Tuesday, January 24, 2006
My Tivo does not love me
I was doing just fine with the Tivo hooked up to the phone line. But then the phone line went weird and we can only get incoming calls, no outgoing calls. There’s just no dial tone. The bastards at the phone company say they can’t get here to check on it until Saturday. Is this not a frickin disruption of service?
Okay, whatever, they’re the monstrous utility company and I just have to take it like a good little consumer. In the meantime my Tivo is about to run out of its subscription information. It can’t dial out, meaning it can’t update its recording schedule, meaning it won’t record anything. Big fat bummer!
I then decide to hook it up to my home network. I never bothered with it before because the phone line was so much easier. So much easier. I’ll leave out the boring technical details, but suffice it to say that the Tivo really needs to have some user interface settings to choose from. I want to be able to click a button that says “For the Technically Inclined” and then I can go in and change all the nit-picky little parameters that are preventing me from getting the setup right. Those who don’t want to deal with this and prefer the pretty interface can click on the “Everyone Else” button to let the Tivo set everything (incorrectly) for you.
Incidents like these make me feel like less of a geek, less proud of my obviously limited intellect. Technology should be predictable, not wonky and temperamental. How else am I supposed to appear more capable than I actually am?