The Finney School of Real Life

Installation to connect my TV was a breeze because I currently had internet with Verizon FIOS. He was able to utilize the Coax splitter I already had in place, splitting the wire leading to the router. The coax enters from outside the house, splits and runs into all the rooms, with one downstream cable attaching to the Verizon Internet Router’s Coax connector. From that point the router communicated TCP/IP over RJ-45 and provides the house, but this is also used to assign IP addresses to the DVR over coax. (DVR or Digital Video Recorder device) that comes included along with your FIOS TV bundle.

While the interface is really intuitive, in addition it comes with lots of innovative shortcuts that you’ll find while using it. For instance, while viewing TV, choose one of the direction indicators on the controls to take you For use as a shortcut to a variety of functions, instantaneously. To view a split-screen that has the TV guide on the left-hand side, push the up button, and in order to see a half-screen floating guide, push the down button. You can get to the full-screen guide by pressing Guide once, or go to the split-screen by pressing it twice. Hit info once for a popup, hit it again for a full-screen page.

This DVR has a storage capacity of 17 viewing hours in HD, or 60 in SD broadcast (standard definition, not HD) or whichever combination of options you choose. It functions like any other DVR where you can mark every recording to be saved. It is not deleted automatically. You may fix yourself in a queue with the last x recordings. It’s possible to choose just the latest programs, or every show, with reruns included.

The Core Package is priced at $43 per month and you can choose among standard, HD, Standard DVR and HD DVR for your DVD options. For the hours we happen to spend before TV, the amount of over $60 for Cable is short of squander. Because they and not the cable providers set their own costs, HBO, Showtime, and other premium channels cost the same as on cable.

Overall, I can report that we’ve been thoroughly pleased! The STB functions properly, the screen image is wonderful, and I’m very confident that new software and On-Demand movies will be made available from Verizon. Verizon FiOS TV has been available in my area for only a month, but I feel they are providing a great service. This is much preferable to local cable if you can possibly get it.

Blogs move so much faster than your traditional idea of static websites. Because of their RSS/Atom feeds, they’re picked up within days and even sometimes within hours by the search engines. This makes blogging about topics that are current and time stamped available, allowing access to the information before it’s “old news”.

A profitable way of blogging is on topics that are hot right now. For example, while the Olympics were going, a little known blogger took it upon themselves to talk about it - include some tidbits about people, the sports, the newsworthy drama, and while the Olympics were still going on, their blog was making about $100 to $200 a day.

Take American Idol as an example, too. Every day, the term “american idol” is searched for 34,857 times a day (according to Overture)! Popular TV shows get thousands of searches each and every day, as well as current political topics and news and large events going on in the world.

Basically, anything that’s getting any kind of news coverage can bring in people looking for more information about it through search engines.

It doesn’t stop at search engines, though. When you write about topics that are hot right now, you can submit your blog entry to other places online that are compiling information based around that topic. There are sites who’s main purpose is being a link directory to other sites with information on topics that people are interested in.

When going this route, though, you are competing with a lot of other current information. This type of blogging requires putting more time into your keywords to rank high with search engines, as well as overall search engine optimization.

Brenda Boggs is an Internet guru, in marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and new technologies. She successfully runs two revenue sharing websites, http://www.bloggerparty.com and http://www.reviewparty.com, where members actually make money just by participating.