Trials, Tribulations, TiVo

Today sucked on the TV doctor front. I am in the process of collecting stimuli for an upcoming experiment, and digital video is having its way with me. Luckily, my friend Byung-Ho Park came through via e-mail and saved the day.

This allowed digitization to move forward in fits and spurts, such as when I spent an hour rendering the Spanish version of Oz. D'Oh.

All of this ripping and redigitizing convinced me to finally move into the TiVo world. So I checked out the procurement card and headed to Best Buy, which was out of friggin' TiVos!!!!!!! Because of their ordering incompetence, I had to drag my three daughters to the other Best Buy.

TiVo finally in hand, I came home to activate it only to find out that my broadband connection was out! Really, I should have gone back to bed after my workout this morning, as it has all been downhill.

With the Internet connection reestablished (obviously), I got the TiVo dialed in only to find out that it has to think for 8 hours before I can mess with it. Have these people never heard of instant gratification? The whole point of buying the TiVo was to archive the content, which requires TiVo To Go. But that requires version 7.1 of the software, and mine now have 5.3 or something, so when I plug in the wireless Internet connection, nothing happens! Arrgh.

So, for the moment, I maintain a fantasy of endless amounts of stimulus material on file. For now, however, only my blood pressure has increased.

P.S. As an amusing sidenote, the blogger.com spell checker that did not recognize "Weblog" recognizes "TiVo." Go Figure.