I sat down during my lunch hour yesterday to watch last week's episode of Buffy, which The Scientist had taped for me. Unfortunately, the tape was fucked. I had picture, but no sound. I tried it on both VCRs, with and without the stereo, and nothing worked. This was the final straw in our ongoing saga of can't-tape-anything. We haven't been able to tape on timer record for a while (perhaps never in this apartment, but I can't be sure). There have been countless fuck-ups (both operator error and mechanical error), many of which involved me not being able to watch Buffy. Because I'm playing so much tennis lately (four or five times a week), the only way I get to watch nighttime television is if it's taped.

Long story short(er), we bought ourselves a TiVo last night. Merry Christmas to us (two months early)! TiVo! TiVo! TiVo! I went around the apartment last night singing variations on the TiVo theme in my head. TiVoooooooooo! TeeeeeeeVooooooooo! T-voh!

So, yes, TiVo is our Christmas present to each other this year. My manager let us off work two and a half hours early yesterday (to enjoy the beautiful autumn day) so I picked up The Scientist at work and we went to Target, Best Buy, and the grocery store. We found a guy at Best Buy who actually owns a TiVo himself and he answered our questions (the TiVo website is surprisingly scanty in actual data). We were vacillating between the Series2 60-hour unit and the Series2 80-hour unit. We ended up getting the 60-hour unit because storing 80 hours of television seemed a little excessive. Of course, some might say that storing 60 hours of television is excessive (or that TiVo itself is excessive), but oh well. We love it already.

The Scientist didn't love it quite so much at the beginning of last night. Hooking up TiVo to our digital cable box, TV, stereo, etc. went about as you'd expect. Badly. But he persevered and by the end of the evening loved TiVo more than ever. I was taking a bath and he would come in to read me things from the manual or tell me about the features he discovered.

Sample from the TiVo manual:

In this tour, you'll take a look at how you can control live TV. So turn on your TV and grab your TiVo remote!

1. First, press the PAUSE button--the program you're watching pauses. Now you can stand up and stretch, or go to the kitchen and get a snack. You can pause live TV for up to 30 minutes!
2. But for now, press BACK and the program rewinds. Press BACK a second time--it goes faster! A third time--faster still! Both the FWD and BACK buttons have three speeds. Press BACK a fourth time to return to normal speed.

Later the manual continues:

"Look for the white line. It marks the part of the program you are currently watching. If the white line is anywhere back in the green segment you are "behind" real time (which is way better than being behind the times!)."

Can you believe all the exclamation points? The Scientist and I noticed that when we were AIMing today every time we'd mention TiVo we'd use an exclamation point. He said that everyone is just so! excited! about TiVo they can't help themselves (including the documentation writers).

I just saw two squirrels humping outside my office window. Or rather one squirrel trying to hump another. The humpee was having none of it, though, and quickly escaped the humper.