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[excerpted and edited from a letter from me to TJIC]

Hey Trav, didn’t you say that a friend of yours was a part of a TV show called Myth Busters?

I stuck it into Tivo and the first episodes will be airing this week. 3 episodes of “Myth Busters” on the Discover Channel on 3/7/03 at 8, 9 and 10 pm.

This’ll be one of the last new things going on my Tivo for a while. I recently put my Tivo account on hold.

My folks got me Netflix for Christmas. I’m very happy with it… $20 a month gets me about 12 DVD rentals per month, delivered via US Postal Service to my door. And, I have a suped-up Tivo, it’s got an extra 60 gig drive in it, for a total of 80 Gig or so. That gives me about 85 hours of recording capacity. Actually, it’s between 55 and 200 hours depending on the picture quality you choose to record at … I usually opt for “High Quality” mode, which gets me 85 hrs. The snazziest factory built Tivos get about 35 hrs of record time on High Quality mode. But recently I’ve been selecting the lowest quality mode… I’m hoarding TV programs for that vast upcoming time without a Tivo programming guide. I still don’t understand why Tivo doesn’t have a dual 100 gig drive option for TV nuts… I’m sure that lots of folks would go for it and love it. The hardware isn’t that expensive and it’s completely worth it.

So I’ve got like 100 hours of all my favorite television programs + 3 new DVDs per week + I’m taking 2 classes + I’m teaching 2 days per week. I won’t be reinstating my Tivo service for a while…

That isn’t to say that I’m not a huge fan of Tivo. It’s only because of all the reasons above that I can put the service on hold for a while.

[Begin Tivo gush]

If you watch television and don’t have one, you need one. You don’t even realize it, but you do, really. I’m not just saying that. Your television watching will become smarter and more productive with less effort than your current channel surfing habit affords you. You’ll watch more of the type of programs you want to watch, when you want to watch them. You’ll find lots of great shows that you didn’t know existed, and you won’t ever be tied to network program guides as when to watch them.

If you’re thinking of paying extra to get more cable TV channels, don’t. Get a Tivo instead and the amount of stuff that you want to to watch on your existing channels will instantly quadruple. I can give you a hundred examples but here’s a start: My dad likes programs about WWII. So I put in a Tivo Wishlist item looking for the keyword “WWII”. In 5 minutes, I found many programs that he would NEVER have found on his own. Like “The Veteran’s Project”. It airs bi-weekly, Sunday mornings at 8am on the History Channel. It’s a fantastic program but we would NEVER have come across this without Tivo.

So, a month before his visit, I pack Tivo full of WWII programs for him. Of course he watches TV most nights when he’s in Florida. Nevertheless, fully 3/4 of the programs that I record for him are shows that he hasn’t seen! Quadruple!

[End Tivo gush]

I could gush about Tivo for a long while; it’s pros and even it’s few cons. I’ll leave the rest of my gush for another time.