Thursday, March 17, 2005

Unfathomable Rage

I've been living with Tivo for about the last four years or so, and I will argue to the death that is the greatest invention in the last 20 years. Up until about a month ago, I had been thoroughly enjoying it's magical gifts. That ended when I moved to Simi Valley, and some poor landscaping on the part of my new apartment complex made it impossible to get a satellite signal here. My only option was digital cable. (by the way, the smear campaign they run against satellite TV is relentless on the digital cable)
At the time I thought it was a reasonable solution, given that I wanted to record my shows and watch them at my leisure, as is my way. And for the first month, my only real grips about the Moxi box vs. my Tivo box were that on the Tivo remote, I have a "list" button that takes me straight to all my recorded shows and bypasses a couple of menu clicks... Although, this is admittedly a luxury that I've come to learn not that many people know about. Whatever, I liked it. And also, with the Tivo, or any satellite TV for that matter, you can bring up a large grid, showing you what's on 10 channels or so at a time, for the next few hours, making it easy to quickly survey the television landscape for the next few hours. On my Moxi box, I have to go through one channel at a time to find out what the heck is on. It's a little tedious, and I prefer it the other way around.
I'm willing to admit that perhaps my experience with the Tivo made me a little biased, but other than those two things (that is up until yesterday) I couldn't come up with any other legitimate complaints. I think the load times are a little longer on the digital cable, but it's hardly worth mentioning. I'd say that the quality of the picture is the same, and all the options i.e. setting season passes, starting your recordings early and ending them late, deciding how long you keep a show... all of these things were comparable.
Then March 16th, 2005 rolled around and the proverbial caca, hit the proverbial fan... Tivo proved to me how it is light years ahead of digital cable in the span of about 1.8 seconds, or roughly the time it took me to realize that a show I had set for a season pass was not being recorded. You see, without shame, I will admit that I am a fan of Survivor. Survivor normally airs on Thursday nights, but during the NCAA basketball tournament, it gets moved to Wednesdays. This is not a problem for Tivo, but it is apparently an insurmountable task for the Moxi box. I only missed 20 minutes of the show, but that is not the point.
The point, my friends, (and yes, I'm painfully aware of the fact that no one is reading this blog) is that my Moxi box has now become an untrustworthy being that I have to pay for every month. I have to watch it with a careful eye now, and to me, that really defeats the purpose of having it in the first place. It's supposed to put TV on my schedule, but now all it's doing is ensuring that I have another chore every day. Now I have to double check it, make sure everything is going to record... I do not like this... I do not like this one bit!!! And now I will commence my rage... (mostly I'm just going to glare at the Moxi box...and every once in awhile I'll probably shake my fist, or start to swear at it, but my fury won't allow me to complete the sentence...)

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