This is my 4th TiVo but it is my FIRST NEW TiVo.
My first was a christmas gift given to me about 7 years ago. It was one of the very first models to come out and it was deeply discounted because it had been a demonstration unit in a store. It only had 15 hours of record time! But they were precious hours. Due to the limited recording space I became a master at organizing my season pass list to avoid conflicts... selecting only the new episodes of the shows I really wanted and then following each of those shows with a less important program in the same time slot which I instructed TiVo to record ALL episodes of. That way when the first show was a new episode it would get recorded, but if it was a rerun TiVo would record the secondary program. My season pass list was tight as a drum and nearly flawless in it's organization.
Then... one Superbowl Sunday in 2001 there was a bad fire in the house I was living in. Some overly dramatic people might say that it burned down. It actually just burned really badly, and what didn't burn was drenched from the fire hoses. No one was hurt and insurance was good to us but a lot of stuff got ruined that night... TiVo #1 didn't make it.
About two years later I was ready to try again. #1's replacement, TiVo #2, was a unit that had been returned to Best Buy. Because the box had been opened the Best Buy people had to sell him at a discount. The price was too good to pass up and on impulse I became the owner of a 40 hour TiVo! I was giddy with the thought of organizing my new season pass list with over TWICE the amount of hard drive space to fill with programing. But it was not to be. Hours after setting him up TiVo #2 suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure. I tried and tried to revive him, but no luck. Best Buy wouldn't let me exchange him for another TiVo because he had been on sale. All they would do was give me my money back.
TiVo #3 was/is a TROOPER. About 3 weeks after #2 died I managed to outbid some other TiVo fans on eBay and just a few short days later #3 was up and running!
That was sometime in 2004 I think. I do not know how I survived between the fire and TiVo #3. I had lost two TiVo's... one dying a horrible death in a burning building, the other suffering a catastrophic drive failure right in front of my eyes. Having been so scarred it was hard to love again, but thanks to TiVo #3, I learned to open my heart and once again feel the warm embrace of TiVo.
Now the next chapter has opened in my TiVo scrapbook. For my b-day I got my first BRAND NEW TiVo! This bad boy has 80 hours of hard drive space (at lowest resolution) AND can record TWO shows at once! This is a feat that until just recently only the DirecTV TiVo's were capable of. Once again a whole new world has opened up to me. How do I have to manage my season pass list now that I no longer have to worry about programming conflicts?
The weird thing about all this is that thanks to my relatively recent foray into the blogosphere... I have actually watched WAY less TV than I used to. I try to turn off the computer and relax in front of the tube, but I'm drawn back to the internet more and more lately... and NOT just for the porn! I've also discovered that I tend to spend more time programming TiVo #4 to record programs than I do actually watching said shows! In fact I should be watching the season finale of BattleStar Galactica, but instead... I’m writing pages about the machine that I use to record BattleStar Galactica so I can watch it.
Is that ironic? Where is Alanis Morrisette when you need her?
2 comments:
We dont get battlestar over here.
Wishing you a great weekend holiday over there in USA.
Kev in NZ
I'm so jealous of your new friend. I want one. Of course I don't watch a lot to TV so some might say it's a waste of money. But one of the reasons I don't watch is because I can't schedule my time to be home when what I want to watch is on. But with a new friend...
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