Last night, following our annual trip to Cincinnati for Easter, we stopped by the construction site.  The unmistakable sign that construction is going to start very soon was the porta-potty that has been placed on the area soon to be our front lawn.  If there were a formula for efficiency of home building, I imagine that proximity to the facilities would be a major component, so this is good news I guess.  We're scheduled to start digging this Wednesday assuming the weather improves and the building permit comes through.  I'll have pictures up soon.

Beware the ides of March.

I haven't blogged an update about the TiVo saga in over a month.  Crap.

Right now, I am up and running wth the original hard drive (40 hours (really 15 or so if you don't want it to look like crap)).  I haven't seen any lockups since switching.  I haven't had time to install the busted HD into a box and run diagnostics on it to see if its time for an RMA.

I am seeing some of the problems that other users of the 7.x software are seeing, including VERY slow menu transitions and VERY long pauses when switching channels.  It makes you wonder just how well they screened their beta testers.  TiVoToGo has also been very flaky.  The desktop software gets very confused if a transfer gets interrupted.  I have had to manually delete temp files and kill processes on several occasions to get it's brain unscrambled.

I'm going tomorrow, but I won't be wearing a flower in my hair.  I've been to LA, but never to San Francisco.  It should be interesting.

Since I booked my flight so late, I was originally seated in a middle seat way back for both legs, including a 5+ hour hop from Detroit to SFO.  That's all changed now due to the wonder of 24hr advanced online checkin.  Exit row window here I come.  And since Northwest allows exit row passengers to board between first class and elite frequent fliers, I shouldn't have any trouble fighting for an overhead bin.  Sometimes life is good.

Hopefully, I'll be able to swing a similar upset on the way back.

It was dead again this morning.  It locked up while recording a show.  After rebooting once again, I could tell that it had only recorded 3 minutes of video before crapping out.  This weekend I will try and revert to the factory hard drive and see if that resolves the problem.  If it does, this will be the 3rd drive that has gone bad in this box in less than a year.

Another issue I found is that the Tivo desktop software is completely unstable when the target Tivo is having stability problems.  When the DVR is locked, the desktop software completely falls apart.  It locks up and has to be killed with task manager.  It doesn't repaint the gui and overall is a very unprofessional job.  Someone needs to read a book on multithreaded programming.  In my opinion, assuming a reliable network connection as a prerequisite for your GUI not sucking is a poor design choice.

I finally got the update.  It's installing now.  I was beginning to believe that it was never going to happen.

Ok, this sucks.  One of the things they don't tell you when you sign up for the priority list is that you have to go into your account settings on tivo.com and enable your DVR for transfers.  Mine was set to not allow transfers.  I changed the setting, but it will take up to 24 hours to take effect, AND my tivo needs to connect to the service AGAIN to get that command.  If they would have said something when I signed up, I would have had over 2 weeks to make the setting change on Tivo.com.  I'm not impressed.

After 3 forced refreshes, I finally can connect.  I'm transferring my first show now.  Initial estimate is 35 minutes for a 30 minute show at best high quality over 802.11b.

Here's another complaint:  Don't even think about rebooting while you're transferring a file.  That's right, there is no download resume capability.  I was about 90% done transferring a program.  The Sonic MyDVD trial software required a reboot.  Not thinking, I let it happen immediately.  When I got back up and running, my transfer had automatically started from the beginning.  Crap.

Update:

I think version 7.1 may have signalled the death of my Tivo.  I've had to power cycle it 6 times this evening.  I can't keep it running for more than 10 minutes at a time without it locking up.  Time to look for alternatives.