Cable gets a facelift

I turned on the TV this morning to a pleasant surprise.

Time Warner Cable announced that it would push their digital cable programming onto Statesville's Adelphia shell today. I forgot.

What a pleasant surprise.

We received a packet in the mail late last week with details on the changes. There are a few things I've already noticed, for those of you with Statesville cable:

• HD channels have moved. Instead of the 700s, HD channels are now in the 600s. This is important to note if you have DVR and record your broadcast shows. Unless you reset your series recordings, you won't get "Private Practice" or "Kid Nation" tonight.
• There are more channels. My soul smiled a little this morning when I was able to flip between Discovery Health and Bravo.
• The menu looks better. Instead of some pre-1990, first generation PC looking menu, this one is sleek and silver.

Some things I haven't noticed yet but hope are changes I'll see:

• The commercials say Time Warner is the home of free HD programming. Under the Adelphia shell I was paying $5 a month for the HD tier, which was just the broadcast channels, ESPN and a couple Discovery channels. I've already been told that Statesville is not the home of free HD programming, but I hope that with this upgrade we can get in on that action. I'm concerned that we won't because why would a business give up money?
• The mailing we received said we would have more HD channels, namely TBS and TNT. I didn't see them in my channel menu this morning, but I'll be sure to check the new channel listings in the mailer when I get home.

Most of all, I hope the new upgrade will keep my cable box from going on the fritz every couple weeks. Sometimes it forgets to download channel guides and sometimes it looks a lot like satellite TV during a bad thunderstorm.