TiVo Series 3 (Goodbye to Motorola)

Over the past few weeks I have been earning my soul back from the devil.   However, today, I sold my soul once again, I got the number 10 large with a coke.

I’m planning on taking my birthday money and buying the new TiVo.  The plan is the TiVo HD Series 3 DVR with the external 500GB hard drive.  Currently, we are running an old SD TiVo along with an HD Motorola DVR from Comcast.  That’s right 2 DVRs, extremely wasteful and not sleek.  Along with this, we also subscibe to NetFlix.  So at any given time we have our recorded shows randomly spread across 2 DVRs and the red envolopes sprinkled all over.  The new TiVo will hopefull solve all this mess and allow us easy TV access to YouTube.

It seems like so far TiVo doesn’t have access to Comcast’s On Demand.  I am unimpressed by this, however, the loss of Comcast’s sloppy, confusing, and finicky VOD (Video On Demand) service could be gotten over by instant access to NetFlick VOD.

The First 5000 Days of the Intenet

This Merry Christmas Eve I laid awake in bed thinking first about the WifeBo sleeping on my chest, then thinking about this video I watched online last night talking about the first 5000 days of the Internet.  When stated like that, 5000 doesn’t sound like very long (it comes out to 13.69 years old).  The Internet has definitely existed longer then that, but that age reflects the time that the public has access to it, (a la: Al Gore).

It’s exciting to think about the Internet as one unified machine that once it was started, it has never once gone offline for even a second.  Even if you personally lose your connection, the overall stability is awe inspiriting.  It used to be that only standard computers could talk to each other, now it’s your phone, it’s you TV, it’s you Blu-ray Player, it’s your car, your DVR, your gaming console.

It will be wild to see how this collective consciousness develops as time goes on.  Merry Christmas Eve.

Blu-ray Hi-Def (How about just “Blu-ray”)

Blu-ray Hi-Def… why must people use the unnecessary addition of “Hi-Def?” Are the Blu-ray marketing people concerned that the simple minded folks won’t know what Blu-ray is? “HD” and “High Def” have an equal number of syllables, “HD” is a legitimate acronym where as “High Def” sounds like a big pile of gay. We’re not going to start calling them: “DVD Standard Def”, so let’s just be simple, “DVD” and “Blu-ray“. If you don’t know which one is HD, then you probably don’t care much about HD to begin with.

Speaking of HD woes, when is Motorola going to streamline its interface for its cable box? The DVD needs folders like the TiVo, and the On-Demand needs….a new On-Demand. Another think I’d love is to automatically hide redundant SD duplicates, so people with HDTVs only watch HD feeds. I can’t say how many times I’ve been somewhere where people have HD and they are unknowingly watching the SD channels. Old people need assistance in making use of their HD.