Guus Bosman

We have internet at home!

This afternoon somebody from Comcast came and installed the TV decoder as well as the internet modem. The connection seems to be very good. I am currently listening to one of my favourite internet radio stations, and I watched a part of the Dutch newsbroadcast. The connection is has a theoretical maximum of 3Mbit/s, but as this is a cable connection it depends a lot on the usage of the people in this area. So far it's been very good.

It's great to be online from home; it's the same feeling as I had when DSL was installed in Haarlem, two years ago.

Today we are arranging a lot of small practical matters. One of the things we did was ordering internet and cable tv.

We had been thinking a lot about what exactly we wanted for TV. When we bought it two weeks ago, we also took an antenna. However, the reception in our apartment is pretty bad, and we exchanged it last Friday for a stronger one. Still -- the image and sound quality is very bad, there is simply no good signal in our apartment. So an antenna wasn't really an option.

The thing is: we hardly watch any TV. Since we moved here we've seen the news once, and twice we've been watching some entertainment. Cable TV is quite expensive (compared to cable in Holland), and we were wondering if it's worth it. We decided to take it anyway, partly because getting cable TV would also give us a discount on cable internet, which we certainly want.

The last weeks Comcast, the cable provider, has been sending us a lot of promotional offers and letters, asking us to become subscriber. Yesterday's offer was the "Complete Holiday Package" -- a 50% discount for 3 months on both internet and TV, as well as a waiver for the installation fee. I just called and ordered it, and they'll come and install it tomorrow afternoon.

Saturday we went to a shopping mall near the Pentagon, "Pentagon City". These malls are a real American phenomenon: a mall is a very large shopping center with many shops in one big building. Most of them are outside the city, and reachable only by car. We have been to this one here a few times to get our new things for the house, because it's well reachable by metro. The "Arena Boulevard" in Amsterdam is perhaps comparable to this type of malls.

In the mall we saw Santa Claus. He is there all day for children to have their picture taken with him.

I've prepared this story and pictures at home; I didn't have time to go downstairs and upload them yesterday. We didn't order internet yet. Not that that's so terribly complicated but we want to have the best deal possible, and a combination package with cable-TV seems now the best way to go.

Today it is Sinterklaas in the Netherlands. This is probably the family celebration that I will miss the most of all the holidays. I have great memories of the Sinterklaas party: the presents, the poems etc, but most of all the great atmosphere with my closest family. Jaap and Mieke are now in Leeuwarden where they'll celebrate with Ettie and Gerben. Sinterklaas visited the United States yesterday, he was at the Dutch embassy in Washington D.C.

Here the preparations for Christmas are going on everywhere. Yesterday we went to a shopping mall where they had a huge Christmas tree with Santa Claus under it, for the children of course.