I have DVR ... for around 36 hours

I broke down and ordered Digital Video Recorder (DVR) service from (big cable company) a couple of weeks ago. After getting their "soonest available" appointment (over two weeks from when I called), I stayed home from work on Thursday, for my 1pm to 5pm appointment. You see you need to have your DVR converter box "professional installed" by (big cable company). Apparently, they used to let people install these things and nobody did it right so they do it now. No exceptions. OK, fine.

5pm comes. And goes. No technician. One call to (big cable company) - OK, we'll page the technician and have him call you with an ETA. 5.30pm comes. No call. Second call to (big cable company) - OK, we'll call the technician and tell you, please hold, OK he'll be there within 15 minutes. OK, fine. He shows up, at 5.45pm (for my 1pm to 5pm appointment). He looks at my digital cable box (the one he's replacing with the DVR box) and immediately looks confused. Apparently, he's never seen one hooked up where the Cable Out isn't directly connected to the TV - I guess nobody besides me has a home theatre system. So I hook it up myself. I asked if he had a S-Video cable I could use to hook this thing up - "You mean that thing?" as he points to a RCA cable. Huh. Well I can clearly see why (big cable company) needs this guy to come out and install the DVR boxes because customers can't do it themselves.

So, after I install the thing myself and pay the man for his professional expertise, he leaves and I cook dinner for me and Cindy. Then we watch TV. I experiment and get the box to record a show. And then realize I don't know how to access the Recorded Programs list. So I hunt around on the Internet and find out that the installer left me the wrong remote - the DVR buttons are missing. Wonderful. So I had to go out the next day to (big cable company) and swap out the remote - atleast I didn't need to schedule a technician visit for that. I get my new remote and all is well. I setup the box to tape both Stargate shows and Battlestar Galactica and head on our for the evening.

I wake up Saturday morning, go to my Tai Chi class, run some errands and then come home, ready to watch some TV before starting working on Chapter 2 of my thesis. I look at the cable box and it's all flaky. The front, instead of the nice display of the time, keeps alternating between "boot", some funky symbols, and "HAL2." It will not turn on and it's not putting out a video signal. I do some WEBINT and find out that this pretty much means the box is hosed. I call (big cable company) and their technical support claims not to have ever heard of this before, they try to contact the box over the cable network and fail, and then say I need to setup a service call - a week from now. Oh joy. Nope, I can't swap the thing out at the lobby - I can't be trusted to hook it up myself (although I did when my installer didn't know what he was doing).

For those interested, the box is a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8000HD. It you want to see what others think of it, try Googling "8000HD." You'll find alot of people with the boot/HAL2 cycle and alot of other problems. Apparently this box has a reputation for being very unreliable and very flaky.

I sent (big cable company) a lengthy email detailing every problem I had since day one of DVRness. Their response - call the 800 number and let's talk about it. I did that. The guy was quite rude and was unrelenting in his "policy is..." statements. He did credit me the $17 I paid for the "professional installation" since that was not quite up-to-par. He didn't seem to think that waiting two weeks for something to be installed, having to do that myself anyway, only to have the thing break after 36 hours, was a big deal.

Bottom line - another day I have to take off work, the loss of those shows I already recorded, no digital cable for a week, and alot of frustration.

(big cable company), you don't have a very good reputation for customer service. This is why.

Television!

I try to watch a small amount of television. I used to watch alot and now I try to minimze the amount I watch. That being said, I find that hard to accomplish this time of year because there are so many good, compelling, things on television right now. Here's a sampling.

NFL Playoffs.

We've had a couple games so far and they are quite good. The Steelers/Colts game was fantastic. Plus the Colts lost. Sweet. Seriously, this is the best time of the year for football.


24

Jack's back. Two hours into the new season and it's just as good as last season.







Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis

Even since SciFi has taken these shows over, they air them in half-seasons. This January saw the premiere of the second half of season nine. And it's good ... it's really good. I'm still more into SG-1 than Atlantis, but both shows are really good. The new storylines with SG-1 focusing on the Ori are very compelling.


