Category: Rant

So after the first day’s comedy of errors, we decided to go the CableCard+TiVoHD route. We ordered the CableCard installation, which was scheduled for a few days later. I figured I’d set up several TiVos in my day so that shouldn’t be any problem, so I left if for the night before the installer appointment. That was my first mistake.
Continue reading “Paul & Vicki get HD – A Comedy of Errors, Vol II”

Last Friday Vicki and I were looking at the horrible picture on our downstairs TV, and at the check I just got back from Google, and said “It’s time to replace this piece of shit and buy a TV made in this century”.

Some friends had raved about the Sharp Aequos(?), and we had a look at it in the store and on the web. It was just barely within our price range. But we said “hey, we don’t watch a lot of DVDs, and we don’t have any plans to buy a new HD or BluRay DVD player anyway, so why do we need 1080p?”. We decided that the Sony Bravia looked just as good to us, and cost enough less that we could also afford a new TiVo HD. Hey, bonus! Of course, the salesman tried to talk us into the Monster Cable HDMI cable (which came in two versions, one costing $100 and one costing even more). There is only one thing I know about video cables, and that’s that Monster Cables are horribly overpriced, so we “settled” for the non-Monster one that “only” costs $50.

It was when we got everything home that I discovered that the new TiVo HD doesn’t have a way to control a cable box. I thought I’d just have to take the old cable box in and swap it with an HD one, and I’d be away to the races. But no, this one takes one or two CableCards. Fine, I thought, I wouldn’t miss the cable box. But then I looked at the Time Fucking Warner (aka TFW) web page for CableCard and discovered three things:

• You can’t just swap your box for a CableCard, you need to wait for an installer
• The CableCard doesn’t support some of the HD channels, notably anything they’ve added after January 2006.
• If we ditch the cable box, we’re going to “lose our package” and pay a-la-carte for the premium channels, which would raise our monthly fees by about $30

Ok, neither of the first two are show stoppers, and we could deal with the third by moving the cable box to the upstairs TV, but I was seriously thinking of ditching the TiVo HD and getting Time Fucking Warner’s own DVR. That was, until I tried to figure out how bad their DVR’s user interface was. I’d heard from some people who had dropped their TiVos in favour of their cable company’s DVRs and had ultimately gone back to TiVo because the UI was so incredibly bad.

And then I discovered the worst Flash web site on the web, and that’s saying something. This site attempts to show you how to use a DVR, but all it does it tell you “press this button, now press this button, now press this one”, without telling you *why* you’re pressing that button. There is a depiction of the user interface screen in one corner, but it’s so small you can’t see what you’re doing, so while it’s telling you to press the up arrow, you can’t tell why you’re pressing up – are you selecting a menu, or scrolling through a list, or what? Maybe if they used some of the real estate taken up by the dancing doofus they’d have room for a readable screen depiction?

Anyway, after enduring that horrible demo, I decided not to go for the TFW DVR.

Yesterday, I took my laptop into the kitchen and set it down exactly where I have been setting it down every morning since Vicki’s surgery. It said it couldn’t get a signal. So I took it out to the dining room. It still said it couldn’t get a signal. I put it down on top of Vicki’s iBook which was saying it had 4 bars of signal, and it still couldn’t get a signal. I took it out to the living room, where it got a signal but MacStumbler was saying the strength was -50 or worse. Software Update says there was an update, so I installed that. When it was done, it said it needed to reboot.

I tried shutting down important apps before rebooting, and many of them went to whirling pizzas instead of shutting down. I tried rebooting it, and as usual since I “upgraded” to Leopard, it froze up while shutting down – it gets to the point where most of the applications have shut down, but then then whirling pizza of death is the only thing happening, although the background is happily changing on schedule. So I forced a reboot, and as usual since I “upgraded” to Leopard, that failed the first time as well – I got some warning about having to rebuild some caches(?) and then when I clicked ok it froze again. So I forced another boot and that worked.

Wifi still wasn’t working right – I can get a signal in some parts of the kitchen, but not in my usual spot. And it doesn’t seem to want to unmount things – the Adobe Updater put something in the list of mounted drives, and after it was finished updating it wouldn’t leave the list. I also attached my new TimeMachine drive and after it was finished backing up overnight I was unable to unmount it. Then it started spewing popups every few seconds telling me it lost contact with my NFS mounted music collection, even though it was playing music from that collection just fine. I quit iTunes and attempted to unmount the drive, but it wouldn’t unmount either. I pulled the TimeMachine drive cable, and it gave me the stern warning about removing devices without unmounting them first.

So another attempted reboot, another failure to shut down and a forced shut down, and lo and behold it actually came up after the forced shutdown with no extra shenanigins. But by that time I was out of time so I left for work without trying to discover if I could unmount mounted drives this time or if my network connection actually works where it used to.

You know, the only reason I wanted Leopard was for TimeMachine, although the eye candy (or as Vicki says, “iCandy”) is cool, and if I’m not imagining things, I think the OS is a little less memory hungry than Tiger. But this network and drive flakyness is making me wish I’d waited for a point release.