Today, I received a package from Time Warner: two tuning adapters and two cable cards. These were the tuning adapters I ordered two weeks ago that I now no longer need because TW could not figure out why they had not been sent yet and sent a tech out instead. Fortunately, I used one of the new cable cards to replace a non-functioning one and just had it paired successfully. I now have closure.
And now a haiku:
All Tivos are GO
Activate couch potato
Now entertain us
The cable guy came out again today. No one would believe me that the Tivo Series 3 needs 2 cable cards even if one of them is an M-card…until one card only activated one tuner like I said would happen.
When they finally believed me and tried to add the second card, for some reason, it wouldn’t pair.
Then, Time Warner told me something ludicrous about the Tivo, which I confirmed was ludicrous when I called Tivo. Now I have to call Time Warner back to figure it all out. Not fun and a waste of my time.
On the plus side, Time Warner called and I think I will definitely get my tuning adapters tomorrow.
So, now I have one Tivo with two tuners that gets half the channels and one Tivo with one tuner that gets half the channels.
And now a haiku:
Cable card failure
One tuner is not enough
What’s it gonna take?
Time has passed since my last post. We are all moved into our new house in Wake Forest. However, the purpose of this post is to bitch about Time Warner Cable. As I feared, the one thing that I would miss the most when I moved from Maryland is my Verizon FiOS service.
The Internet service from Time Warner is not too bad — 30 down and 5 up. Verizon was superior with 35 down and up (and the option for much faster speeds), but I will not complain, since 30/5 seems like it works ok for my purposes.
The TV service is where I am currently having the most issues. Time Warner contracts out their installs, so a tech from Kablelink (which sounds eerily similar to 30 Rock’s fictional cable company Kabletown) came out last Monday. I requested 3 cable cards for my 2 TiVos. In my experience, it seems like every time a tech (from any company Comcast, Verizon, TW) arrives for a cable card install, at least one of the cards is bad. This time was no different. Two of the three cards were bad and, as usual, the tech did not bring any spares.
The tech says that he should have new cards in by Friday and that another tech will come back. A new tech came back on Friday WITH THE SAME TWO CABLE CARDS THAT DID NOT WORK ON MONDAY!! The tech said they should get more this week. I am not holding my breath.
Can I live with one operational TiVo? Of course. Can I live with one operational TiVo that only gets half of the channels that it is supposed to? No, but that is what I am dealing with (First World Problem…I know). I am only getting half of the channel lineup because the tech failed to tell me that Time Warner requires tuning adapters because they use Switched Digital Video — something I never had to deal with before. I called up Time Warner and they supposedly shipped them to me. I am expecting them today, but, again, I am not holding my breath.
Fortunately, everyone at Time Warner and Kablelink have been very pleasant to deal with, so I have refrained from “asking to speak to a manager”. Hopefully, by the end of the week, I will be able to watch the other half of my channels. Fortunately, AMC runs the most recent episode of The Walking Dead many times during the week.
And now a haiku:
Cable incomplete
Partial TiVo is like hell
Want to watch zombies
We had a very quiet and uneventful New Year’s Eve this year. Some might say it was a bit pathetic. We didn’t get together with friends, although my sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and nephew stopped by for about an hour early in the evening. We didn’t even have dinner. I was too tired (or lazy) to get take out or cook anything. I had chips and dip for dinner.
What did we do?
Around 11:45pm, we all gathered in our bedroom to watch the ball drop with Dick Clark. Around 11:58pm, I looked at the time on my cell phone and compared it to the TV, which appeared to be 2 minutes behind. I mentioned that I thought something was wrong, but I was hushed by my wife who was caught up in the moment. Then, my cell phone turned midnight and about 20 seconds later, we heard fireworks being set off in the neighborhood. However, on the TV, Dick Clark wasn’t even close to starting his verbal countdown. I grabbed the Tivo remote and hit the Play button.
