Thank you Comcast

Those are words I never thought I'd speak. Comcast have been my cable TV provider since 2002 and my high speed internet provider since 2004 and in that time have managed on many, many occasions to annoy the hell out of me.

But last night they redeemed themselves. I was able to watch the Australian Football League ("Aussie Rules") Grand Final live on ESPN360.com which I only discovered earlier this week is available free to Comcast subscribers.

I have a computer connected to my big screen TV that I used to watch it, so apart from the occasional jitter it was as good as watching it on TV back in Australia (apart from being the middle of Friday night instead of Saturday afternoon, but hey you can't have everything).

To obtain this level of performance ESPN must mirror the feed from Australia to the US and then serve it to end users from here, because I've tried streaming football video from Australia before and it's been unwatchable (bandwidth across the Pacific is lousy).

So once again for the record, just in case there is any confusion; Thank you Comcast.

First snow for '09

It's 66 days until opening day for the 2009-10 ski season and we had our first snow last night. Only a light dusting but it still counts (there was still snow on the rooftops when I got up at 6.30 am). There's probably more at the top of the mountain but right now you can't see that for the clouds.

Terrible jet lag

We arrived back in Steamboat on Wednesday after four weeks in Australia. For some reason we're suffering from jet lag far worse than we ever had before; awake until 3 or 4 am and then sleeping until 10 or 11 am.

It normally takes at least a week to adjust to a time change this big (eight hours in the northern summer), but by now we should at least be sleeping a bit better, yet last night was still a shocker. Hope it improves soon - I've got a trip to San Diego on Tuesday, with a 9.30 am meeting on Wednesday morning!