Posted 10:09 p.m. by Jim Courtney

Prior to the Winter Olympics I reported on my acquisition and setup of the SlingBox such that I could watch the CBC version of the Olympics while traveling in southern California. At the time SlingBox was only available in the U.S.; I had purchased one on my trip to California immediately prior to the start of the Olympics. In addition to the points made in that posting I can also relate the following:

During a Skype chat session with an acquaintance in Sweden, I was watching the Olympic Opening Ceremony via my SlingBox as was my correspondent who was watching the Swedish TV network version. All of a sudden we found ourselves diverging to a discussion about various aspects of the ceremony. I guess you could call this coviewing!

During our trip we, of course, watched my home cable channels via SlingBox from our various hotel rooms; free broadband did enter into the decision about choice of hotels. One hotel charged for broadband access; however, their free breakfast more than made up for the daily Internet charge.

On one of our transit days, we stopped at a Starbucks in Palm Springs, CA and watched the CBC telecast of the Women's Gold Medal Hockey Game. I did record on my digital camera a video of the team singing O Canada via my SlingBox; they definitely should stick to hockey for their livelihood. Congratulations on a great performance!!

Rogers, my Internet (and cable TV) provider, has started providing individual Internet usage statistics to its customers. I was away from the home office for 12 days in February of which 10 were days when I had the SlingBox available. Whereas my January usage was 8.7GB download and 1.1GB upload; my February stats showed 5.8GB download and a whopping 11.0 GB upload. Given Alec's experience with Rogers "unlimited" wireless charges, I have a bit of trepidation about hearing from the Rogers usage police, probably suspecting I am running a highly accessed web server (Not!).

Last weekend I set up a High Definition (HD) television set; this necessitated moving to the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD cable box from the SA3250. Once I had completed the setup (and moved the appropriate cables to the 8300HD) I found my SlingBox player was still running on the desktop PC in my home office (without so much as touching the PC). The one caveat: the S-video output on the 8300HD only provides a Standard Definition signal -- quite suitable for SlingBox. However, since the TV itself is hooked up to the 8300HD via the HDMI cable, I cannot use the SA8300HD's PVR features on the SlingBox. There is also occasionally an annoying message about a "DVI/HDMI connection blocked" if the main TV is not turned on; however, simply hitting the Exit button on the remote control panel solves this.

In two days (Thursday, March 30) SlingBox will be announcing availability for purchase in Canada.

And now to install the Mobile player on my Dell Axim..