February 05, 2004

Electronic meltdown

Posted by Scott at 06:36 AM

Because my work often involves debugging customers' digital circuits, I've often joked that I'm amazing anything electronic works. It seems that designs that have been in production for years can still fail when a new customer simply configures it in a way we hadn't anticipated. Yesterday was a day when I had two television related failures at the home front. It was enough to make my want to kill my television.

Adelphia - First, there were problems with our TiVo video recorder. As nice as TiVo is, it has one Achilles heel. It needs to know the channel lineup for your cable provider. In the past we've had cases where Adelphia changed a channel or two. You occasionally see TiVo think it's properly recording a show, but it's not because it's recording the wrong channel. Yesterday was a major meltdown because Adelphia changed nearly every channel between 30 and 75 in their lineup -- a complete swizzle. These are the channels that most of my children's shows are on -- Disney, Nickelodeon, etc. There is no trivial way to tell TiVo, "pay no attention to what you think, Disney is now on channel blah". It affects me a bit because EWTN also changed from 75 to 66. About the only thing being correctly recorded are the mainstream channels: ABC, NBC, CBS (the Janet Jackson "Tempest in a C cup" channel"), and PBS.

DVD player - But the coup de grace yesterday was when Claire and I drove out to BestBuy to pick our combo unit television. They had called Michelle earlier to say that it had come back from repair and was ready to be picked up. Once I brought it home, I turned it on and it had the exact same failure as before -- the DVD tray won't open and close without looking like it's having an epileptic seizure. After all that driving, I was so mad! I admit, I was a bit naive and trusting to not have them demonstrate it at the store. I assumed that when they said it was fixed, it was fixed. I should have gone a bit Missouri on them and said "show me". This weekend I get to drive all the way back to Manchester with Claire and drop it off again. Argh! It's not that I miss the television. It's the aggravation of loading this heavy unit into the van, driving half an hour into the store, hauling it into/out of the store, waiting 15 minutes at the service desk, etc. After four hours of this, we still are where we started - a broken television. The bright side is that this is warranted work.

Comments

hi Scott-
liked that 'kill your tv' link- not that i think we should get rid of tv, but it had some good links for me- one was about the "beautiful people syndrome" that was very similr to some theories in media psychology- we view these images on tv and our perceptions of what is real becomes disrtorted- advertising is especially harsh! oh well , hope you're having a good day!

Posted by: Suzy at February 5, 2004 10:35 AM

Hi Suzy,
Thought you might like that one. I tend to think that television is a huge huge factor in shaping public opinions, impressions, and culture. While we often say that we know "it's just TV" before you know it we are subtly striving to maintain their standards, whether or not they make sense. It's because we have so enjoyed being able to run television through a "TiVo filter" that we are so mad now that Adelphia's channel lineup change has castrated our TiVo's ability to record accurately.

Posted by: Scott at February 5, 2004 01:23 PM