Running Over People, Colon Health, and Switching Channels.

Yes, it's time once again for a Things that Bug Me! session. Miniblogs that highlight things about life that irritate the snot out of me.

* I am convinced that I will be sent to jail one of these days for vehicle manslaughter, as will we all. The prisons will be full of normal citizens that just couldn't see the people they ran over. It seems the best time for people to walk in my neighborhood is after dark, and only when wearing the darkest clothes possible. Usually dark sweatjackets with hoods, so you can't even see skin reflecting off of headlights. For instance, there's this girl, probably in her 20's, that walks her dog every time I have to go to the grocery store. The only reason I see her at all is that the lights reflect off of the dog's eyes. When I get close, she has this blank look on her face (and headphones on, so she wouldn't be able to hear me), as if the dog had more cognizance than the owner. It's why I say that the dog is walker his owner. Please, if you must go walking, after midnight, as Patsy Cline says, please wear something reflective. Running over people is too expensive, after all.

* Comcast really needs to look at their advertising layout for the digital channels. Most companies will use sponsors that work toward the demographic that is watching the show. Ergo the commercials for false teeth applicants during Price is Right, or Lawyers advertising on episodes of Judge Judy. But Comcast doesn't seem to see it that way. They have the right to advertise on their channels using whoever they want, and since commercial space, especially on newer digital channels is cheaper, they can get anyone to run their advertisements on any channel. So I'm watching Disney XD, because you can't get enough of Phineas and Ferb and all of a sudden I get these commercials for medication to help improve colon health, complete with charts about volume of fecal matter. I did some checking online, and others have seen commercials for vodka while watching similar channels. What Comcast is doing is simply not profitable for the sponsors, as a 6 year old will not be persuaded into buying colon care meds. And with all the talk of advertising to the demographics that are most profitable for any one business, it's actually fraud what Comcast is doing with their advertising. They need to get into line with what they are claiming to provide.

* And since we're on the subject of television, I had to switch over to Comcast's digital cable in the past little bit. Rewired the cable catastrophe downstairs myself, which I'm proud of. :) But the box that has all the channels (which I'll get to in a minute) costs $15.00 a month for an extra one, so the living room only gets a few extra channels. Now, on the subject of cable channels. The normal analog lineup had, say, 70 channels (I remember when cable only went up to 36). So say 25 channels are worth anything at all, and the rest are marginally useful or utter crap. Now, triple the amount of channels. 210. That puts the useful channels at 75, with crappy channels at 135...what a waste of bandwidth!! And the ironic thing about all this is, at times, there is still nothing on! 210 channels, and there's nothing I want to watch on! Maybe it's time I found me a book to read..... And then, to make it more frustrating, the time that it takes to flip through channels has gone up, because the smaller adapters take a few seconds to load the next channel, putting a frozen image of whatever it was you didn't want to see up on the screen for you to stare at while the next channel is coming up. And what if it's something totally violent, or gross, or Wolf Blitzer or something? It makes flipping past the crap a lot harder to do. Which, since On Demand is always an option (and sometimes not free), I'm sure that was Comcast's intention all along.

I know I complain about Comcast a lot in this blog, but truthfully, you'll not find a better connection to the Internet, and I've seen the other television set ups on dishes and the like, and I've got it ten times better than that junk. Give me Comcast any day.