TiVo
The Cox guy, Joe, arrived last Wednesday with three cable cards. The first worked right out of the box. The second didn’t and neither did the third. He said that that’s about typical. There are two types of cards they carry: the “old” cards and “2006″ cards. The old card have about a 1 in 3 failure rate, whereas the 2006 cards a 1 in 20. A 5% failure rate is definitely better than a 33% failure rate, but still, 5% is higher than it should be.

With three cards down and one slot still waiting to be filled, Joe did something I really appreciated. I’m not sure it was because of a strong commitment to customer service or he just didn’t want to come by again. He called around to other Cox installers in the area to see if any of them have a spare 2006 cable card. He found one out in Centreville and went out to get it. He returned about 40 minutes later with the card, popped it in, and a couple minutes later, we had a happy second tuner. I’m very happy with him doing this. He did a good bit to pull my opinion of Cox techs out of the sewer.

So now we’ve had TiVo series three loving for the past week. How have we liked it? It’s been pretty nice. Compared to the Cox DVR, it’s a wild frenzy of lovin’. My only complaint about the TiVo right now is that the front display won’t stay at the “bright” or “regular” brightness setting after you set it. It’s normal setting (”dim”?) is too low for us to really see from the couch. After calling TiVo tech support, I found out that it’s a software problem that’ll be fixed in the next software release, which should be “in a few weeks.” Annoying, but if this is the worst thing we have to say about the TiVo, we’re golden.

Bugs
A lot of the bedroom stuff (bed, night stands, lamps, etc.) is still out on the back deck, shrouded in blue tarps. I’d like to give the bedroom a test run before bringing the stuff back in, though. I figure, while uncomfortable, it’ll help reduce some variables. If I get bit more, we’ll know that the problem runs deeper than the stuff on the deck and that buying a new bed will just infest that too. I really hope that it’s an uneventful night (or at least few hours) and that this extended stay in the cold outside will be enough to finally rid us of these damn bugs.

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