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2002-10-11 - 11:09 a.m.

Two more reasons

TiVo is so cool. It's cool for all the reasons you'd think it would be--recording entire seasons of shows with the touch of a few buttons, no tapes to worry about, so much space on which to record so many things, being able to pause live TV, I could go on and on. But there are two more subtle things that have stood out in my TiVo experience.

The first thing is the attention paid to the little things. Like that our TiVo (who I've named Maurice--nicknamed Mo) came with a very long phone cord, a phone jack splitter, and batteries for the remote. How nice is that? Plus, there are little touches like the fact that if you're fast forwarding when you hit play again TiVo backs up a few seconds so you don't have to worry about overrunning your mark.

The second thing is related to the first--it's the attention paid to usability, product design, and documentation. A large group of talented people have obviously invested in making TiVo user-friendly. The hook up was difficult, but that was more of a function of the many pieces we had to connect, not a fault of TiVo's. Beyond that, everything has been super easy. The onscreen menus are simple and intuitive, the remote is easy to use and ergonomic (as well as being simple to program to run our TV and cable box), fixing a user-mistake isn't difficult, retrieving shows is cake, and the manual (despite the exclamation points and sometimes cheesy language) actually makes sense and isn't tortuous to read. As someone who works in this industry (and isn't always pleased with the things that come out of my own department), I'm geekily happy about this.

TiVo rocks!

Enough about TiVo. I promise never to mention it again, except in passing when describing some wonderful show that Maurice has recorded for me.

stars

I gave our cats some catnip this morning. As usual, the male cat went apeshit over it while the female ate some of it and then wandered off uninterested. Now the male is sleeping off his 'nip bender on top of the scanner in the office. Of course he woke up when I took his picture. But he's still sleepy.

Russell on the scanner

And because she never gets her picture posted here, I give you The Other Cat.

Dark Harriet

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