Slingbox

The Slingbox is a device that using your cable and internet can send you your TV anywhere in the world. So after a week of living in Korea, Shannon has decided that American TV is a must for the next 3 years.

On Friday, I went to Best Buy and purchased the Slingbox.

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Brands/Slingbox/pcmcat202100050003.c?id=pcmcat202100050003

http://www.slingbox.com

The Slingbox hooks up to your cablebox (or your coax cable), your internet hub, and power. Then, it has a remote control signal that you attach to the cable box so you can control your cable remotely.

The Slingbox Pro (which does HDTV) is about $300. A one-time payment, no subscription fee needed.

Now with the Slingbox, you can watch your TV on your computer or phone… anywhere you can log into the internet in other words. I don’t know if you can watch it via your Playstation 3 or Xbox yet. We’ll try it and report back when our gaming systems get to Korea. If you want Slingbox to run on your remote TV, you either need to hook up your computer to your TV, or buy a SlingCatcher. A SlingCatcher will run you another $300 approximately.

We plan on hooking up one of our desktops to the TV and stream it there. (Like old-school netflix)

To initially set up the program, you need to have a computer in your house hooked up to your network and download the software from the Slingbox site. After that initial setup you can log into your account from any computer and watch your TV. When you log-in there’s a virtual remote you use to change channels, etc.

Here’s a photo of the Slingbox in use (Slingbox on the right. Wireless router to the left):

Here’s a photo of the remote system attached to the cablebox:

Hooray! We’ll get to watch Seinfeld and all the other rerun sitcoms that we’re addicted to. Now, it’s too bad we don’t have a DVR….

Shipping our Cats to Korea

Both our cats are coming with us to Korea. Rather, I’m shipping them from the US, my husband will receive them in Korea.

We went through an IPATA certified shipper.   http://www.ipata.com/   We went with Air Animal Inc. I’ll give them a more thorough review after our cats get to Korea. http://www.airanimal.com/   Before I hired them though I looked into what would be required to get our cats out of the US and into Korea. Korea’s requirements aren’t that bad.

1.       Need to have a rabies vaccination < 1year but more then 30 days. If less than 30 days, then they have to sit in quarantine until the 30 day mark is reached.

2.       Need to have a Health Certificate by a certified veterinarian (this means the USDA certified vet for your state…. Which means you’ll have to send off for the certification, the USDA has its own rules and regs and it’s a lot harder getting a straight answer from them)

An IPATA shipper, depending on how much you’re willing to pay them, will sort out all this paperwork for you. Pick your pets up at your front door, provide appropriate kennels and supplies, they will transfer your pet (make sure they don’t get lost at an airport), get them through customs, and deliver them to your door at the end.

Because I had so much trouble finding out costs before I did this, I’m going to provide our breakdown here for anyone who might be using this as a reference for their own move. And let me just say, Thank God Shannon’s company is paying for this.

$350       Residential pickup/airport delivery

$403       International health certificates with USDA endorsements

$500       Domestic Cargo

$350       Airline Transfer

$950       International Cargo with Insurance

$1200    Customs clearance, duties fees, and residential delivery

$945       Pet Move Management Fee

_____

$4698    Total

I probably could have done this for cheaper (they call this the VIP treatment). It was worth it to me to have them take care of everything so I wouldn’t have to stress out about this. A month on my own trying to figure out from the USDA certified vet what we needed to do (they gave me 10 year old documents about what’s required by Korea and then contradicted that information on the next page, not to mention pricing charts that had farm animal information instead of pet information) convinced me that it was worth any price to have someone else figure it all out and get my pets safely to me. Also, they’ll have someone who speaks Korean escorting our cats through clearance at the end.  (That’s why customs clearance is so expensive!)

My experience thus far is I would recommend this route to anyone who can take it. I’ll let you know if I still feel that way in April.