ARGGGGH!

Wednesday night is a big TV night for me. There's lots of good shows on, way too many to watch. But thankfully I have all kinds of cool technology to help me. I just happily record things and watch them throughout the week. I've been doing this with my TiVo for years. It's grace and reliability have completely changed the way I watch TV. But since I'm an audio/video nerd I've wanted to take advantage of HDTV. I recently got an HDTV digital video recorder from my cable company which has allowed me to do cool things like watch shows in HD (like the Superbowl) and record those shows just like I do with the TiVo.

This is all great when it works. But now for the second time in two months it's screwed up and not recorded things it's supposed to. Tonight my digital cable was screwed up across the board and my recordings of Lost and Alias didn't happen. Grrrr. But what's going on with my TiVo? It's totally unaffected, happily whirring away recording what it's supposed to...

New technology is great, but in the consumer electronics space stuff just has to work, all the time, no matter what. It's times like this that I don't mind sending TiVo some money each month, their service is just so much better then anything else in it's class from a reliability standpoint - and new features (like HDTV) are totally cancelled out by any reliability issues, it's like Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs - just put reliability on the bottom of that pyramid.

I guess now I get to go figure out how to download TV shows on the internet...

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