Thanks for the info on how TiVo DVRs work. The new house’s construction is done now all the carpeting is done (the upstairs doesn’t have ceiling fans yet but they’ll be added after we move in) however, the toilets, bath tubs, sinks in every bathroom are done, wiring is done, a lot of the electrical work is done — the city has already cleared the house for final inspection and given us the keys. We have the plumbing done for the sprinkler system, we have the area to keep all the piping even for the swimming pool complete (the pool as I said is yet to be made and will be done later), we have the lighting, we have a gas line, we have gotten the digital cable service activated, phone service and Internet all from the same company for the time being.

Since we have an alarm service we needed to have a phone so we got the phone service from the same company for now — we’re not moving in till much later in the month — after we move we’ll take all our TVs, phones and computers with us to the new house — in the meantime for when the service was being activated we installed a spare TV we bought recently in the main wiring closet of the new house and a laptop for setting up the Internet connection and a new phone we got just for use in activating service.

My parents have decided for all we know after we move in we might switch back to Dish Network or just keep the new digital cable service but we activated it to test in the new house. We even got a DVR from the cable company and not just any DVR an HD DVR from Time Warner Cable.

I actually don’t use my DirecTiVo anymore because it died… I could probably resurrect it by opening it up and running Spinrite on the drive, but I had other uses in mind.

I went and got a Series 2 TiVo because I wanted to use TiVo-2-Go, which allows me to download my shows from TiVo to a PC and then re-encode them for watching on iTunes, AppleTV, or my iPhone. However, TiVo doesn’t do everything perfectly. For instance, if I tell TiVo I want to watch South Park, it will record every instance of South Park, including the repeats. It’s not good about ferreting out the new shows. It’s also not good about getting episodes that are only on a single channel. Like, in the later days of Friends, the show was in syndicated re-runs on other channels, while the new episodes were on the network. TiVo grabbed them all.

So I use a combination of TiVo and a dedicated PC running Snapstream BeyondTV, which does a lot better at allowing me to specify only which episodes of a show I want to get. So I use the PC to get South Park, The Colbert Report, etc. Trouble is, the PC isn’t the most stable thing in the world, so I force it to reboot once a week, which helps. But the TiVo is rock-solid and has other features (like Amazon Unboxed downloads, for instance) that make it a great DVR.

Incidentally, Snapstream will re-encode recorded videos automatically and make them available as a podcast, so it is easy to get access to the shows on it. However, like I said, it tends to get flaky. Just a few days ago, for some odd reason, it’s stopped re-encoding. I need to spend some time figuring out what the problem is. And there is also an ongoing issue with audio/video syncing when the videos are played on the iPhone.

In any case, if all you are going to do is record shows and watch them on your couch, then pretty much any DVR will do.

-Mike

It seems to me that DirecTV’s costs though may be higher than Dish.

By the way I just read an article titled “The Dish On Dish’s Mounting Woes” here http://www.multichannel.com/index.asp?layout=talkbackCommentsFull&talk_back_header_id=6568794&articleid=CA6614960

It says that “Charlie Ergen’s Dish Network is struggling to overcome a “perfect storm” of obstacles and setbacks, with the satellite-TV provider reporting its second consecutive quarter of subscriber losses earlier this week.

Missing Wall Street’s projections, Dish Network shed about 10,000 subscribers during the third quarter, compared with its gain of 110,000 subscribers in the year-ago period. In the second quarter, Dish had also reported a subscriber loss of 25,000 households, the first such loss ever for the satellite company.

“It doesn’t look like they’re going to be able to turn this around,” SNL Kagan analyst Mariam Rondeli said. “They’re looking at a very bad year next year with a lot more than just 10,000 subscribers lost. It’s just shocking to me how this has developed in some ways.”

Losing Streak
Dish Network has lost subscribers for two consecutive quarters:
DBS

3Q 2008

3Q 2007

2Q 2008

2Q 2007

Dish Network

(-) 10,000

(+) 110,000

(-) 25,000

(+) 170,000

DirecTV

(+) 156,000

(+) 240,000

(+) 129,000

(+) 128,000

SOURCE: Company reports.”

