In May 2000, Michele got a phone call at home from my employer looking for me. I had taken the day off in celebration of my birthday. She took a message and called me on my cell phone. The sordid details aside, I was “downsized” that day.
In March 2004 after coming home from work for the day I received a call from my project manager asking me to come back to work, and when pressed about the reason he wouldn’t say. This time I was fired; my contract terminated.
So this evening, when we were just sitting down to dinner and my cell phone rang, and the caller was my project manager at work, both of us had a heart-in-the-throat moment. I actually interrupted the guy to tell him that the last two times work had called me at home “after hours” it was to let me go. I point blank asked him if this call had anything to do with getting let go. He assured me that it didn’t. He merely wanted to go over some task he wanted me to work on exclusively in the morning. Details that could have, and should have, been expressed in an email.
Sure, I’m a little gun shy, but when the only calls you get from work precede bad news, I think you are allowed to overreact. From here on out, no more calls from work. Please.
So, on Thursday last week at around 7:30 our primary Tivo died. Efforts to resuscitate it failed. Tivo kindly initiated an exchange for us, sending a refurbished series 2 machine our way.
This morning the DHL guy dropped it off, and Michele immediately started hooking it up. Fresh out of the box it takes a good 4 hours for the initial formatting to complete. Overcoming issues with the phone connection, Michele was able to start the format operation about noon. Once it was completed it was apparent that the wrong set of channels had been set up. Luckily the second pass through to change the channels to the proper set only took 40 minutes.
By 5:30 this evening we had most of our season passes reestablished, and the Tivo was already recording programming for us.
I am happy to say that we survived 128 hours or so of “live” television; mostly by not watching live television, roughly a dozen movies were watched instead.
With the primary Tivo on the fritz we’ve been watching movies. Lots of movies.
The Corporation A very engrossing look at corporations in America and their impact on the lives of people both here and abroad. One of the scariest things this documentary revealed is the use of Prosilac to increase dairy milk production - even though it isn’t needed and it may introduce disease causing pathogens in milk. Highly recommended.
Veronica Guerin Based on the true story of one journalists battle to expose drug corruption in Ireland. A grim, harsh look at the impact drugs have on society.
Sherlock Holmes: Dressed to Kill The last Sherlock Holmes to star Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Not overly long on plot or characterizations, but good fun nonetheless.
The Picture of Dorian Gray The first time I saw this I watched it on a black and white television. It was shot in black and white after all. Except for one or two scenes where color is used to great effect.
Stuart Little Good, clean family safe fun. With the Tivo out of service we sorted all 229 DVD titles and in the process we discovered some we hadn’t watched in a while. This was one. The next three were others that caught our eye in the alphabetizing effort.
Beverly Hills Cop I remember seeing this when it first came out in 1984. At the time I had recently completed college and was working my first programming job. Eddie is only a month older than I, and I was struck by his fame at a tender age. The movie is a little dated now but still enjoyable.
Bringing Down the House A great comedy that allows Queen Latifah to strut her stuff. Steve Martin, as usual, plays the every man caught in over his head role very well.
Ruthless People A great vehicle for both Bette Midler and Danny DeVito. I hadn’t seen this in years and it was funny all over again.
Must Love Dogs A good little romantic comedy, I actually almost cheered when Diane Lane’s character finally takes the plunge and goes after John Cusack. Michele and I discovered that the local theater has an early (before noon) matinee on Sunday’s that is usually deserted. Movies like this are fun again since the theater is largely empty at 11:50 am.
Shadow of a Doubt From the master, Alfred Hitchcock, with a carefully crafted presentation and precise camera angles. When people say that movies aren’t made like they used to be anymore, this is the kind of movie to which they are referring.
In the spring of 2001 Michele and I bought our first Tivo. The series 1 machine soon became an indispensable part of our lives. So much so that in January 2004 we bought a second Tivo, a series 2 with double the recording capacity. The original machine was moved to the bedroom where it collects old sitcoms from Nick@Nite, TVLand, and other cable outlets. While the new machine lives in our office space and records all the reality shows we like as well as movies and “Good Eats.” In all we have over 20 season passes set up, or we did.
Last night the series 2 machine borked. We had just finished watching a Sherlock Holmes movie recorded from Turner Classic Movies and when we tried to delete it from the play list it refused. After trying to delete it a second time with no luck we tried to delete another program, still no luck.
