Losing One Addiction, Gaining Another

Back long, long ago when Colleen and I were in our engaged and before Colleen moved out here, she mentioned that we shouldn’t get cable. It would make us lazy and anti-social, she reasoned so it was best to not even have it hooked up in our (then) new apartment. Of course, I didn’t listen and things turned out a lot like she expected.

Who would have thought that it would take the purchase of a fancy new HDTV before we finally were ready to give up our cable addiction?

A couple weeks ago, Colleen mentioned that since it was the summer (read: nice outside), we had the Wii, and the SSHL summer reading program, it made sense to cancel the cable. Sometimes I wonder if she has some kind of mind-reading device because I was pondering the same. I quickly agreed and within a couple days, we were down to the local cable package rather than the expanded (but not digital tier) package. I thought there would be a period of adjustment where we really missed it but, from the looks of it so far, we really weren’t addicted at all. Part of ease of transition stems from the Paradox of Choice book that I read a couple weeks back. We had all these extra channels but all the choices we had weren’t really making us happier. We only watched a couple of them (ABC Family, Comedy Central, HGTV, etc) and we watched them so much that everything eventually became a rerun for us. The Daily Show is the only thing I thought I would truly miss but since they have the full episodes online, I haven’t missed a beat.

Are we better people now that we only have basic cable? I don’t think we are foolish enough to think that quite yet. We still waste a lot of time in front of the TV watching the beautiful HD local channels and our favorite shows like Hell’s Kitchen, Bones, and House—I’ve even taken a liking to PBS and it’s HD offering. We have also increased our Wii play time, mostly occupying ourself with The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which we recently purchased and have slowly been making our way through. I’ve even picked up a brand new addiction: OpenStreetMap (OSM).

OSM is like the bastard child of Wikipedia and Google Maps. You can freely edit the map, adding roads and trails, and placing points of interest (like gas stations, grocery stores, parks, etc) on it. The beautiful thing is that you can then take those maps and upload them (after a bit of finagling, of course) to your GPS unit. This saves us the pain of having to pay Garmin $200 for some local street maps for Colleen’s Garmin eTrex Legend. You can upload GPS tracks to OSM or (if you are sans GPSr), you can just check out the ariel map and eyeball locations based on your memory of the area. Don’t be shy: map your neighborhood. It’s oddly addicting.

- Sat

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