These statistics suggest while Dish was losing subscribers this year DirecTV gained some which means the satellite television businesses overall didn’t suffer huge losses necessarily to digital cable. DirecTV is a little more costly than Dish though and with the global recession occurring I would expect more people abandoning Dish to look to cheaper alternatives mainly cheap cable services. However, DirecTV added and maintained subscribers as Dish was seeing losses.

With our current set-up the boxes inside the house (the Dish receiver boxes — not the dish on the roof but the system inside) we have 2 such boxes 1 downstairs and another upstairs. Both the family room downstairs and the master bedroom upstairs are linked to the same receiver. Then there are two other bedrooms including mine which operate on a second receiver box so I get all the channels also on the TV in my room. When and if we switch back to cable — which I cannot imagine doing now but we’ve had it so long and I enjoyed it for the most part more so than the last time we had cable because I didn’t get my favorite channels with cable on my TV even if they were available on the family room TV — this time if I can get the digital channels also in my room through cable that would still be great.

I was wondering though how does TiVo compare to a cable company or satellite television DVR? Speaking of Chrome yeah I heard it has some problems — but so did Apple Safari when it came to Windows. The Windows version of Safari was insecure and buggy but is now better. Safari at the time was a beta browser for Windows users as is Google’s Chrome which is in its third beta release now that has improvements over the first two beta releases.

I will check out Virtual-Box but may still want to run Linux natively sometimes and Windows natively other times. Typically, I’ve found virtualization programs to be slow and buggy.

When I had my PowerBook G4 working one time I tried Virtual PC 7 for Mac and when running the Windows XP virtual machine in Virtual PC it would sometimes become buggy and the Mac OS itself would stop responding when the Windows virtual machine froze.

Some improvements may have been made in virtualization programs since then though.

Heck, if I can get a good internet connection, I may dump cable altogether, get Boxee, and just get everything from the ‘net. But then again, my girlfriend loves the reality shows, so we may have to keep cable.

Hey, be sure to check out VirtualBox. It is a free program that allows virtualization (like VMWare or Parallels) and it might be a better solution for you to mess around with Linux without having to reboot to do so.

My jury is still out on Chrome. I’ve heard it isn’t very secure and has some holes. As well, for some reason, when I use it at my office (behind a proxy) it will frequently mis-render pages. Many graphics only half-load. Some CSS doesn’t render properly. And some pages never come up at all. But at home this problem doesn’t exist.

On the other hand, for some reason, I can use Google Chat with Chrome at my office when it is disabled in IE. Go figure.

In any case, there are some really great points about Chrome and some not-so-great ones. I like using it.

-Mike

By the way with the huge debt my family now has because of our new home which will be finished now in another week or two I think (there was some delay) we’re trying to cut costs apparently and my dad found a cheaper plan for cable television and is now considering canceling Dish Network when we move to the new house and re-join cable. We have had Dish Network for the past 4-5 years. Before that we even had Dish once.

We have switched over the years back and forth between satellite television and cable TV.

What I didn’t like about digital cable the last time we had it was that it was only available in one room of our home on one TV only. All other TVs got the basic channels but none of the other channels.

Personally, if it wasn’t for the price issue I would keep Dish Network (I hear their struggling by the way to retain customers this year and just lost 10,000 subscribers in its third quarter despite plenty of new promotions to keep existing customers and add new subscribers. ) I have liked the service, trouble is my parents only reason for having it initially was to get Hindi channels from India and the last time we had cable we canceled it when cable stopped offering Hindi channels — now they just started offering them again. We just started getting local channels through Dish Network (before you could still get local channels and Dish Network but you had to install an antenna on your roof separate from the dish to pick up local channels and the local channels would be free) now that Dish Network is offering them directly we ordered them through Dish Network and are paying extra just to keep the local channels on top of the Top 200 package we already have. At one time we even had a DirecTV service and once we had both DirecTV and Dish bundled. At present we only have Dish.

Personally, I prefer satellite television and see more value in Dish than DirecTV because its cheaper than DirecTV and still has had great value but with the worsening economy many people are switching from Dish to cheaper alternatives even when those alternatives turn out to be cable companies. Our local cable company provider is Time Warner Cable. We already get Road Runner Internet service from them.

I’ve wanted to get an Apple TV of course as I mentioned — and have been willing to hold off a while in doing so but if we switch to cable I think I’ll try to get an Apple TV sooner provided the money is there.

