TiVo came back to life!

The tip I received indicating that my TiVo's hard drive might be dying could just have been my problem. We've gone 2 days on the new drive and it seems a bit faster and programs recorded after I replaced the drive haven't skipped! We watched Saved without interruptions today whereas the last few episodes, it got blocky and almost unwatchable a few times. I offer my apology to TiVo for saying that they needed to fix their update. Too bad there isn't a way to tell an end user without knowledge that the device is failing.

The TiVo got emergency surgery

I complained previously about the sluggish response of our TiVo after the latest upgrade and how it was almost impossible to watch some shows due to choppiness of the playback. I was unable to get a real answer out of TiVo, so I did some detective work and found that one of my connections on LinkedIn knew someone that is currently an engineer at TiVo. So I asked if he'd put me in touch and he graciously did. The engineer, to my delight, responded and provided some valuable information and offered to have my TiVo logs examined to see what they said. The first part is that TiVo has said publicly that they're investigating the sluggishness of the menus. The second part is that he as well as some other engineers suspect that the hard drive is failing. That seemed a bit coincidental as the problems started happening after the latest update. Well, he said that after the update, TiVo switches to a different partition. This gives credibility to the dying hard drive theory. The TiVo has been on 24 hours a day 7 days a week for 2 years (2 years minus 1 week to be precise). I happened to have an extra 200 GB IDE drive lying around and I have the skills to replace the drive. I found instructions for doing the upgrade and proceeded to get things going. After a few false starts (BIOS issues with my PC), I managed to get my TiVo upgraded; unfortunately it took about 10 hours to copy all the info over (the instructions said 1-4 normally, up to 8...my PC must have been dog slow or the old drive was failing such that it kept having to re-read sectors).

Knock on metal, the TiVo seems to be working. We'll know on Tuesday if the drive was the problem as one show we like, Saved, has had the most problems lately. If this was the solution to part of my problem, three cheers out to TiVo; however, the menus appear to be a bit slower than before the upgrade.

(I've felt kind of helpless without TiVo for the day even though I don't watch TV during the day. My wife was bored and watched TV; I kept seeing her make motions like she was fast forwarding through the commercials!)

A trip to the stadium

A few weeks ago, my wife and I decided to see a Padres baseball game in the "new" stadium that our tax dollars helped fund. While I was skeptical at first that the location of the stadium downtown was a good idea, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a downtown location makes the stadium convenient and isn't the traffic nightmare that many had suspected. It amazes me that after paying to get into the stadium, we were bombarded by advertisements all over the stadium; on every part of the scoreboard from fixed signs to electronic signs, to sponsorships of this and that (including a sponsorship for each strike out), and of course, to the name of the stadium, Petco Park.

If I'm subjected to so much advertising, the least they could do is lower the ticket prices as I felt like we weren't going to a ballgame, but to an advertising event. I'm sure some would argue that the ticket prices are lower because of all the advertising, but I think the advertising has gotten a bit out of hand.

A GUI isn't all that it is cracked up to be

This past week, I started learning about OS X server. The interface really confused me at first as there are lots of different options buried in lots of different places. After a few hours of playing around, I started making headway on figuring out what stuff did, but it wasn't pretty. I then tried to use the GUI to turn on some other features and found out that it hung the system; I had to use the command line to kill off what I tried. Furthermore, I made a mistake and deleted an SSL certificate; when I went to add it back, it kept failing. The log gave a cryptic error message and after some searching, I found a reference to the keychain. So I used Apple Remote Desktop to connect to the server and look at the keychain (the keychain can't be access using the server admin software), removed some pieces from the keychain and then I had no problem importing the certificate again. While Apple did an OK job (I'm not impressed with the UI) integrating UNIX tools into OS X, I'm not convinced that the GUI on OS X server is all that useful if I keep having to fight it to get stuff working.

On Tuesday, a friend of mine is going to teach me about OS X server; maybe it will change my view on it, especially if I can get everything working.