It seems that at least one of the hard drives in our TiVo is slowly dying. Fortunately, we still have our old DirecTV receiver laying around, so we can still watch Tour de France coverage on OLN. But, being temporarily without TiVo makes me now realize how much I loved it. The pause button is an amazing thing. I caught myself watching a dumb show on Comedy Central tonight. With TiVo, I rarely watched bad TV. I generally only watched programs I had recorded in advance AND really wanted to watch.
Anyone with packrat tendencies might already be wringing their hands over this idea of having lots and lots of shows recorded, waiting to be watched. If you have a bad guilt complex, you might start feeling a lot of pressure to watch all those shows. I felt like that, too, until I read the following bit from Jeff Keegan’s Hacking TiVo where he tries to explain to friends why it’s a good thing:
“What they didn’t get was that it was always better to have a TiVo full of shows I know I like than to have nothing and have to watch whatever happens to be on at the time. An empty TiVo is a bad, bad thing. … At first we felt compelled to watch everything we’d recorded, calling it ‘TiVo debt,’ but we got past that. We watch what we want, and ignore what we find ourselves not watching.”
That quote alone was worth the price of the book for me. If I want to watch TV, I start with the most interesting items I’ve already recorded. Since the second drive gave us a total of 157 hours of recording space, we recorded lots of things that might interest us. Every now and then I would notice that something I had recorded had gone a couple weeks without getting anywhere near the top of my unofficial priority list. I would then either watch it or delete it guilt-free.
I liked this idea so much that I’ve applied it to my many piles of unread books and magazines. Rather than feeling stressed out about the large number of unread books and magazines lying around my house, I now take the more positive view that I always have lots of interesting stuff to read. If I find a magazine laying around unread for a long time while more appealing stuff is piling up, I toss out the old stuff. Unlike the TiVo recordings, each extra magazine takes up additional physical space in the house, so I need to be a bit more proactive in my magazine pruning. But, the philosophy of keeping around enough good stuff so you never have to waste time on mediocre stuff still holds.
Hmmm, I’m thinking I may be a geek. My idea of a self-help book is a book on hacking digital video recorders.