By the way I have tried Google’s new Chrome browser on my PC running Windows and it seems great. It does not yet have the amount of extensions and the amount of functionality as Mozilla Firefox but otherwise is a great browser in my opinion. I also have Google Desktop Search for both Mac and Windows, and Google Toolbar for Mozilla Firefox on my Mac and my Windows PC (I know Macs do Windows now too however, I’ve chosen to continue using a separate PC for when running Windows — the PC I have is customized to my liking it has Windows XP Professional SP3 installed I’ve been considering adding a second hard drive to the PC and adding a dual boot partition to install either Ubuntu or Kubuntu Linux. and still keep Windows on the PC when I need to use it.

But replacing the drive should only cost a few hundred dollars for the drive and a little elbow grease to install it. A new Mac notebook is a grand or more… but man, the new ones look nice.

I don’t have a .Mac/MobileMe account, so I don’t know much about the backup. But it is for files and documents, not the entire OS. So that’s the big difference there: MobileMe is limited and allows you to keep some of your files and documents in the cloud (very safe), but TimeMachine keeps versions of everything in your computer (except external drives, apparently) and also keeps versions so that you can go back to any point in the past. And you can restore your entire OS from TimeMachine; you can’t do that from MobileMe, I’ll wager.

-Mike

How is Apple’s Back Up application that would come with dot mac compared to Time Machine? Any ideas? Ever used it. I have as part of the dot mac free trial. I never became a subscriber though. Was okay but restricted in how much can be backed up per disc without dot mac premium account — of course dot mac has been replaced now with Mobile Me. The problem on the PowerBook is if I try to boot from the OS X CD and I can do so — I use the alt+option key and works fine but when I launch the installer and asks me where I want to install OS X it cannot find the hard drive to install on so cannot install OS X. From what I understood as this PowerBook is out of warranty it would cost a lot to replace the existing hard drive. I asked my father who is more knowledgeable than me even — doesn’t know that much about Macs but he knows computers in general better and suggested it would be cheaper to buy a new laptop. Even a new Apple laptop probably in that regard would be cheaper than just repairing the PowerBook.

As well, if you have an external drive, you can boot to the OSX CD (hold ‘C’ while booting) and then install the OS to the external drive. It won’t recover everything on your internal HDD (hopefully you kept good backups… do you have Leopard and use TimeMachine?) but it should at least get you up and running.

Oh, BTW, hold Option while booting to choose which drive the OS is on. I’ve done this on several occasions to backup Tiger while I was seeing if Leopard would work for me.

Good luck. Let me know how it turns out.

BTW, I recently had a big issue with my Mac Mini. I can only think that the problem was QuickSilver… it wouldn’t even allow me to force quit it, and then the machine wouldn’t boot at all. Then it seemed to ignore my Apple keyboard as I couldn’t boot to the OSX CD (which was scary because I thought my CD was stuck in the machine forever). I switched out the keyboard and used Option (instead of ‘C’ which seemed to not be working) to boot to the OSX CD and ran all of the drive check utilities on the HDD… it found a few issues, but those didn’t allow the machine to boot (it would just spin the little asterisk-type icon with the Apple logo… I let it try to boot for over 24 hours with no luck).

Finally, I gave up, booted to the OSX CD and used the restore feature in TimeMachine. It took a while to restore the drive (an hour or so) but ever since then it’s worked perfectly.

But here’s a mixed blessing. Since the Mac Mini’s drive is only 40GB, I can’t store all of my music and movies on it, so I do so on an external 500GB drive. Well, iTunes kept randomly resetting the location of my music folder, so I deleted that folder and set up a symbolic link to the 500GB HDD. It’s sort of a kluge but at least iTunes doesn’t lose it’s mind periodically.

I’d done this some time ago and a few months ago got a 1TB external drive for my TimeMachine drive. Well, it turns out that is way overkill because it refuses to let me back up the 500GB drive as part of the TimeMachine process. So I still have to schedule a backup (I use RSYNC) of all my music and video to a 1TB NAS that I got a few weeks ago.

Well, that’s bad news for TimeMachine being the #1 solution for my backup. However, the good thing is that when I restored the TimeMachine backup to earlier in the week, that didn’t include the 500GB drive, so it was as if no problem ever occurred.