Tivo is great for many things, but ringing in the new year may not be one of them. Apparently, sometime earlier in the evening, my wife had paused the broadcast for a couple of minutes. So, while everyone else on the East Coast was kissing and celebrating, we were still waiting for the ball to drop. I wanted to fast forward ahead, but my wife was adamant that we pretend it’s 2010 for another two minutes. Which we did. I was taken out of the moment a bit by our technological snafu, but I was exactly where I wanted to be: with my wife and kids.
Happy New Year!
Around the holiday time, my company was generous enough to give all of its employees a $100 gift card to Amazon. I haven’t spent mine yet. I don’t know what to get. I want to use it to get something that I want rather than something that I need.
There are two things that I am considering using it on, but I can’t decide:
What should I do? I’m leaning toward the Kodak Zi6 right now. Is there something else I should consider?
Owning a Tivo is practically a religious experience. I currently own three Tivos and can’t imagine life without them. I’ve written about Tivo quite a bit. Those that say that their generic cable-company supplied DVR is just as good as a Tivo just haven’t been enlightened and don’t know what they are missing.
Tivo does all of the above…and more! Once you have a Tivo, it’s hard to live without it…even if you don’t need it anymore. Why in the world would you not need a Tivo if you already own one?
I, for one, don’t typically watch TV in my basement, so I’ve thought about retiring that Tivo. But, why? Yes, I’ll save $6.95/month, but I don’t think I can do it. A Tivo that isn’t plugged in is like — well, geez — I can’t even imagine that.
I have a friend who just put a Tivo Series 2 out to pasture. He hasn’t used it in about a year, but he couldn’t bring himself to cancel it. He’s been paying $6.95/month for a box that has been sitting unplugged.
He bought an HDTV before the Tivo Series 3 or Tivo HD was available, so he got a Comcast HD DVR. I think he still used the Tivo Series 2 at that point, but not very extenstively. He lives in Massachusetts and lives in one of the first towns to get the highly anticipated Comcast DVR powered by Tivo. Let’s just say that Tivo and Comcast hadn’t exactly worked out the kinks yet and he had a horrible experience with it. However, he had the taste of a Tivo that could record HD programming and he couldn’t bring himself to go back to a plain old Comcast HD DVR. I advised him to buy the Tivo HD. So, he called to cancel his Series 2 and Tivo offered him a Tivo HD for $199, which was an excellent deal at the time. That was at least 6 months ago, maybe more.
So, yesterday, we had the following IM conversation:
Him: I think I’m dropping down to a 1 Tivo household
Him: I haven’t had the Series 2 on in about 6 months
Him: and I’m still paying for it
Him: I keep thinking I’ll upgrade
Me: didn’t we already have this conversation 6 months ago.
Him: look
Him: shut up alright
It turns out when he got the Tivo HD, he actually never actually followed through and cancelled the Series 2 as I had thought. Canceling a Tivo subscription is like trying to decide whether to euthanize an ailing pet.
Then today:
Him: I had less 2nd guessing breaking up with girls in high school and college
Him: than I did with cancelling the unused tivo
Him: but it is done
Him: sigh.
Him: I need a moment.
Tivo just has that effect on people.
I upgraded my Tivo. I bought a 1TB hard drive. The Series 3 comes with a 250 GB hard drive that can hold 32 hours of HD. Verizon is about to add another 27 HD channels and are expected to add another 20 or so by the end of the year. I don’t think I’l have any reason to record anything that isn’t HD. Therefore, 32 hours of HD just isn’t going to cut it.
Tivo does have the ability to add an external drive, but I figured it’d be a better idea to upgrade the internal drive instead. I’ve actually never upgraded the hard drive in a Tivo. I wanted to do it myself, but the Tivos have SATA drives and I had no way to do the upgrade at home. There’s a guy I work with who is about 100x as fanatic about Tivo than I am who’s done about a million upgrades. He was nice enough to do it for me.
I popped the new drive in and everything is working perfectly. It was very cool to go to the System Information screen and see that I can record up to 131 hours of HD and 1247 hours of SD. Yes, I’m a geek.
