TiVo!

Hubby-Eric and I had a little mishap with the VCR a week or so ago, in which it ate his tape of Jeopardy. Eric really enjoys watching Jeopardy, but is generally at work when it's on, so he tapes it, watches it, then tapes over it. Well, the tape he was using got old enough, and the VCR tired enough of it, that it got all chewed up and devoured, and hubby-Eric missed a week of Jeopardy (because we also had to get the rest of the tape out of the VCR). He grumbled that maybe it is time for us to get TiVo.

Flash forward to just before Christmas when our good friend Jen visited and bought us pizza (thank you again, Jen!). We had a merry little night, and I noticed a coupon on the pizza box for TiVo. Normally I wouldn't look twice, but we'd talked about it, so I showed the coupon to Eric, and we popped on-line to look at the deal.

It wasn't bad. For the price of a very nice quality VCR we'd get a TiVo box, wireless adapter, and three years of service. There was one problem, but it isn't unsurmountable (more on that in a second). So we did a bit more research, slept on it, counted up Christmas money... and went for the deal. We don't watch a lot of TV, but we like having flexibility on when we watch what we do watch, and the VCR is getting a bit tired of helping us, so a TiVo makes sense for us.

There are a couple of issues I have with our new little TiVo friend.

First... to install the thing you need a landline phone. We do not have a landline any longer. We went to cell phones and haven't missed the landline at all until now. The installation instructions say you can go to someone else's home to set that up, but you still must have a landline for the initial installation. That's annoying.

The other issue is setting up the wireless. Basically, I really hope I'm up to the task. I have my router filtering by MAC address at the moment, so I hope the wireless adapter has a MAC address I can use.

Anyway, I'm blogging about this mostly in the hopes that somebody out there has some links to TiVo support sites and such so I can learn how to get the most out of the little thing. Any advice? Any thoughts? Anyone even reading right now, or is everyone off on holiday?