Friday 10/06/2023
Took the standard walk and it was fine. Did my month-end accounting; the nest egg is still in good shape.
At 1pm I had a routine dermatology checkup. The doctor was pleased to find nothing that needed to be burned off. A year ago she did burn off a couple of things; not this year. No issues at all.
Before and after 1pm I struggled to install a Tivo. I have been unhappy with my Comcast, excuse me, XFinity, DVR. Its response time to the remote buttons has been very bad: for example, hit the pause button on a recorded show and you could count slowly to 5 before the actual pause would happen. Similar for other commands.
So when Martha, a neighbor, talked about using her Tivo with our Xfinity system I thought, cool. I had good memories of TiVo from the 90s and Oughts. Then we switched from the Palo Alto cable company, to DirecTV satellite; and had to change to the DirecTV DVR, which was OK. So I thought, hey, the TiVo box should have better response, and on the spur of the moment I ordered one.
In the days after I placed the order, I shit you not, the response time of the XFinity DVR improved a lot to where it was almost usable. How did it know?
So today I unboxed the TiVo and tried to set it up. It has a “guided setup” process that, I swear, is the lamest, most dim-witted piece of software I have ever met. Bottom line, it would not connect to any of our three wifi networks, so I could not complete the basic setup process. And the TiVo website support pages were badly designed and unhelpful.
I spent an hour in live chat with a support person and they taught me an undocumented trick with the TiVo remote that let me get around one of the snags in the setup process, but I still couldn’t make it work. Folks, I am an experienced tech support person and I threw up my hands. That box is just stupid. Whoever designed it should be fired.
This was a big disappointment. After all, TiVo has been selling essentially the same product for thirty years. They should have honed the support and the out of the box experience to a fine edge by now, but no. Probably the corporation has been bought and sold several times and all the original intelligence is gone.
In the end I called their support line and with only about twenty minutes of arguing got them to send me a return authorization and a shipping label. Tomorrow it goes back where it came from.
Codgerville 