Zibblog

Recently, Leslie and I took a quick trip to the big island of Hawaii. I had never been to Hawaii, but I’ve heard to not necessarily judge Hawaii by the big island. For the most part, it was pretty much what I expected. We were staying in a time share near Kona, so we were only about a 45 minute drive from the airport. We felt like it might be nice to have something with four wheel drive if we wanted to see waterfalls and such, so we ended up with the Jeep in the picture.

We left late afternoon on a Thursday, which got us there with enough time for dinner and sleep. The place that we were staying at included a kitchen and living room, so we didn’t have to go out for breakfast. On Friday, we decided to stay close since we were going on a dinner luau cruise. The cruise was about what you would expect. They had a live band along with dancers that would dance around the isles and on the tables. I didn’t have the heart to tell Leslie that the wine I brought back from the bar was box wine, but she probably had her suspicions when I told her that the bartender had suggested I bring back some ice for the wine since it was warm. After all of the food had been taken away, everyone was invited to dance on the tables to the sort of stuff you’ll find played at weddings when they want everyone to dance. My personal highlight was when Leslie and one of the dancers started doing the electric slide. The rest of us around that table will a little intimidated at the quality of the dancing, so I decided to just take pictures.

In an effort to pack in as much as possible, much of Saturday was spent driving to various parts of the island seeing the volcanoes and waterfalls. The best waterfall we saw was a triple waterfall at one of the botanical gardens. We drove around the volcano park, which was pretty impressive for someone that had never been to a volcano in person. Most of Sunday was spent shopping before we flew back Sunday night. If you want to see some more pictures, I put some of the more interesting ones in a flick photoset. I’ll admit that it wasn’t the most exciting trip that I’ve ever had, but Kona is a great place to go if you want the kind of vacation where you just wander around and chill out most of the time.

For anyone interested, I thought I’d post my experiences with the series 3 after about a week of playing with it. I’d forgotten just how old of a software version I was on with the series 1. The new software has some nice features like having folders by show in the now playing list. I kind of like having another folder with the HD shows grouped together. The guide data looks nicer than it used to and there is a little HD icon if you are flipping through looking for HD or just wondering if that show coming on at 10 is in HD. The other feature that will be nice is the ability to simply clip off the first or last couple of minutes of a show if there is a slight overlap. Somewhere after software version 3 they introduced it and I’ve been sol in terms of software updates since then.

I’m looking forward to playing around with the online features when my account gets sorted out. There were some issues transferring my lifetime membership to the series 3. Currently, customer support says that they are convinced that everything is fine for the service transfer offer, but their computer system still needs some convincing.

The main reason I wanted the series 3 was for recording HD content, so on Monday I scheduled by cablecard install from Comcast. Until then, I decided to see if I could get over the air digital working so that I could get HD that way. I got a $20 Terk antenna at Fry’s just to see if it would work, and I was pretty impressed. I had to go through some of the guided setup of the tivo again to enable the cable channels, but after that, I was flipping through them just fine. There are a few channels like the CW and alternate KQED digital channels that I’ll probably leave enabled since comcast doesn’t carry them. The tivo has a screen to show you the signal strength of the channels as you flip through them so that you can see if they might cut out. The one irritating thing is that there seemed to be no way to disable channels from the channel list while you were viewing the signal strength. I had to just write them down and then go in and change the list later. Out of about 30 – 40 digital channels that tivo had guide data for, I could probably receive 15 and actually cared about 10. After all was said and done, I recorded Smallville, CSI, and some other shows in HD, and they all came out looking great. The odd thing is that the channels seemed to go off during the day but were back on by primetime.

During the day today, I got the cablecards installed. I had read about people having some bad experiences, so I was prepared for the worst. Both of the cards that the tech brought with him worked in the end, but it took him about 2 hours and a lot of sitting around before he could get it working. In the end, he had a lot of conversations with someone at comcast about the fact that the cards were going into a tivo that involved him saying HD and tivo a lot.

From what I’ve seen, the feature set is really similar to the HD DirectTivo that came out a long time ago (at least, it seems like a long time ago to me). The series 3 has a cool little display on the front and has more network features enabled, but the only big differences I can see are the CableCard instead of DirectTV, the THX certification, and the eSATA back connector that will probably be enabled for storage expansion at some later date. If you’ve already got the HD DirectTivo, I don’t think you have any reason to be really envious, but I couldn’t find anything that should prevent someone from spending the money if they’ve got digital cable (other than the paying the high early adopter cost).

After what was probably not enough deliberation, I bought myself a series 3 tivo on Sunday. From the tivocommunity forums, I knew there was some chance of finding one at the Fry’s store off of Brokaw in San Jose. I’d tried the Sunnyvale and Campbell Fry’s stores on Friday, but couldn’t find any at either location. I’d never been to the one off of Brokaw before, but I can’t say that it’s a lot different than any of the others. I’d probably order them (from good to crappy) Sunnyvale, San Jose, Campbell, Palo Alto. Anyway, I went straight to the back of the store and found what looked like the last one that was in stock. I had been tempted to order online from tivo.com and give them the extra profit on the sale, but I read that tivo seems to be having a lot of trouble filling demand for orders placed on their own website. Unfortunately, I can’t experience any HD with the tivo until I schedule a comcast appointment to install the cable cards in the tivo. For anyone interested, I’ll probably post again once I’ve had a chance to play with it.

Well, it’s finally out.

PVRBlog has a writeup with links to the other main writeups. For many of my friends that are reading this, Megazone’s FAQ is a pretty useful page of specs and info. For the most part, it looks like a great machine and I can’t wait to have one. About the only downside if you are on Comcast (in terms of features), is the lack of on demand programming, but I tend to have more than enough on my tivo such that I only use on demand at Leslie’s place.

I figured I’d go ahead and comment on the price. Some people would say that $800 is too much for a tivo when you can get a comcast unit for $10 or so a month. For me, the main differentiator is the interface, features, and the storage size. The fact that it has an esata port on the back is a big differentiator to me. The big question is about service plans. For me, there are 3 options.

1. Transfer the lifetime service from my current series 1 (from Nov 2000) for $199. This gets me lifetime on the series 3 and 1 year service on the series 1. This is tempting because I’m amazed that the tivo is still chugging along with it’s 120GB drive in it.
2. Use the multi service discount to just pay $6.99/month instead of $12.99/month. The big question here is what if my series 1 breaks or I give it to my parents to use. There is some very explicit wording in the terms and conditions that makes me nervous.
3. Buy 3 years of service at $299. This comes out to about $8.31/month, so it is worse than #2, but it is straightforward and not connected to my series 1 box. However, it is certainly worse the #1 unless you can get the tivo substantially cheaper at someplace like circuitcity or bestbuy.
4. If you have a tivo that was activated with lifetime before Nov. 1999, I believe that you still have a one time transfer that you can use at any time. You’d want to call tivo and make sure, but I’ve read about it on tivocommunity.com, so I’m pretty sure it would work. This is what I’d do if I had one.

That’s all I’ve got for the moment. I’ll post more when I’ve bought one. The major hidden cost of the tivo is trying to explain to Leslie that I can only afford to go to Wendy’s or Panda Express after buying the tivo.

If you’re a Lost fan, then you need to take a look at this page on TV Squad.  The website HansoExposed has been showing little clips which explain a lot about the Hanso corp and the meaning of the numbers that show up all the time on the show.  Somebody took the time to piece them all together into a little video that is a very well spent six and half minutes if you watch Lost.  It will be interesting to see if any of this is shown on the show or not because this is one of the few times that I’ve found a tv show plot reveal that was a long time coming to be very interesting.