Roku Me!

I'm heaving a big, heavy sigh here. Could you hear me? I swear it changed the flow of the wind, maybe even disrupted the spin of the earth on its axis: it was a huge, huge sigh. I don't even know where to start with this particular story.

OK. So The EGE and I don't watch tv. We don't go to the movies, either. What we do is watch movies at home, mostly via Netflix (and then I buy good used DVDs of the ones we really like so that when Netflix becomes prohibitively expensive (or when they get their next harebrained idea for innovation), we can cancel and watch those). I pay almost $40 a month for 5 movies at a time and unlimited streaming. I'm not sure why, though, because we've never watched many streamed movies. I've had it for so many years I probably got some great deal that's slowly, slowly crept up in price. Anyway--the reason we don't stream much is that, to do that, we have to both sit in front of the iMac or, alternately, take the Macbook into the other room and hook it up to the larger monitor, which is a pain for shifting back and forth.

I'm just too lazy to make it work, is what it is. OK? I'm not that big a movie hound that I'm going to jump through hoops to watch them. Or go to a theater with suspicious substances on the seats and smelly babies whining in the row behind me. If I'm going to watch movies, I'm going to watch them on my own terms. So there.

So a month or so ago I got the brilliant idea that I was going to use the Netflix iPhone app and an adapter and HDMI cable to stream movies from the iPhone to the big tv. Brilliant: I had the iPhone app, and all I needed was the adapter and a cable. So off to Best Buy we go. The EGE happily goes along but has absolutely nothing to do with technology, which irritates him. He doesn't even like telephones, never mind the computer, which he believes is just an insidious way to force everyone to type keyboard, which he believes is a form of torture designed by evil mutants. So off we go, me complacently expecting that Matt the Apple Guy will be there and sell me stuff. He's the Apple Expert at Best Buy, and he knows Apple stuff, and every time I ask him a question, I buy something. I make the sign of protection against the evil eye before I ask him ANYTHING. He's trying to sell me an iTV, but I'm putting my fingers in my ears and going, "Nannernannernannernannernanner" as I walk rapidly out of the store to the parking lot. Probably being studied on security video.

But--horrors!--Matt is on vacation, and the young acne-ridden child who is filling in has no more knowledge of adapters than I do. AVI. VGA, DMI, RCA, HDMI, DisplayPort. We stood together, this child and I, and looked at the display rack and looked at each other, he trying to pretend he had a clue and me not even trying. I knew I needed an adapter that would allow me to connect the iPhone to a HDMI cable, so I knew *something* which turned out to be more than the boy knew, and I felt bad watching him try to maintain. You know, like drunks try to maintain so you won't notice they're drunk? He was trying to maintain so I wouldn't notice he had not Clue #1 about adapters, and I began to pity him, so I heaved a big sigh and went away.

And came back two days later, only to find Matt *still* on vacation. So I thought I'd just buy some stuff and try it out and see if it worked and, if not, bring it back. I mean, really, what did I have to lose? There's a long, long story in here, with multiple trips to Best Buy, but let's skip all that. I ordered the HDMI cable online for a fraction of the price (turns out I was right: if it's a short indoor cable, the cheapo ones are just as good--they say you can buy them at Big Lots and be just fine) and then got another adapter and brought it home--it would require plugging and unplugging stuff every time we used it, and I never even took it out of the package: I knew that was too much work for just watching movies, so I took it back.

As fate would have it, The New York Times had an article that day on your various getting-away-from-cable-tv options, and I brought that page home and read it and decided to try Roku (yes, it really is that cute). I went with the top-o-the-line (snort) Roku so The EGE could play Angry Birds, and while I was at it, I bought a new router. Next the the Airport Extreme ($179), it was supposed to be the best. And Matt put the fear of privacy invasion in me when I admitted that my Wifi network wasn't password protected and that I couldn't get in to change that.

Brought all this home, spent Friday--supposedly my Afternoon Off--setting it up. Hooked up the new router, got the password, got all the devices on the new network, everything groovy. Then I went in and set up Roku. Got it going and doing its thing, and it said it couldn't update. It was on the network, online, ready to go, but it couldn't update the software.

Skipping ahead, past the over-an-hour online support chat with someone from Roku who was not a native speaker, as evidenced from severe Mangling of The Verbs, at the end of which she wanted me to unplug and reset everything--the router, the iMac, Roku, my toaster and microwave--everything. I hung up on her and went in and starting dicking around with it, and I thought, "Huh. I wonder if instead of Error Message 101, what it really means is that the wireless signal isn't strong enough?" So I unplugged the fancy new router and re-set-up the old-unprotected-from-skyper-thieves router, and voila! It worked just perfectly.

But now I was worried about the unprotected network, and so I went in and tried to set up a password with the old router. Not only would it not let me, but it locked me out. I hardwired the laptop to get online and find a number for Linksys, and I called them and jumped through a million hoops and finally got to talk to a human (also a newcomer to English), and she listened to the problem and said she'd help and was very confident we could work it out together but first--first!--I would need to pay her $39.99 because I was out of warranty.

"All I need to know is how to get in and change the password," I told her, trying to keep the patheticness out of my voice. Also the total-pissed-off-ness. I was on the edge. I'd been on chat or on the phone all morning, dealing with people who made my hair hurt and set my former-English-teacher's teeth on edge. My Free Friday Afternoon was gone, I hadn't had a shower, I was tired and pissed and worried that I would never have internet again.

Oh, she said. If that's all I needed, then I could just pay her $29.99.

So I hung up on her, too. No, I didn't yell or cuss or anything. I just hung up and went away. And then I stomped around the house and bitched and groused about greed and planned obsolescence, and then I came out here and reset the old router, woefully unprotected but still working, and ordered an Apple Airport Extreme, with its 2200 square foot range.

While I waited for it to arrive, I've been unplugging the router in the evenings when it's being skyped. Not "skyped" as in Skyped, the online telephony system. Skyped as in taken and not paid for. I thought "to skype" was an actual verb, but apparently that's only in my head. Whatever. In fact, I did on some evenings take delight in checking to see if someone else was using my wifi and then Poof! making it disappear. Shame on me. But shame on them for not getting their own damn connection. Or at least they could do like everyone else in town and go hang out in the Starbucks parking lot to use wifi or, like the REALLY ballsy guy the other night: walk in, take the biggest table, set up his laptop and iPhone, use them for half an hour, and then get up and leave, all without speaking to anyone or buying anything.  They could be like that guy.

Today the base station arrived, and I got it set up with only a few glitches when my cable modem refused to cooperate even after doing The Magic Thing. You know, where you work magic by unplugging whatever-it-is, waiting 15 seconds, and then plugging it back in. This is an amazing trick, and it works on everything from modems to computers to DVD players. I swear I think it would work on my brain if only I could find the cord. I was on the phone to Suddenlink, waiting for help, when the modem finally said, "Oh, all right, I'll play," and reset itself.

And it all worked perfectly. I got the iMac and the Macbook and my iPhone and my old iPhone-which-is-now-an-iPod all connected, and I went outside and tested the signal. The territory extends across the street to the opposite curb, to the far edge of the property of our neighbors on either side, and across the alley to the dumpster. In short, it reaches anywhere The EGE would want to go while listening to Pandora radio while working in the yard. And that's enough. Roku is happy, I'm happy. We're all happy.

Well, except the cats, who've been locked in the front of the house all day, away from the construction, and keep crying, "What's in it for *us*? Huh?" They haven't gotten much attention, and I'm going to have to pay for that.