UCI Housing Network and Cable TV Issues

It looks as if HBO is now activated. I get a signal on channel 18, and while the video signal is snowy, it clearly is HBO (like other channels, they put their logo in the lower right corner.)
The audio, though, does not come through.

I am happy to report that in the month since UCI Housing switched us over to DirecTV, I haven't seen any serious outages.
I have seen occasional receiver errors, though, but the DirecTV receivers seem to have a better error recovery mechanism that the receivers from Dish. They were up and running within minutes.
I am still waiting for HBO to be available. The housing website continues to say

HBO will be installed soon and will require a separate subscription to activate. Service will be provided on Channel 18. Subscription information is forth-coming.

Finally, we still need to push for more channels, in particular ESPN.

In the last couple of days, I have noticed quite a number of chinese-language flyers being posted around campus housing.
A fellow Chinese student, Jie, told me today that these flyers come from the Chinese student community, and they are trying to get the housing administration to put the Phoenix channel, which carries Chinese programming, back in the channel lineup.
There is also an English call for support posted to my blog.
So, if you are a Chinese student living in on-campus housing, please support these efforts.

It seems that the switch to DirecTV was a good one. I didn't notice a single outage over the Thanksgiving weekend. That is the longest time without outage since UCI started managing this.
Of course, before, with my subscription to Cox, it wouldn't even have occurred to me to be thankful for a couple of days of working cable... I would have expected nothing less...

Although the situation has improved, it is far from what was standard with Cox.
My current beef is that the audio is not normalized. When channel-surfing, I constantly have to adjust the audio. On some channels the audio level is so low that I have to turn up the volume to hear anything. On other channels, the audio level is much higher, so when I switch channels I nearly have my ears fall off, in particular if I was listening to one of the channels with a low level before.
Professional cable providers (i.e. Cox, etc.) do audio normalization to avoid this problem. Given how long it took them to change providers, I wonder how many months it will take UCI Housing to fix this problem...

Ok, UCI Cable TV is now using DirecTV...
Let's just hope that the channel freezes are a thing of the past.
The channel lineup is here.

Some impressions so far:

• Still no ESPN, but at least Spike TV and FX, and HBO hopefully coming soon.
• The pretty much useless UCTV and Research channels are gone. That's a good thing. I don't know who had the glorious idea to put these programs up in the first place...
  I am sure the people who produce these programs are sincere, but TV is the wrong venue for them. TV is entertainment, for heaven's sake.
• Audio normalization is still not done. When channel-surfing, the audio always has to be adjusted.
• The channel lineup lists 2 UCI channels, but they don't seem to be there. My suspicion is that they are going to be similar to the UCTV channel. If so, they should rather put some real channels there.

I hope that after this fiasco with Dish the UCI housing administration is more open to student participation. Without a number of students putting pressure on the administration, we would still be stuck with the crappy Dish service.