If you registered your TiVo with Amazon Unboxed video download service when they were offering the $15 credit, that credit is due to expire at the end of this month.
I can’t say I’m totally impressed with the service thus far (my only complaint is video quality), but it’s not terrible either. I’ve bought one episode of a TV show and rented 3 movies. Just having the video downloaded directly to your TiVo is pretty cool and convenient. If they would adopt a Netflix-like rental model and offer HD downloads, then it’d be perfect.
I had $12 of my credit left (although I’m wondering how considering I’ve spent about $5 so far) and was looking for something to waste it on. I settled on V: The Original Mini Series, which actually includes both the first and second mini-series. It was about $20, so I had to shell out another $8, but for “classic” early 80s sci-fi television, I think it was money well spent.
Something is wrong with my baby. No…not my children…my other baby: my TiVo Series 3. I got the Series 3 back in June when they were offering a $200 rebate. The issue that is causing me to exchange it started 2 days after I got it. Every 10 – 14 days, the device locks up. Typically, I get a blank green screen and it doesn’t respond to any input from the remote or the front panel. One time, instead of a green screen, my screen was filled with static. And, one time, there was a loud high pitch noise accompanying the green screen. Luckily, cycling power cleared up the problem temporarily.
I think the green screen was a red herring. One of my theories was that something may be wrong with the HDMI port, so I hooked it up using the component connection to see if there was a difference. The only difference was that the green screen was now completely black.
It took me at least 4 calls for TiVo to agree that something was defective and that they should send me a new one.
I really don’t believe there’s a problem with the power supply. I think there must be a problem with the hard drive. I’m sure the new box will be fine. It will just be a pain to recreate all of my Season Passes/Wishlists. Plus I’ll lose all of my ratings.
Although it was frustrating to me as a customer to have to call 5 times to convince them that my box was defective, I can understand that they wouldn’t want to rush to exchange a box every time someone experienced a strange issue. After call #3, I was satisfied that they would take care of me and my frustration would end as soon as it happened again.
Now, I just have to wait for the new box to arrive.
My Verizon/Motorola HD-DVR holds eighteen hours, forty-five minutes of HD content. How do I know this? I found out the hard way.
Last night, I came back from playing poker around 1am (I came out $40 ahead) and wanted to watch some TV before I went to bed. I hit the List button on my remote to view my list of recorded programming. I see a warning icon and a message that says, “Your DVR is 100% full”. However, there was another message that said, “You have 0 recorded programs.” Obviously, something was wrong.
Coincidentally, I had a Verizon tech scheduled to come out today to replace a faulty router (that’s another story…or is it?), so I had him look at the DVR while he was here. Basically, he did what I would’ve done had I not known that he was coming — he unplugged the DVR and plugged it back in. That seems to be the magic fix for any DVR…even the almighty Tivo.
When it came back on, it still said it was 100% full. However, this time there was one program in the listing. I had taped Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on Thursday. On Thursday night, because of the problems I was having with the Verizon-supplied router/cable modem, I was having trouble getting the guide data, etc on the DVR. However, I did notice that the red light was on to record Studio 60 as I had expected and thought nothing of it.
Guess what? The DVR started recording Studio 60 and it never stopped. It recorded 18 hours and 45 minutes of HD content before it became 100% full. Why is this such a problem? Well, I had been saving the final 6 episodes of this season’s 24 and the final 2 episodes of How I Met Your Mother. They were purged to make room for Studio 60.
I have never had much faith in my Verizon/Motorola HD-DVR and have continued to tape everything on my two Tivos as a failsafe. So, I can still watch the remaining episodes of 24 and How I Met Your Mother…just not in glorious HD.
Thankfully, this should not be a problem for long. If all goes according to plan, I will be buying a Tivo Series 3 tomorrow. There is going to be a $200 rebate on the Series 3 from May 27th thru June 16th in honor of Father’s Day. Since Amazon is selling it for $606, the $200 rebate will bring it right to the price I was always willing to pay. This nightmare will have a happy ending.
Better Off Jed 