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Blogging, a year later
I've now been blogging for just over a year. In that time, I've written about many random topics from politics to technology. The most popular article, by far, has been my review of the Garmin Forerunner 305. This article has been quite valuable, it appears to many looking at the device. All my other posts seem to be for my own entertainment, which is fine by me.
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Franchise Tax Board is incompetent
Several months ago, I blogged about the Franchise Tax Board somehow losing my tax payment. For the last 2+ months, I've been calling them to find out the story and was promised a call back a number of times. No one ever called me back and I called them again today. This time, I got a different story...I had to make the payment AND the interest and penalty. So the $68.81 penalty and interest has now gone up to $92.31 because they'd been jerking me around for 2 months. This is not to mention the $20 stop payment fee I have to pay the bank so that the original payment doesn't get cashed. I'm going to send the damn payment today by certified mail (or registered letter) to ensure that they get it and I can put this behind me. I can't believe I have to pay an additional $23.50 due to their incompetence. My future tax payments are going to be sent certified or registered. I don't have the time or patience to deal with their stupidity.
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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.
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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).