Gotta Love My Tivo

Of all of mankind’s greatest inventions – the wheel, the car, electricity, the telephone, microwave popcorn – there really is none is greater than TiVo. (Full disclosure: No – I’m not a TiVo employee or trying to brownnose my way into a freebie. I’m just a huge TiVo fan.)

I love my TiVo. What a better way to watch TV than with all the commercials fast forwarded right out of them? Plus, you’ll never have to buy another blank videotape again, then hope to God that you programmed the damn thing correctly to tape your shows when you’re out. TiVo made television so much easier.

Mostly.

I’ve had my original TiVo for almost 5 years now – I won it in an essay contest in November 2000. At first I thought “what would I ever do with that thing?”, but I was quickly hooked. I set up season passes to automatically record my favorite shows, I used the interactive guide to see what was on all 128 channels (which is now about 150 channels), and I learned the joys of teaching TiVo about my TV watching habits, so that when it decides to automatically record shows it “thinks” I may like, it’ll pick up on Disney cartoons and not soap operas. Who said computers aren’t smart?

But my original TiVo lived a good life, and is starting to spaz out on me. It takes forever to set it to record shows lately, and the quality of recordings is starting to lack. (If it was a regular computer hard drive, I'd say ScanDisk and Defrag the damn thing, but alas....) So the lovely Mrs. G. and I went out yesterday to the 8th Level of Dante’s Hell (a.k.a Best Buy) and bought a new one. And yes – as much as I LOVE my TiVo, I equally HATE Best Buy. But that’s a rant for another day.

So we bought a brand new one, then spent four hours trying to hook the fucker up. Between our cable box that the local cable pigs forced us to take on to keep our HBO to our cheap-o DVD player to the RF converter for the cheap-o DVD player and our ancient TV, it was a wiring nightmare. I was just about ready to throw the whole thing out the window, but at last – the new TiVo is hooked up, ready, and pretty sweet.

We put the old TiVo in the basement and hooked it up for Miss Katie to watch; I’m sure it’ll soon be packed with 40 hours of “The Real World” or some crap like that, but as long as I don’t have to watch it, I don’t care.

So tonight I have to go home and get acquainted with my new TiVo. I have to teach it all about my favorite shows, and make it really clear that if it somehow does something stupid and forgets to record ‘Lost’ for me, then there’s going to be a really painful ‘retraining lesson’ involving TiVo’s pretty new front logo and a cheese grater. (Threatening to torture your household appliances really does work – you should see my computer monitor cower in fear these days. That’s respect, man!)

For those of you out there stuck with “ordinary” TV, I pity you. I really do. Ask anyone with the power of TiVo – you’ll see how good life can be. If nothing else, having the power to fast forward through that stupid gastro-intestinal-macarena Pepto-Bismol ad ("heartburn, upset stomach, DIAHHREA!") is worth the $6.95 a month.

Three thumbs up!