I have a confession to make. Last week, I got satellite TV.

Yeah, you read it right. Last week.

Before that, I was subsisting on what my antenna and my wireless internet could bring into the house, and running up a large bill at the local video store. (Seriously - it's what some people spend on groceries.) And I call myself a TV columnist. What a fraud.

Here's the truth about me - I'm cheap. I'll spend hundreds of dollars on a handbag (or DVD rentals), but I've always balked at the monthly fees for a decent cable or satellite package. Because that's the catch, right? Satellite isn't all that expensive, but good satellite costs a fortune, with all those picky packages. If I want to watch 'Dexter' as it airs, I'd have to get pregnant, make sure it was a boy, gestate for nine months, and then hand him over. Am I right, people?

Well, this is a rather cool feature for a TV fan: IMDb pages for TV and movie characters.

Now, it's one thing to have a page for a character that has only been seen on one TV show. But what about characters that have appeared on several TV shows? I decided to test IMDb and see how thorough it is. I typed in "Mike Bauer," a character that used to be on Guiding Light. The character has not only been played by a bunch of characters over the decades, he also appeared on another soap, Another World (on another network!), and damn, the IMDb caught that too.

The Office star Steve Carell was injured yesterday on the set of Evan Almighty, the sequel to the Jim Carrey comedy hit Bruce Almighty. He fell out of a Humvee and badly sprained his ankle. He's doing OK though, and the filming won't be interrupted.

My shock isn't that Carell was involved in an accident. I'm more shocked that they're making a sequel to Bruce Almighty.

So I'm surfing around The Internet Movie Database, getting some info about the NBC show from the 1990s called Something So Right (Jere Burns, Mel Harris, kids and step kids - funny show), and while I'm on the page for the show, I see their "Recommendations" section. For Something So Right, they say "If you like this title, we also recommend ... Survivor."

Yup, if you like family comedies, you'll love a reality show about people on an island backstabbing each other to win a million bucks! I know that family life can be hectic, but it's not that bad.

Curious, I went over to the Survivor page, and the recommendation for people who like Survivor is...The Apprentice. Now that actually makes sense, but why isn't the recommendation Something So Right? (Oh, and Survivor is also recommended for people who like Newsradio and American Gothic too).

How do they pick the recommendations? Is it actual people picking them, or is generated by what shows users are looking at? Very weird.