Feel the love

Sometimes I question the “family” aspect of my company. They love to tell us that we are a family here at the office and we should treat each other that way. The following picture shows the activities located directly behind my office on Friday. This happening began at about noon.

Now I ask you, the internet, how would you react to this sort of activity were it near your family?

We continued to work until closing time, and some of us past that.

Tivo, you broke my heart.

I’ve long been a proponent of Tivo. I think everyone should have it. TV is good; Tivo makes TV great. My schedule is no longer defined by prime time programming. I watch what I want, when I want. I avoid commercials. I rewind when someone distracts me or I miss something that was whispered. If I get a call in the middle of the show, pause is just a quick click away. All of these things make watching TV with Tivo great. It’s really on my schedule and after all, I’m a huge control freak at heart.

So I was at work today searching around for many other things when I stumbled across some Tivo options I had previously been unaware of such as, TivoToGo and Tivo Desktop. In a nutshell, you can port the shows recorded on your Tivo box from there over to your desktop PC either through a wired network or a wireless network. This greatly intrigues me because since I moved home, having satellite TV doesn’t work so well with the Mythbox, but that’s ok because I had a Tivo box. But when I wanted to burn a show onto a DVD for whatever reason, it became fairly difficult to transfer the show over to the PC.

According to the Tivo website, all you need do is make sure you have the proper version of software running on your Tivo box and all the rest is just a couple of quick network connections away. I couldn’t wait to get home to try this out. The website states that it does not support series 1 Tivos and that Series 3 Tivo software is currently unavailable. But Series 2 is supported. I happened to know for a fact that all we have are series 2 boxes. In fact, we have 3 series 2 tivo boxes in our house, so I figured I’d be a lock to get this set up tonight.

Then Tivo broke my heart.

We have 3 different boxes!!! All of varying age and brands. I thought surely one of them would be compatible or have the necessary software upgrade. I was dead wrong. Not one of them qualified for the TivoToGo services. I was devastated. I really don’t know why Tivo would toy with me like this.

I don’t ask for much. All I want is to digitally record my shows, put them on my computer for mass storage and manipulation, stream them to my cell phone and watch TV anywhere I want, whenever I want. And don’t talk to me about your slingbox, you can take that slingbox and shove it. I say that because I don’t have one and I can’t afford one right now, not because I think it’s a bad product. One of these days, the television will bow down at my feet and call me its puppet master… or delusional freak… one of those.

November 2006: A Retrospective.

Well, I think it’s safe to say that after a solid month of posting, I didn’t improve one bit. Sure, I may have compensated for quality with quantity, but… no wait, I think that’s one of the Shuck N Jive’s mission statements.

When in doubt, type a lot of crap out.

I think I vaguely remember demanding that statement be put in the Shuck N Jives official documents somewhere. That was some amazing foresight on my part. I can’t imagine the legal ramification if I hadn’t included some sort of verbiage in there like that. I think I’d have a lot of false advertising lawsuits if I hadn’t put that in there. Can you imagine the position that would put me in? I think I’d be sitting in a court room a lot… yeah… I’m pretty sure that’s the position.

I do hope you’ve all enjoyed or, at the very least, endured this month of posting. There have not been any official meetings yet to discuss the contract situation beyond this month, so I can’t guarantee that you’ll be able to rest a day without being force fed some more Shuck N Jive content. Then again, I can’t guarantee that there will be any more daily content for you to mutter under your breath about angrily at your desk while you wonder (some of you out loud) why you ever book marked this url in the first place.

I would like to thank everyone that doubted me, without your wavering support, I probably still could have gotten through this, but I wouldn’t have had such a half hearted hooray feeling at the end of it. One can only wonder if this newfound determination will spill over into the slightly less important areas of my life, like work and exercise. I trust a few of you will begrudgingly follow along and find out.

I will make you all one promise though and that is this: I will have longer posts in the future. These short little guys were mostly a product of the deadline. I think the added pressure made me tighten up a bit. We’ll see if we can’t do something about that. So don’t fret, I’ll have you all rolling your eyes in unison again at the ridiculous length of my boring nonsense. Until then…