stay in the shallow end

Well, for the DSL problem, and now the TiVo. The strong winds of late moved the dish out of alignment, and we realigned that last night. As the TiVo was collecting guide data, I was messing with our recordings, and then it locked up and rebooted. From there, it never recovered.

I popped it open and put the drive in a PC, and it pretty much said the drive was hosed. I called DirecTV up, and they said that because it’s out of warranty, they couldn’t just repair it, but since they wanted to keep me as a customer, they’d do a free replacement if I signed a two year contract. In addition to the two year contract, I would be switching to a lease, so while I own my TiVo now, I would not own the new one, and in fact, I’d have to pay a leasing fee. Forget that.

So I went online and downloaded a new drive image, and I’ll go pick up a new hard drive tonight and perform the transplant. Hopefully all will go well.

In the meantime, we missed the Sopranos, Big Love, 24, and Prison Break. Luckily HBO replays their shows a kazillion times, and for 24 and Prison Break, there’s always Bittorrent.

I recently upgraded my DSL connection to the 5.0 Mbps service from the 3.0 Mbps service with Sprint. While it is tremendously faster, the upgrade has introduced some instability. My connection slows to a halt every 8 hours or so. The solution to this is to come downstairs and restart the modem. I’ve started doing it proactively whenever I’m about to leave the house.

It’s kind of like I’m on Lost, except I wasn’t in a plane crash, I’m not on an unmapped island, I get plenty of food, and I’m not repeatedly thrust into life threatening situations. So really, it’s just that there’s a button. If I don’t push it every few hours, my internet connection goes down, and life as I know it comes to an end.

It was really refreshing to read this article where movie industry executives are finally admitting that ticket sales being down has less to do with piracy and more to do with the fact that movies these days are considerably suckier than usual.

I used to go to the movies much more frequently than I do now. Part of it happened with the move to Charlottesville, and the fact that the movie theaters here are so craptacular. I get depressed every time I go to one. It just sucks to sit through a movie on a small screen (for a movie theater), poor sound quality, and having my feet cemented to the floor by spilled soda and candy.

I thought about it more recently, and I realized a lot of my decreased movie watching has to do with the quality of television these days. IMHO, we’re in a golden age of television. Shows beyond soap operas are finally moving to more serial plot lines rather than episodic ones. Six Feet Under and 24 both play out like season long movies… if you just watch one of their episodes, you won’t get anything out of it.

It was easy for movies to compete when their budgets dwarfed television, and they got all the top actors, while television actors remained fairly anonymous. That’s all changed now, with actors like Kiefer Sutherland moving to television and doing the best work of their careers by far.

And at best (or worst), a movie can be 200 minutes long. One season of television gives nearly 1100 minutes to work with. It’s much more difficult for a movie writer to be able to develop characters to the extent that we now see in television shows.

The big question is why it took so long to happen. I’m guessing that it took awhile for a network to give a show a movie sized budget and demand corresponding production values. I think we can thank HBO with The Sopranos for that.

I guess I’ll close this post with a list of my favorite shows from the last few years:

• 24
• Arrested Development
• Battlestar Galactica
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I am still catching up on)
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Da Ali G Show
• Deadwood
• Lost
• Six Feet Under
• The Sopranos
• Veronica Mars
• The Wire

So half my list is HBO. If there were a way to subscribe only to HBO, I’d save so much money…