TiWoes

Yet another ice photo for your enjoyment. Don't worry, there won't be too many more of these. At least not a lot of them, I have to run out at some point, right?

TiVo has managed to drag Ginger over to the dark side. She stated the other night that like me, she couldn't recommend a TiVo to anyone anymore. Why you ask? We got our "new" TiVo the other night and set it up. The next day when Ginger was playing around with it while the kids were at school she noticed that it shows a gray screen when changing channels. And sometimes it will just not display a channel and there are a couple of channels that both the old Series 3 TiVo and the television can see but the new TiVo refuses to acknowledge even exists. Turns out the new TiVo isn't so much new as it is new to us. That's because it's a refurbished model. And apparently it's in way worse shape than the one we already had (in our opinion). On Thursday night it started just spontaneously rebooting. No rhyme or reason, just every so often it would reboot. And it was as if it was running at half speed. Remember back in the day when computers had that Turbo button you could press to speed it up? It's sort of like that, but in reverse. It just operates slower than normal and can take multiple seconds to respond to a command. That is if it responds at all since the user interface has a nasty habit of simply locking up at various times. So Ginger called up TiVo and this time she got one of the "special" tech support people (even though she called her "take me to the more advance tech guys" support number). The guy she was talking to kept insisting that TiVo simply had the wrong channel lineup, even though Ginger's knows that's not the case. So at this point it certainly seems like we'll be sending this replacement one back and trying our luck with the next one they send. Ginger's becoming more and more willing to consider my fallback plan of simply keeping the old one with one cable card that doesn't work. I mean it's really only an issue if we want to record two encrypted HD channels simultaneously, because even the broken cable card slot still displays all the local over the air HD channels just fine.

Tonight at dinner Catherine pointed out how quiet it is without Quinn here. She mentioned that no one has been yelling or fighting or anything. Then as if a lightbulb went off in her head she wanted to know if she could get her chip for the day. What's a chip you ask? Well the kids can earn poker chips for various things throughout the day which they can later turn in for a reward, it's a lot like the smile system that Barry's kids use to get stuff, but we require way more chips (each chip represents 25 cents and the toys they can get around between $8 and $20). Anyway, Catherine's rationale for wanting a chip was, as she pointed out, that she hadn't gotten into a fight or hit Quinn all day. We explained that Quinn's been in Richmond and she responded with "Yea, but I didn't hit him." It's this kind of reasoning that has me thinking she may end up being a lawyer someday. It is a creative way to think about the issue, I'll give her that.