In the end, TimeMachine gets an B from me… it’s super convenient and saved my bacon, but it loses points for not allowing me to backup from one external drive to the other.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, it’s not following the symbolic link to find the music and videos to back them up… I checked. Bummer.

-Mike

When I first got my PowerBook I didn’t know about Disk Utility and sometimes was forced to restart my PowerBook which meant shutting it down wrong and restarting which would cause hard disk errors — later I tried to fix it and it seemed to work for a while maybe its too many forced restarts or that it just got too old to keep working. Its out of warranty so will have to just replace it at some future date.

But I hear ya… if my Macbook Pro died, I would feel lost. I do everything (except games) on that computer.

-Mike

-Mike

Sorry for the double post but just wanted to say sorry for the long post above — I just had a lot on my mind I wanted to get out.

This house is very huge — the garage is at the back of the house and the driveway has a gate at the entrance. There are actually 3 or 4 different decks. At least 2 on the second floor including 1 next to the master bedroom. In my current home there are only 3 bathrooms with 2 on the second floor (one being the master bath) the other a regular bathroom, and downstairs a guest bathroom and guest bedroom. The master bedroom’s closet is huge. In the new house every bedroom has its own bath — and there are 4 or 5 restrooms in the new house.

Most of the construction is already done — they’ve just started installing the ceiling fans downstairs, and except for the master bathroom every bathroom has a bath tub, a toilet and a sink already. The master bath has both a tub and a separate shower.

The ceiling fans would have been installed upstairs but there was a problem with the wrong fans for upstairs being ordered and we have to wait for a new set to arrive. The ones downstairs are fine though.

The bathrooms are tiled as is the kitchen. Half of the family room will actually be tiled the other half carpeted. Aside from adding the rest of the ceiling fans, and fixing the electrical system (its been installed but some lights weren’t working upstairs),

Most of the plumbing work is done — except a few bathrooms still require more plumbing work to be completed. The largest deck is on the highest floor of the house. My parents combined make at least $250,000 a year. There is a block fence that was built around the outside of the house. They installed some pipes for a swimming pool connection.

We’re not building the pool currently after we move in we will — but much later. The pool will cost at least $30,000 on top of the amount being paid for the new house.

We had just finished paying off our existing home after living in it for at least 15 years (since 1994 we have lived in the same home) when we decided last year to build a new one. We really want to add a swimming pool but won’t have the money to pay for it for a while. The house itself is expensive enough. There is room to build the pool later. The thing is on top of whatever we need to pay for the entire house — it is so expensive I don’t even know how much the new house is costing us — my parents might have an estimate but they haven’t told me.

I mentioned the swimming pool would cost $30,000. Here’s the thing the house costs way more than that.

My existing bedroom closet is not a walk-in closet but my new bedroom closet will be. Your right I’m sure I’ll figure something out. I just hope its soon. We’ve had 3 houses over the past several years the first being the 1 story house my dad sold to me after fixing it up and being unable to sell to anyone else. The second being the existing 2 story we live in, its not huge but its bigger than the previous 1 story. Since construction of the new house began we have lost ownership of our existing house — in the sense we owe so much money (will owe) that until its all paid any of our assets like the existing house we paid off would belong to the bank again. The swimming pool as I mentioned will cost $30,000. We aren’t building it yet because we can’t afford to at present but when we can we plan to add it later. As at present it does not look likely that we will be able to build it until next April at the earliest. As I mentioned the house costs a lot more than the pool will.

When we move out of our existing house we’re going to try to sell it as soon as we can but till then likely also put it up for rent.

We have lots of room in the new house and have talked about as soon as we can afford it also how we plan to add an entertainment center including an HD TV to the house — well we would get one for the family room and one certainly for my new bedroom but only when we can afford it. That also means we would have to wait on installing a new surround sound system. My dad has had configurations put in place for a surround sound speaker to be put in my room when the time comes. Again your right on one thing though we are managing the best we can.

So they just have to fix the electrical system so the lights turn on, finish the plumbing, in my new bathroom the mirror on the wall still has to be installed, the master bath tub has to be installed, the carpet still has to be installed, the refrigerator has to be brought in and installed — our existing one will be taken to the new house and put in our new pantry so we’ll have 2 refrigerators, counting the new 1 to be installed in the kitchen, a new microwave will be there built-in, we’ll also take our existing microwave to the new house; there will obviously be a new dishwasher installed — that is yet to be done.