Lost

Hands down, best television show to appear on network for many, many, years. It's like one huge, multi-season, episode of The Twillight Zone, but with really good, compelling, character development.



seaQuest DSV

This one is cheating, as it's not on television anymore. But, thanks to alot of fan persering to Universal, seaQuest DSV, season one, is now available on DVD. I really miss this show. And this is the first season, when seaQuest has stories that were very grounded in science - it was believable science fiction that you could really see happening in twenty or thirty years. No aliens, time travel, or anything else that we'll see starting in season two. This was (and still is!) damn good television.

Three Books

I got alot of books for Christmas. Here's three that were really good and I suggest reading.

Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton. ISBN 0596006748. 116 pages.

This book is a collection of five short stories by Wil Wheaton, who is best known as Ensign Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation. I say five short stories lightly; it's really four really short stories followed by one much longer story. The four short ones are all things that happened during Wil's life, both before and after TNG but focusing on Wil as Wil. The long one is about his experiences doing TNG itself. Some are funny, some are sad. One is cute. This book took me about an hour and a half to read on Christmas evening at Cin's grandparents house. It was an excellent read and I highly recommend it. This book is one of two of Wil's published works, the other being Just a Geek, which I also received for Christmas but isn't to the top of the queue yet.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. ISBN 0316346624. 304 pages.

This book is all about how various things - ideas, trends, viruses, and so forth - tip, or hit that point where they just take off. There's three key factors into making something tip, "The Power of the Few", Something's "Stickiness", and "The Power of Context." The power of the few is important - some people's opinions matter more than most peoples'. There are three types of people that matter the most, Connectors - who know vast numbers of people from all different social circles, Mavens - who stay up-to-date on current happenings and supply information on "things" willingly (these are the Consumer Reports-type people) and Salesman - who are really good at influencing people. Stickiness is a simple concept to understand - the presentation of ideas, as well as the idea itself, can be tweaked in very small ways that make the idea so much more appealing. The power of context is also simple - the context an idea is received in changes ones perception of it. All-in-all, this book was really good. The best part about it is that Gladwell uses real-world examples all over the places to explain things. He'll use an example to illustrate an idea, then talk about the idea, and then use more examples to drive it home. Really good writing. Highly recommend. The book took about four or five hours of serious reading - it goes fast though and it was easy to understand as I went along. The most interesting part for me was the section on the three types of people that matter in making an idea tip - now I know that I'm a Maven (with some Connector properties). :)

On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt. ISBN 0691122946. 80 pages.

This is one of the shortest books I've ever read. It's written by a professor at Princeton University. It is an academic examination of bullshit - what is it and what role does it play in language and modern communication. It's not intended to be funny, but a serious examination of the role of bullshit in moden culture. It's a very short read - took about thirty minutes (it's only 67 pages of text and the book is very tiny - it's only 6.4 x 4.5 x 0.5 inches). Nevertheless, it has got alot of good content in it and really makes one think seriously about both lying and bullshitting and how they are very different, both in goals and in effects. It was a very good examination of the subject and worth reading for anyone. Highly recommend.

One Chance Encounter

Me and Cin got up this morning and drove up to Cracker Barrel in an attempt to get breakfast. No luck - the wait was over a hour, probably since it's New Year's Day. So we headed back to Columbia and went to Boston Market for lunch. While Cin was paying and I was filling up our drinks, I hear someone come up to me and say "Jeff, it's been a really long time."

Turns out it was Jan, a girl I knew for years and went out with for a while, many years ago. We've lost touch. So in the course of ten minutes, we kinda caught up. I found out she's working for the Department of State right now, which is really cool. It was really good to see her.

What bothers me is how I handle situations like this.

Even once in a good while, I'll see someone I haven't seen in a long time, someone that I'd love to catch up with and learn more about. Jan was very special to me, and I'll always consider her a good friend. Yet I don't know much about how she's spent the past couple of years. And yet I spent this chance meeting learning a little more, but that's it. No attempt to see her again and catch up. No way of contacting her in the future. It'll be the next chance meeting that I'll see her again at, if that ever happens. This is usually what happens when I run into someone I haven't seen in a while. While I'm really glad I ran into her, part of me feels like I messed up a good chance to reconnect with an old friend.

Oh well. One of these days, I'll get better at this kind of thing.