Oddball Update

And again, I bring our TiVo back from the brink of destruction. Actually, it was more like a resuscitation, as the little black box was already clinically dead. I mentioned this tale of woe a couple of days ago, when our TiVo committed suicide during my dinner hour. In the hours after that posting, Apple and I started thinking that maybe we should just say “oh well” and buy ourselves a new TiVo. Like one of those dual-tuner ones that can record two shows at once, and has a 180GB storage capacity. After all, there was no telling whether the $80 worth of parts I could order for the old one would actually fix its problem!

The more I researched a new TiVo, however, the more I started to think I was giving up too easily. A 180-hour box costs $169, not a bad deal, until you realize that you have to make a simultaneous service committment to get that price — otherwise it’s $349. Uh, no. And I was not really wanting to just cast aside our Lifetime Service box with barely two years in the can — that’s a horrible value. So, I decided to take the $80 gamble and ordered a replacement fan and power supply board from Weaknees, an official TiVo supplier. Why they’re called Weaknees? I don’t know.

The parts arrived today, so I dug out my Torx sockets and set to work. Quite happily, a matter of minutes later the TiVo was up and running again, with all of our programs, settings and schedules exactly as they were — even my episode of Star Trek, still waiting for me to resume playback. I initiated a manual network connection so the unit could get caught up on the local listings, and in a couple of minutes it’s scheduled to start recording tonight’s final episode of Sci Fi’s The Lost Room miniseries. Aw yeah, TiVo saved again — I wonder how many more times will it die, only to be brought back kicking and screaming to the realm of my living room as I pack it full of replacement parts like Frankenstein’s Monster?

Speaking of The Lost Room, this new miniseries has really eclipsed all of my expectations. Starring Peter Krause (who played Nate in Six Feet Under), it’s all about an ethereal motel room from 1961 that seems to have never existed, and how all the objects from that room now have strange, otherworldly properties. The comb, for example, can stop time, while the key can transform any door into a portal to the motel room of the past. An excellent story, wonderful acting and really creepy, weird imagery combine to make this the best original Sci-Fi channel event since the Battlestar miniseries launched in 2003. We don’t know how it will end yet, but I think The Lost Room would be hard to make into a weekly series. Still, I hear it’s cheap to produce (unlike Battlestar), so you never know.

Categorized as Life, Media, Media/Television