You Learn Something New Every Day

In the past few days, I've been learning lots of new things. Did you know that Almond Joy and Mound now use a Jamaican theme to sell their candy? Red Robin is now selling a really awesome looking burger with fried onions and other yummy toppings. And the movies that are coming out in the near future? Yeah, I'm probably not going to see a single one. The Toyota commercials with new customers touting how they still bought their cars even after the recent recall issues make me giggle, though.

Why do I know all this?

Wellll, on Friday, I sat down after the wee ones were in bed and turned on the tv for the first time all week. Funny - you'd think with me being off work I'd have more time to watch tv and get caught up on my computer, but oddly the reverse is true.

I immediately flipped over to the saved shows on my DVR and started to watch one from a couple weeks ago that I hadn't yet seen. Oddly, it had no volume. I sighed, as this sometimes happens where the volume goes out for awhile but then comes back partway through. No dice. I tried another one. Same thing.

Then I noticed that my husband had stopped the recording of one of my favorite shows earlier in the week so that only a single minute recorded. I sighed and decided to watch at least that one minute. Annnnnnd nothing. I received the error message "Sorry, no video data detected. Show not recorded."

Uh-oh.

I began looking at other shows, and they all had the same volume problem. I noticed other shows that had taped in the past week that also recorded only for one minute. Even shows that I had watched previously with no issues and saved no longer had volume.

I tried watching just the regular tv, but it wouldn't change to television and instead kept playing the silent recorded show. Worried, I flipped over to straight cable instead of the DVR feed, fearing that all tv was gone. Nope, that still works.

I went through my usual fixes of turning off the DVR and resetting it. I reset the cable modem. I reaffixed the little laser DVR readers to the cable box. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

My DVR has died.

I've lost three weeks of LOST now, two weeks of Grey's and Private Practice and other shows that I won't quite admit to - the last two were revelation enough. And nothing else can record until this gets fixed.

Our DVR is a Replay TV that offerd a lifetime subscription. I think we hit its lifetime (granted it's over seven years old and my husband has been begging me to replace it for years with a model that allows you to record one show and watch another and does so in HD).

We kept it all this time, however, as I had no interest in paying an extra $15 for cable for something I was essentially getting for free. I knew it couldn't last forever, but I didn't think it would just go like this.

Since Friday, if I wanted to watch something, I had to be home to watch it, and I had to watch it commercials and all. I couldn't rewind and rewatch something particularly interesting or something I missed. I couldn't pause to read details on the screen that are too quick to catch when watching live tv.

And I haven't been home much. I miss my shows. That's sad to admit, isn't it?

How did we live without DVRs again? What technology is now a required one in your life?