Newly Wired

I wrote in my 699th post to this blog (this makes it an even 700) that I recently got wired up for internet and television through a company, here, called Cable Onda. It’s too soon to give them a complete okie dokie on their service, but so far I’m pretty impressed.

I signed up last Monday. They said, at the office, someone would be out Thursday morning to wire up the services. Remembering that things operate on Panamanian time (that’s like ‘island time’ except it’s on the isthmus) I wasn’t ready to hold my breath waiting. Saturday morning I got an email saying someone would be around between 7:30 and 12:30. Okay. We’ll see. at 8:45 two guys showed up at my front door, and an hour later I had two spots in the house where I could watch my new television should I want to and one modem for the internet which, with the router I bought along with the t.v. I was ready to rock and roll.

It’s been two years since I’ve had a television set and for the past two years I’ve accessed the net via a USB modem with the blindingly fast speed of one-half meg. You couldn’t do a whole lot with it. Certainly it was WAY too slow to stream movies. Cable Onda promised 5 meg speed. I don’t know. Haven’t tested it. But I CAN stream movies.

So what about the t.v. in the first four days? Well, I watched two episodes of the Simpsons (in English), a few minutes of the winter Olympics (in Spanish) and I watched Panama Metra wallop the Chiriqui team in baseball on Thursday and Saturday nights (in Spanish, of course). That’s it for t.v.

The internet is a different story. Now that I’m able to stream video, I signed up with Netflix. I had a two day marathon of watching the first season of ‘Orange is the New Black.” Watched 13 hours, so there’s no need to say whether or not I liked the show. I also watched ‘The Dark Knight.’ I’d seen it years ago in the States. Heath Ledger was FANTASTIC as the Joker. What a shame he’s gone. What a talent.

So, that’s it. In between episodes of ‘Orange’ I finished one novel and started reading another. So goes life in the slow lane in Panama.