Author: Bob Benz

I guess my techno-hubris eventually had to get the better of me. After turning my Tivo into a wireless wonder, I thought I was set. Until I came home last week to find the screen frozen in a pixelated scream that would have done Edvard Munch proud. I couldn’t get it to respond. After rebooting, it became clear the worst had happened: a hard drive failure.

After spending an hour on the phone with Tivo support, I finally got the kid I was talking to to agree with me. It was the hard drive. But of course the warranty on labor is expired (though parts were still covered). It cost me $99 to get a new hard drive put in it. One cool thing they did: They sent me a replacement Tivo first, which I’ve already hooked up and configured. Now I just send the fried box back to them. They put a charge on your credit card until they get the deceased unit back. So in the end, it cost $99 and I was without Tivo for less than a week. Not sure I could have lasted much longer. Live TV sucks.

But my technology slump didn’t end there. I purchased an Onkyo CP-500 five-disc CD/DVD changer when I set up our surround sound system. It never worked quite right, and I finally take it to the authorized dealer for repair. After a few weeks, they report parts aren’t available for it. After a few more weeks and wrangling with Onkyo, I get a new one, which is even an upgrade. I’m pissed that it took almost two months, but happy to have a new CP-701 with a six-disc changer.

Until I get it home.

And it won’t work. No matter what I try, the tray won’t come out. I try resetting it. Even resort to reading the manual. Nothing.

So I take it back to the authorized service center. Fortunately, this one takes only a day to resolve. But it apparently is a design flaw. The guy who fixed it said they’d issued a bulletin on the problem, noting that it happens if the player gets jostled during transit.

Moral of the story: Be humble when facing the technology gods. Buy protection plans on Tivos. And never, ever buy an Onkyo DVD player.

A friend told me a funny story recently:

His grandmother, a card-carrying Texan well into her ’90s, is a devout racist. My friend doesn’t have a racist bone in his body and is a tad embarrassed by grandma’s attitudes, but realizing he’s not going to change a 90-something, he just deals with it.

Grandma had to undergo surgery recently, and the doctors pumped her full of morphine. In a hallucinatory state, she ended up in heaven, where, to her horror and disbelief, all the angels were black. To add insult to injury, they were rolling her in mud trying to make her look like them.

Part of me wants to believe her vision was more divinely inspired than drug induced, and that god has a really cool sense of humor …

(BTW: She emerged from the surgery fine, though a bit shaken.)

Hey, good news! After spending the entire summer paralyzed from a back injury, Landry, my basset hound, is walking again. He can even run a bit. The old boy will always have a pronounced limp because he did not regain much feeling in one of his rear legs, but I’m going to invent an exciting tale about his weak leg, one he can tell to strangers in bars.

Something like, “He was dragging children out of a burning house when a glowing, hot timber fell on his leg. He managed to get himself and the last child out of danger, but he was scarred for life.”