Vitriolic Humor

I recently contacted Charter's support chat to see if they offered a reasonable solution to recording HDTV on PVR. The Moxi Box I have now (great, Linux-based solution) only has 80GB of storage, which represents about 6 hours (give or take) of HD programming that can be stored. This past weekend I recorded both Divisional Playoffs on Sunday, then accidentally hit the record button while watching TV later and the Moxi wiped out one game completely to make room to record the current show. I'm ping on the edge of the storage space with nothing but 2 3-hour shows recorded. I've added an external 250GB drive to the Moxi and it worked fine until the drive overheated and died. I don't want to maintain my DVR infrastructure, that's why I effectively rent this solution from Charter with a monthly fee.

Here's the online discussion I had with Charter.

A representative will be with you shortly.
You have been connected to Janet .
Janet : My name is Janet. Thank you for contacting Charter Communications. How may I assist you?
Me: My Moxi box is woefully inadequate for my DVR (esp. HDTV programming) recording needs. Do you offer something with more storage?
Janet : May I please know if your DVR is hd capable?
Me: Yes, it is. I recorded 2 3-hour football games this weekend (in HD) and it wiped out all other programes on the box.. I could've kept some of the programs, but then I couldn't record the games.
Me: I really need to be able to record more than 6 hours of HD programming
Janet : HD
Janet : HD DVR only records short hours.
Janet : If you want longer hours of recording, you may add external drive to your moxi.
Me: I'd prefer not to be in the business of upgrading my infrastructure, that's why I'm paying Charter a monthly fee. Do you offer anything more than the Moxi with 80GB of storage?
Me: I understand that HD requires (drastically) more storage. Is Charter offering any practical solution to this issue?
Janet : Yes, you may add an external hard drive to your moxi.
Janet : That is to have longer hours of recording.
Me: Please take a note for Charter: I'm going to switch to satellite because they will not provide me a more adequate solution for my PVR/DVR needs. I don't want to buy and maintain extra hard drives because Charter isn't keeping up with technological demands. That is why I pay a DVR fee to Charter.

If you are looking at using Charter's cable television services (especially HDTV) beware their DVR solutions are drastically limited on space (while otherwise being a great technological solution.) Expect Charter to not upgrade their infrastructure, but to pass on storage upgrade costs onto you, the consumer, despite you renting the DVR from them in the first place.

That felt good, now I'm off to go shop for a satellite provider...

Tags: tivo moxi recording hd htdb dvr capacity pvr charter technology

Posted by speedeep at 4:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My kids won't know what life was like without the Internet, before computers were in every home. They'll never know what a modem is or the wonderful (yet grating) sounds it would make when you dialed a BBS. They won't know the joy of getting online 1200bps (and all the free time you had when you waited for downloads to happen.) Even their perspective on the Internet will be different. They won't know about Mosaic browser or text-based (only) browsing with lynx. They'll never know Prodigy or Compuserve. AOL is just a website. They won't know that Yahoo was a directory of links, or that Altavista, Excite, HotBot, and WebCrawler were once prosperous search engines with a large market share. They won't know that there were many years of Internet without Google at all...

They won't know of life before the convenience of microwave ovens.

They will think (rightfully so) that everyone has a phone and they are almost exclusively cordless or completely wireless. They won't know that at one time all phones were wired into the wall, that long distance calls were expensive and infrequently used. They will never know what a party line or a rotary dial phone was. They won't realize that phones didn't used to have cameras, games, music, and full QWERTY keyboards on them.

They won't know that people used to shave with just one blade.

Lightweight 27-speed mountain bikes with disc brakes and super travel full-suspension will be mainstream and affordable. They won't know the relatively low tech, heavy, inefficient bikes we had to ride. They won't realize that mountain biking was started in the mid-1970s.

My kids will never know what a caboose is for. They will only see them in train museums (and so we take them.)

Film photography will be some long-forgotten technique that people used to use before digital photography. They won't know what camera film looks like. They'll never know the growing pains of digital photography from low resolution to slow, delay-prone cameras. Everything will be high resolution, automatic, and instantaneous. It seems normal to them that you can store thousands of photographs on a memory card smaller than your thumbnail. Digital photo frames will seem normal to them. Static real photo frames will seem pointless.

They'll never know what a reel-to-reel, an eight-track, a vinyl record, a Mini-disc, or a cassette tape is. Even CDs are going to the wayside as things gradually swing towards completely digital music delivery, played on the all-pervasive MP3 player. Walkman and Discman will be largely historical and unfamiliar to them. They won't ever know about VCRs and Laserdisc players. They'll have always known DVD, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD and DVR. They'll think televisions were always flat and thin. HDTV will be the norm for what they are used to viewing. Their music will be all-digital and all multi-channel.

My kids won't know what a floppy disc was (8", 5.25", or 3.5") Wow! They won't know DOS (and I'm doing all I can to make it so they won't have to use Windows.) They won't know about daisy wheel printers, slow and noisy dot-matrix printers or fan-fold paper.

My kids will probably never know much measured in terms of 'megabytes' and will likely be more familiar with the concept of 'terabytes' rather than with 'gigabytes'.

I'm excited about the rapidly changing world they've been born into, but I'm sad they won't know the world as I do. I'll try to teach them what I can and maybe if I'm lucky they'll help me see their world through their eyes someday.

Tags: thoughts progress existence reality generation perception technology new memories family

Posted by speedeep at 2:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)