Saturday, January 28, 2006

DVR Distress: A Lesson in Procrastination

We had a digital video recorder loaded with a backlog of episodic TV we had not yet watched. This week, it started having problems. It recorded shows, but would not play them.

This morning, a very apologetic Comcast technician came, shook his head, and swapped out the DVR. All that TV programming, stored up for a rainy day, is gone. Pfft.

I had backed up a lot of stored episodes onto VHS tapes, to free up space. But it will only dub programs to video in real time, so hours of shows took hours to copy. And we had to copy the eps one by one.

Further, although we had a dual-tuner DVR, the tech only had a single-tuner. For the last half-hour I've been on hold with a Comcast service rep trying to find out how to get a dual-tuner again; apparently, they are scarce.

The lesson: Don't trust the machines to keep your shows safe. Or as Darth Vader once put it, "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed."

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