I almost miss cable. But only today.

A few months ago we turned in our cable boxes to Time Warner and went completely to Internet TV. I bought a Mac Mini to be the HTPC or media server or whatever you want to call it: the computer that stays plugged in to the TV and stereo all the time. “I pretty much killed an older HP laptop trying to make it do that.”

We’ve been watching a lot less TV, which was certainly a big reason we did it, along with saving a hundred bucks a month. Most of the shows we like are streamed via the network Web site or Hulu. The one exception was Mad Men, and we bought that per episode from iTunes, which I will probably do with Top Gear, the BBC car show, once the new season is available. All in all, apart from some glitchy periods “possibly due to the fact that we live in an unusually-high-bandwidth-using neighborhood”, it’s worked well. Until the snow.

We’ve been stuck inside the house for almost 48 hours. We’ve watched everything in our Hulu queue. We watched the Netflix DVDs we had in the house and, cruelly, discovered that the copy of “The Hangover”; we received is unplayable for some reason. Last night, desperate for some form of mindless entertainment after a long day trying to keep The Boy amused, I delved deeper into the Netflix and Hulu archives.

Let’s just say there isn’t a lot of deep there to delve in. There’s a reason you haven’t heard a lot of people standing around the water cooler talking about most of these shows. A lot of them have that quasi-Euro crossover look that means they were probably filmed in Vancouver by a director who was shortlisted but ultimately rejected for a series on The WB. I’m sure a lot of them have cult followings. That may sound like a good thing to you. It may not.

The sun is out and the snow is thinking about melting, but I’m not optimistic we’ll be going to work tomorrow. Which means I may soon be catching up on old episodes of “McMillan and Wife.”