Thursday, September 07, 2006

Life With TiVo

OK, it's Day Three of living with TiVo, and already I'm feeling pretty glad that I bought the thing. It seemed like it'd be really useful to help make sure I don't miss the shows I'm heavily invested in, but I'm starting to realize that it's almost more useful for catching shows I enjoy but don't want to go out of my way to watch. It's nice to have stuff like that saved up for when I want to watch something, but there's nothing on and I'm out of DVDs. This came in especially handy yesterday when I came home sick after deciding that, for that day, at least, the allergies had won and I needed to put in some good, quality lying-on-the-couch time. Man, oh, man, I hadn't watched The Daily Show in forever, and that is just a shame.

It's started making suggestions for me, too, some of which are... interesting. The first two shows it recorded for me all on its own initiative were Jaws and Buzz Lightyear of Star Command. For no reason I can put my finger on, this amuses me immensely. But, y'know, that's not at all bad for a first-guess approximation of my tastes.

I only wish there was some way to tell it things like, "I love this show, so do use it for making recommendations, but I have it all on DVD so there's no point in recording it" or "I am interested in that show, but since I missed the first few eps, I'm waiting for the marathon to catch up, so don't bother until then." I have the feeling it's likely to become a bit annoying to keep weeding out shows that fall under those kinds of categories.

Ah, well. That may be pretty minor. And the gadget does get about a thousand brownie points for the fact that it jumps back a few seconds when you go from "fast forward" to "play," thus accounting for fallible human reaction time. I like that feature.

5 comments:

  1. it will continuously record crap you're embarrassed is even made, and wouldn'tbe caught dead watching. I don't bother deleting. If I need space for something new, it will erase it for me...eventually. I really need to tell it to NEVER EVER record the military history channel.

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  2. I was thinking that I ought to delete the stuff I really don't want, in case it deletes the stuff I might actually be interested in instead, but then I realized that if I really want it to keep something it decided to record, I can tell it to. So that's OK, I guess.

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  3. I've had the "recommend" feature turned off since I got mine, as I record plenty of random stuff on my own without needing TiVo to do it for me. :)

    Does your cable company ever offer "free HBO weekends"? I get a lot of mileage out of that ...

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  4. I might turn it off it if gets too annoying. But I'm kind of interested to see if it turns up anything worthwhile.

    And I know they've done free HBO weekends in the past. Don't know if they're still doing 'em, though.

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  5. Oh yes, I used to massively DVR stuff during free previews of premium movie channels.

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