So a few little things still need to be done — by November 4th at the earliest we should be able to move in (same day as the election). The doorbell still has to be installed, the gate is there — and there are 3 different entrances to the garage implying 3 garage doors.

Finding a job has just been taking longer than I thought — after all it was May when I became unemployed and now its almost November. If I can find out about a blog willing to pay contributors for each entry I’ll look into it.

I’ll figure something out though its just taking longer than I hoped and since becoming unemployed I’ve had to start applying for unemployment wages assistance from the state. I get $214 dollars every week and they offer a total of $6,000 a year — so once I have been paid $6,000 in total I’ll have to wait a few months without unemployment financial assistance before beginning to receive it again.

I have also started getting health insurance through a state controlled socialized health care insurance program.

It sounds like your family is doing okay, though. Three stories is a sizable house, even if it is unfinished. Much bigger than my little 2 bedroom apartment.

-Mike

We needed a new car and my father wanted to trade in his old one a Honda from 1998 but with the loan he had to take out for the new house he couldn’t afford a loan for the new car so he got the car loan in my sister’s name. So I got a home loan to buy our earlier house and my sister got a car loan to buy a new car. My dad traded his old car for my sister’s existing car a 2005 Honda and my sister got the new 2008 Honda that was purchased.

So yeah this economic recession has been tough on my family as well. I hope things improve soon.

I agree, credit card companies have many tricks. I am no stranger to pretty much all of them. But this is the first time ever that an issuer has changed my credit terms to my disadvantage with no notification and no specific event from me (like missing a payment, for instance). I am fairly responsible with the accounts, just not my spending. Lesson learned.

Shareholder meetings may be a nightmare, but that’s no excuse to throw up your hands and give up on the process. And if the problems were identified, then a savvy investor would have bailed before too much $$ was lost. I am sorry that this has happened to you and every other innocent bystander in this fiasco. But I don’t think barking at me for my identification of a series of poor business choices will help anything. Might make you feel better, and I hope it did at least that.

As for being in the blogosphere, yeah, it’s tough to take some criticism sometimes. Especially when the criticism is in the form of “You (deserve it/are an idiot/don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground) because you (did something totally unrelated to the post being commented on).” That’s a tough pill to swallow. You were, in essence, saying that I deserved to have my APR raised because somehow WaMu knew that I would miss details on my subsequent statement. If that were true, then there would be all manner of “hey, we raised your APR… if you noticed, call us and we’ll put it back where it was. If you don’t notice, then nanny-nanny-boo-boo.” I am fairly certain that that type of thing isn’t happening to any great degree.

As well, I hope you’re not saying that the comments section should be off-limits to the author. I surely deserve the chance to respond to my criticisms in kind. I relish the tete-a-tete. If I really had a problem with the comments, it’s my blog and I can delete them. Not to worry, I’ll sleep well tonight whether you like me or not.

In the end, yes, there is plenty of blame to go around for our current financial crisis. But I find it loathsome that I was not part of the problem but WaMu tried to make me part of their solution.

-Mike

-FYI, banks have been selling mortgage as securities for YEARS even before the sub-prime mess, which I never denied that it was the wrong decision by management. I was only saying there are PLENTY of blame to go around and you can’t just pinpoint one source for this whole thing. Executives definitely had a huge stake in this mess, as well as the investors who traded these securities thinking these were the best thing since sliced bread.

-I won’t defend the practices of credit card companies such as using two cycled billing, changing due dates and the problem you went through, really I don’t condone it. At the same time as a bank employee, you should be the first to know the nuances of card agreements and just about EVERY credit card company has tricks up their sleeves to make money. Your experience is nothing NEW to consumers, and it’s seen throughout the industry, even the bank you work at (if they issue cards). With that said, best ways to use the card is to take advantage of the rewards system, and treat it like a debit card and pay the balance off each month.

-Shareholder meetings to voice your opinion?? you kidding me? You DON’T think people were going after the exec’s heads?? Trying to get executives to talk about an important issue and make the changes for the shareholders is about as painful as watching Couric interview Palin.

-Last point I want to make. I’m voicing out my opinions throughout the comments. If you’re a blogger in a public medium, one advice, prepare for backlash when you voice out opinions without giving too much thought and sensitivity to the subject matter.