Having Fun & Access Going Lo-Tech

I suspended my DirecTV at the start of 06. Please, no hushed gasps! Yep, and down at the sweet little thrift shop I found a beautiful glass (for use in the parlor, pleez!) kerosene lamp with a new wick! Wouldn't ya know, HDepot carries Klean Heat, a fine kerosene alternative. And I live near the big hills where all the local broadcast towers are, and now that they're having to upgrade those towers to carry analog and HDef signals simultaneously, I get as good a broadcast signal as Austin's TimeLifeWarnerCableDigitalThingy. And yes ~ it's free!

What do I really miss? Why, Jon Stewart and The Daily Show of course. Don't miss CSPAN, because I can stream its audio, INCLUDING CSPAN 3. Don't miss Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, cuz I can stream her show as well. Don't miss those pesky $60 per month satellite TV bills. Don't mind knowing that Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp have one less subscriber as they maintain a virtual monopoly on global satellite television networks. Naw, that doesn't bother me at all. I could give a flying flea's fart!

So, I keep my sweet little Grundig radio tuned to KUT FM (of course, I could stream KUT at kut.org), and listen to ESPN radio when an NFL game is on cable. To me, it's like listening to the Tigers win the 68 World Series on my NEW transistor radio!

And, as for privacy and data mining, I'm not concerned. As an individual and a sole proprietor, I simply went to PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and paid for the software necessary to obtain a lifetime license (about $60.00). Now, if the NSA decides to peek in on my email, they'll have to go find out whether or not I've published my Public Key to the worldwide PGP Directory, and then they'll need to decrypt my email in order to find out whether or not that particular email was encrypted using my Public or my Private PGP key. If I used my Private key, well...too friggin' bad for the NSA!

I've also begun to change my method of payment habits. Sometimes I'll use cash, sometimes a check, sometimes a credit card, and sometimes an automatic bank draft. And I might use any combination of the above to buy anything from a BlogShares coffee mug to a thumbdrive to a pair of OshKosh B'Gosh overalls. Is he a geek? A stock broker having some fun? A farmer? Who IS this mystery man? Is he a man at all? Look, he just started a complimentary subscription to Vogue...hmmm...Aha! It's a geeky SheMale who left the big city to start an organic tomato farm! Yeah, That's The Ticket!

Pffffffft!

Feel free to bookmark HMonk: Sites Worth a Visit and start discovering how much fun you can have with a dialup, free TV, and a candle ~