for a couple of months now, my tivo has been on the decline. it first started with a little pokiness: a pause here, a little freeze there. and then the ui would start to choke and take a little longer to respond. and then longer. and then even longer.
then the stutters began: you’d be watching some show, and it would sloooow down. and thenspeedbackup. like your tivo was on acid and couldn’t keep linear time. except without the hallucinations.
and then the hallucinations began. it would play, and then black out and get all weird and pixellated, and eventually go back to normal. stutter, slow, fast. rinse, repeat.
alas, it seemed the hard drive in my tivo was dying. thankfully, the rs has a good thing called a “gift economy,” whereby people give up things that they don’t want anymore but maybe someone else might. for example, i’ve given away a cordless phone:
Well, this may be your lucky day! Free for your taking, a vtech cordless phone system running on 2.4 GHz digital! It’s got caller id so you can avoid your many stalkers from your mickey mouse club days, and even call waiting caller id so you can pick up calls from your stalkers from your playboy bunny club days. It even comes with an extra handset and charging base, although the handset doesn’t seem to work. But the charging base does! Feel the freedom! Do I leave the handset over here, or over there? Feel the panic as that crucial call from the academy admissions department comes in! Did I leave the handset over here? or over there?!?
but now back in the “real” world, it’s hard to adjust. where’s the beating sun? where are the art installations? why is everyone wearing so many clothes? is my piss still clear? how can i reintegrate myself when i still feel like i’m carrying black rock city around with me all the time? oh, that damned playa dust everywhere, why won’t it leave me be? it’s in all my gear and clothes and naughty crevices, and i can’t get it out! if there were only some sort of machine that could take it away!
alas, my friends, you are saved.
for i have to offer you one miracle machine which will whisk your problems (playa dust) away. it’s a miracle of the modern technological world, called a vacuum cleaner, or more specifically, a hoover (hoov ‘er? i hardly know ‘er!) elite 350 upright. bagless? HELL NO. bag definitely required. you don’t want your memories and remnants just floating around all willy-nilly, do you? you want a BAG to carry them in. maybe to the dumpster. whatever.
included are also various hosey attachments. not included is you getting to tell me what you’re going to do with the hosey attachments.
think of it as a star-off machine, and you’re all black rock sneetches. which would make me mr. slyvester mcmonkey mcbean. except this machine is free. for you. because i love you. and you’re dirty.
because this world is full of karma (yes, in exactly that my name is earl type of way), i was able to score a free 80gb hard drive to resurrect my tivo just when i needed it most. i simply replaced that old 13gb one with the 80gb, and then all is better in the land of time-deferred television: no more stutters or timewarps or pixellations.
as an added bonus, by replacing one of my drives with a much larger one, now instead of the luxurious 96 hours of recording time, i now have a positively corpulent 169 HOURS of recording time. that’s enough to record a week’s worth of telelvsion. non-stop.
or things like football and cartoons while someone is in lost angeles watching marionettes. better yet, insidious things like the bsg season premiere!
(oh, and did i mention that i scored another tivo off the gift economy? because i did.)
Posted at October 9, 2006 11:20 PMComments are now closed for this entry. Thank you for playing.