MrBalky Heavy Industries

I’ve been a fanboy since 1999 when VStream gave them out for Christmas. TiVo is essential; I can’t imagine being without. Still, TiVo’s come down a few notches in the last 12 hours.

Our new HD TiVo arrived last night, and the initial setup went fine, just as expected. So now there are two TiVos in the room. They’ve thought of this, and the remote has a little 1-2 switch so commands to one don’t affect the other:

Fine. Cool. So I click around to the Settings menu and look for this configuration. Nothing anywhere, just how to set the remote up to control the TV. Sigh; off to the manual. Yes, there it is, and I have to do some convoluted operation going to the System Information display, and then enter an elaborate key sequence on the remote while shielding the TiVo from the remote. Sorry, I only have two hands.

Still, I made it through that, but it just doesn’t work. WTF? Well after poking at the buttons for a little while, I finally worked out how to do it, which was almost nothing at all like the manual said, and I’m not entirely sure how to get there again.

That hurdle cleared, I discovered they come with the Home Media Options turned off. Fine, I’ll go turn those on, but are they in Settings? Of course not. You have to navigate to the Music and Photos menu, select Media Options and press the thumbs up button 3 times then enter. Huh? Why can’t this just be on the Settings menu?

So eventually the old TiVo’s going to be displaced, so I want to transfer my recordings from that to the new one. But the TiVos don’t see each other at all. HMO is on, and I know this is possible; how do I do it? Nothing in the manual this time. Surfing up the TiVo site, it turns out the only way enable this functionality is via the TiVo website? Again, WTF?

I used to think TiVo had the usability and intuitive menus down, but now I’m not so sure. It really irks me to have to spend all of this time to hunt down these different places to configure the box, when one would expect them to all be one place.

I still think TiVo is essential, but some of the setup stuff truly sucks.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the credit card class action settlement? It revolves around the major credit card companies overcharging on exchange rates and service fees for transactions made overseas, including ATM withdrawals. Basically, if you had a transaction outside the U.S. between 1996 and 2006, you are entitled to a piece of the settlement. There are 3 options: a flat $25, 1% of an estimated total or 1-3% of individual yearly estimations.

Well, since we lived in Paris for 16 months, one can imagine we racked up the activity. For the entire time, I was paid by direct deposit to our U.S. bank, and we did everything with our cards.

So I’ll be itemizing, thank you very much.

Now the interesting thing about the whole deal is that the bank and credit card statements are kind of like a diary. By looking at the locations for the transactions, you can see when we went to Cologne for Mardi Gras, the trip Steph and I took to Positano and Capri, Christmas in Muenster, London, Bruges, the Camarque… all of it.

And at the end, I had to laugh out loud. After a final visit to Muenster in June, we got home on July 2. The first three visits were to an ATM, Conoco, and Liquor Mart.

Apparently our priorities are cash, gas and booze.

My knee has been feeling pretty good in the last week, aligning this weekend with warm temps and very little wind, so I put flats on it and took the hardtail out for a spin. I gotta say that after years with clipless, the flats just killed me. Or maybe that was the surgery.

Eventually I got to a section of trail still in meltdown; PPDM (postponed due to mud).