Then the screen went totally black.
After a minute a grey screen with the words, “Welcome. Powering up…” appeared. About three minutes later the Tivo Central screen appeared and we were able to see our “Now Playing” list once again. This time we were successful in deleting Sherlock, but no sooner had that operation completed when the Tivo once again rebooted.
Uh-oh. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
After 5 or 10 minutes of looking at the “Welcome. Powering up…” screen I called Tivo support. The support tech had me unplug the unit and wait 15 seconds and then plug it back in. No change. A second cycle was suggested and still no Tivo. So we initiated an exchange. Tivo is shipping (hopefully today!) a refurbished unit to us and, once it arrives, we’ll return the malfunctioning unit in the same box. Since we are out of our 1-year warranty period we have to but the refurbished unit for $149, which is roughly half of the manufacturers suggested list price for a new series 2 model.
I’m not very good about copying shows we want to keep forever off to tape from the Tivo, so we did lose a couple of things we would have liked to keep. And the Thursday night episode of Big Brother 6 is gone forever, unwatched by us. Mostly we are going to be inconvenienced by having to watch (gasp!) live TV for the next week or so until the new unit arrives.
I have been reading about MythTV for some time now. Having my Tivo die on me is making the prospect of having my own homegrown DVR seem like a better idea.
Forget running Mac OS X on any old Intel processor. I managed to sneak into Apple’s R&D Lab and make off with a soon to be released G5 Powerbook!
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Actually I followed this Mac OS X Hint.
Kinda makes you wonder about the veracity of all these Mac OS X running on x86 machines, doesn’t it.
Kung Fu Hustle A riot of a movie; zany, filled with stunts, and surreal. Think Bugs Bunny meets Matrix meets Jackie Chan.
Alexander Long, slow, tedious. The story plods along and is hard to follow by virtue of flashbacks. The sound quality is such that you can barely understand the lines being spoken by the actors. Did I mention it was long and tedious?
The Upside of Anger Dreary to the point were we turned it off less than thirty minutes after starting it.
Elvis Has Left the Building A very funny light hearted romp. Great cameos by some unlikely people. Good fun all around.
Forrest Gump Every bit as good today as it was when it came out. We own it on VHS tape but I want to get a DVD copy because this movie will always be in my collection. Tom Hanks does an outstanding job in the title role. Certainly he is one of our finest actors today.
Stone Cold A sleeper that was actually made for television, Stone Cold delights. Tom Selleck is perfect in the lead role as a troubled LA cop who has moved to Paradise MA to start over again. Only there is trouble in paradise. A very enjoyable film
We have two Tivos in the house. One in our office/living room and one in the bedroom. Just because I am in a list making mood, here are the shows we record via the “Season Pass” feature.
When I was a child there were two service stations a mile from my parents house, a Shell station and across the road a Standard station. (Who else remembers Standard stations?) These were full-service stations; when you pulled in next to the pump island your car ran over the annunciator cord causing a bell to ring inside the station itself. The attendant, dressed in an collared shirt with his name embroidered over the left pocket, came out and asked you what kind of gas you wanted, and should he check the oil. The front and rear windows were cleaned as a matter of course.
All of this service for 29 or 30 cents a gallon.
By the time I was sixteen the oil shortage had occurred and gasoline prices had passed the 60 cent per gallon mark. Before I was out of high school prices were $1.30. Once or twice while I was in college I remember the price dipping below a dollar, but only briefly.
This morning I had to fill our car up. When the “miles to empty” value that is displayed on the dashboard computer reads 80 or so, the car takes 20 gallons to fill. This morning I put 19.380 gallons into the car. It cost me $50.37.
Fifty bucks for a tank of gas that will last me until next Thursday or Friday.
Two dollars and fifty-nine point nine cents per gallon.
Un-freaking-believable.
One of the reasons I use Firefox when I am web browsing on a Windows OS machine is the ability to block popup advertising. Imagine my dismay to learn of a new exploit that allows the spawning of popup windows even with popup blocking enabled. It seems that using the Flash plugin we all have installed in our browsers it is possible to launch popup windows. The blocker doesn’t prevent this since it is aimed at preventing javascript launched windows.
Fortunately, you can get around this in Firefox. (Thanks to Pete Bevin for the original posting.)
The possible values are:
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