12.12.04
Posted in City Life at 4:00 pm by Beau
In a post-haze of Nyquil and Benadryl, I forced my germy, disease-riddled body out of the apartment this morning in search of…something other then the apartment walls. I ended trolling up Lenox Ave to 125th street, passing the most amazing side streets of gorgeous row houses. Harlem gets a lot of bad raps but it’s like one of those great New York things, you just have to look a little closer and you find some real treasures.
Unlike my prior rant about the lack of good coffee up in this neck of the woods, I did happen to find, to my surprise I’ll admit, a very serviceable and cozy Starbucks up on 125th which led me to have a delightful Sunday morning with the Times and a Chai Latte, watching all the fancy-dressed people meander to church. I could very much get used to this.
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12.02.04
Posted in Home Life at 9:30 pm by Beau
As predicted, the combination of a shitty cell-reception in the heart of this fortress-like apartment in conjunction with picking up the cable remote several times to replay a missed conversation on the TV, has led us to purchase a bare-bones phone line from a large telecom company for the sole purpose of being able to use the new Series 2 Tivo we purchased. For anyone counting, that’s 3 separate Tivo’s we boys now own, two for our home and one for the apartment. Thank God for the multi-user plan which discounts multiple DVR’s on an account. It’s a sad statement of our lives that we can’t have a TV that isn’t tied to a Tivo but I’m sorry, we’re just futurists that way.
The saddest thing and the dirtiest secret that isn’t much talked about (until after the purchase, that is) is that Tivo, unless you buy the $1200 DirectTV with HD capability model, doesn’t work with high definition TV, just like the one we just bought for the apartment. Homosayswhat? Seriously. So I spend the day emailing Max, Great Giver Of All Good Tivo, complaining and looking for help. The support forums on tivo.com help only in the way that allows me to understand that there might be a cable work-around that would at most allow the Tivo to function on all non-HD channels. But then what’s the point. This evening’s two hour time-slip (those hours when I get to the apartment from work to the time I would have gotten home had we driven to the country like in the old days) was spent matching up A/V cables and S-cables and reconfiguring audio in to audio out, from cable box to Tivo to TV. Not something I particularly adept at but which, none the less, has to get done and it’s the one thing I can figure out, eventually. And I did and now we’re ready to go except our land line isn’t turned on yet. Next week I’m going to figure out how to cable the Tivo into the wireless network (an oxymoron I still don’t understand myself)and utilize the desktop features promised with the Series 2 model.
UPDATE: Never mind about that online networking business. Apparently the Series 2 doesn’t support my Linksys G router. Fuckers. I hate technology.
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