­cling bin thief on the loose in Baltimore!
• For the next month, I’ve chal­lenged myself to cook at home and not eat in restau­rants or order take-out.
• Why stop there? For the next month, I’ve cut myself off from tele­vi­sion. Instead, I’ll try to use that time to be more cre­ative? Will it work? Tune in next week to hear how crazy I am!

Enjoy!

Down­load the MP3 here.

Sub­scribe with iTunes or RSS

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Look, Com­cast, we need to talk.

It’s been a wild few years. I invited you into my home at a time when I lived in a small base­ment stu­dio apart­ment and needed Inter­net access. I had been with DSL for a few months, but we both knew I was just set­tling. You promised me more chan­nels than I had ever seen in one place, many in star­tling, breath­tak­ing clar­ity. I ditched Ver­i­zon and signed up with you and your attrac­tive pro­mo­tional rate.

I was so naïve back then.

Let’s face the facts. I tried to love your dig­i­tal cable ser­vice. I pre­tended not to care when the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel dropped out, some­times for days, even when you tried to blame it on me.

Maybe I should have lis­tened to my friends. They tried to warn me about you, but I couldn’t resist the way you streamed Net­flix in HD.

Over the course of our rela­tion­ship, you sent me five faulty cable boxes. Five! Who does that? When­ever some­one came to swap equip­ment, you charged me thirty bucks. It should have only taken me two or three ser­vice appoint­ments to real­ize you had no respect for me.

Also, your embar­rass­ingly out-of-date user inter­face should have been a major red flag.

Oh, remem­ber when I moved to a new apart­ment in a dif­fer­ent neigh­bor­hood? You acted like you didn’t even know me and raised my rates with­out warn­ing. Sure, I tried to call and talk to you about it, but you put me on hold. For over an hour. I believed you when you said my call was impor­tant to you, but now I’m not so sure.

Don’t get me wrong, we had some great times, too! You still have the fastest broad­band in the city. Remem­ber all those movie trailer down­loads? The hours spent play­ing Xbox? The HD movie rentals? They wouldn’t have been the same with­out you. And you have a great crew of peo­ple on Twit­ter cov­er­ing for you.

I’m a dif­fer­ent per­son now. Insanely fast down­stream used to be enough for me, but now I need some­thing more. I need reli­a­bil­ity and con­sis­tency. I need to know my rates won’t change arbi­trar­ily. I need some­one I can count on for Inter­net access with­out always try­ing to turn it into a Triple Play.

I’d ask you to please not call with your “spe­cial offers”, and I’d ask you to not mail me glossy ads of happy-looking peo­ple enjoy­ing your ser­vices. But I know you’ll do those things anyway.

I’m box­ing up your things, and I’ll drop them by your office on my way home from work. Hope­fully, we can end this with civil­ity and with­out mak­ing a scene.

But if you charge me with a “Break-Up Fee”, I’m call­ing the police.

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I don’t have cable TV or a DVR right now. I can­celed my Com­cast ser­vice last fall when I com­pleted a year at a pro­mo­tional price for TV and Inter­net and they dou­bled my monthly rate to the “reg­u­lar price”. Instead, I have a good old-fashioned antenna hooked up to my HDTV, and as long as it’s bal­anced just right on top of my shelf, it gives me fan­tas­tic pic­ture for prime­time high-def pro­gram­ming. The Super Bowl was stun­ning. Jack Bauer’s wacky Mon­day night adven­tures come in crystal-clear.

Still, with­out a DVR, I refuse to re-organize my life around pro­gram­ming sched­ules. Hulu takes care of a lot of time-shifting for me, but for the past two Fri­day nights, I’ve sat at home and watched my new favorite block of geeky TV.

On a night when most peo­ple go out, I’m at home with a big stu­pid geek grin on my face. I starts at 8:00 pm with Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles. I don’t care that it has a much slower pace than the movies, or that we haven’t seen a really good ter­mi­na­tor fight in months. I can even for­give the shame­less and bla­tant prod­uct place­ment. This sea­son has been a lot of set-up, and I’m dying to see how the knock it all down for the remain­der of this year’s episodes.

At 9:00 it’s time for Joss Whedon’s Doll­house. Whe­don is one of my all-time favorite writ­ers, and not just on TV. He can put together the kind of story that is packed with action, yet still has a lot of the­matic under­cur­rents, but he doesn’t beat you over the head with them. It pre­miered just two weeks ago, so if you haven’t watched, I strongly, strongly rec­om­mend you check out the first two episodes over on Hulu. Just like with Whedon’s past projects, he’s weav­ing a long story arc, and I can’t wait to see where it goes. I embed­ded the pilot episode at the top of this post to make it super-easy for you to check out.

At 10:00 I have to shut off Twit­ter because the rest of the world is watch­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica. If you’ve never seen it, start at the begin­ning. Don’t start now. Too much has hap­pened, and there are only four episodes left. This has been the absolutely most com­pelling tele­vi­sion in the past four years, with maybe the excep­tion of The Wire.

Because I don’t have cable, I can’t get Sci Fi and watch live. I step away from Twit­ter to insu­late myself from spoil­ers. (Peo­ple in the Twit­ter­verse love to post spoil­ers, I learned the hard way.) But Sci Fi drops the ball here. New episodes aren’t avail­able until eight days after their broad­cast. Eight! I’m sure it’s a ploy to get those of us with­out cable to head over to iTunes and shell out a few bucks, and I’m sure that it works.

For two hours, Fri­day nights are my geek-out nights. If you haven’t checked out Doll­house, you should give it a try and, if you like it, you should join me while I immerse myself in a world of killer robots from the future, high-tech per­son­al­ity imprints, explo­sions, femmes fatales, and sci­ence projects gone awry. I’ll be on Twitter.

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