… so said my daughter, upon discovering me in the kitchen yesterday watching the Deadliest Catch marathon on my son’s Z60 via the newly configured Slingbox service which took the better part of an afternoon to set up and wire into a spare satellite DVR. (some guys watch hours of Bowl games; me, I watch hours of commercial crab fishermen)
Slingbox, for the uninformed, is a $129-or-so dee-vice that connects to one’s television and makes the signal available anywhere on the InterWeb to a PC. In other words, my college student spawn can now control (and fight over as only one can use it at a time) the upstairs television from their dorm rooms in Manhattan and Charlottesville.
The wife’s irrational allergy to blue ethernet cables snaking over doors and across rain gutters forced me to Best Buy to purchase the Sling wireless connection doo-hickey thingy that uses the house’s electrical system as an extension of the LAN. Set up was a pig, some serious manual configuration inside of the router, with UDP and TCP and Port settings abounding.
But four hours later and I was watching men in orange Grunden’s pound the ice off the pilothouse in the Bering Straits on a pee-cee.
For people like me who spend a good amount of time in hotel rooms fighting the urge to spend $15 for a bad movie on LodgeNet (aka, Spank-a-vision; aka “You-Can’t-Expense-It), Slingbox is a good idea for boob-tube on the road. Now, if I only watched television … but I do have a personal programmer in the form of son Eliot, the third-year film major at NYU who spends hours searching for the world’s best movies on Tivo and stores dozens of them on the machine.