I thought I was going to be so clever, but Peter beat me to it. I guess it's only fair since it is his nameplate and he made the sign.

Peter's office is next to mine and I enjoy seeing his handmade sign every time I pass by, so I took a few photos today.

 

More photos of Peter's name tag.

Thanks to Sue, who is the guide of the well-run Graphics Software section at About.com, we now have 30-second forward-skip on our DirecTiVo. What a relief. Thank you Sue!

There's one more annoyance that I forgot to mention: each night when we turn the unit on to live TV, it's on a different channel, and that channel always seems to be a premium movie channel that we don't subscribe to.

Is this something that DirecTV is doing? Or is it a by-product of the suggestion process that TiVo goes through? I've disabled the auto-recording of TiVo Suggetions since it doesn't have enough data yet and (I'm guessing) based on my selection of a season pass for "Monk," it started recording things like "Cops" and detective shows from the 70s.

We'll see tonight if it's still on the same channel I left it on when I put in standby last night. This is a minor thing, yet the UltimateTV got it right.

After practicing tennis until it got too dark to see, then walking Maya, we sat down to watch that night's episode of Big Brother 5. I checked the "My Shows" list but it wasn't there. Huh? I checked the recording history and it says it wasn't recorded due to a conflict. But there was only one other show (The Daily Show) scheduled to record at that time. There are two tuners, so what's the problem?

It turns out that there weren't two tuners — there was only one. The other tuner had failed in the hardware, something that is apparently common in UltimateTV devices. After two-and-a-half years of service, we needed to get something new.

We're committed to DirecTV and love the integration, so there wasn't much question: we would have to buy a DirecTV with TiVo DVR. On the surface, there shouldn't be much difference: both have two tuners, both have on-screen guides, both can record shows, pause live TV, and both are integrated with DirecTV. Sounds like it should mostly be a drop-in replacement.

Saturday morning, I bought a Samsung 100-hour DirecTV with TiVo DVR at the Crossroads Circuit City. This is a bonus: our Sony UltimateTV only had a 35-hour capacity.

I took it home. The connection was a breeze — just plug the same cables that were in the UltimateTV into the TiVo and walk through the setup process. Very smooth. We were watching TV in less than a half an hour after I started the process.

But I've discovered that the devices are not quite so similar as I had hoped. The TiVo doesn't have a 30-second forward skip. Instead, I have to fast-forward. That's just annoying, especially since the fast-forward feature of the TiVo is designed for people with slow reaction times. Once you see the part you want to watch and press play again, it backs up a bit assuming you were slow. Well, it turns out I'm faster than their target audience and so I end up watching the last 10 seconds or so of the commercials I was trying to skip, even when I try to respond more slowly. This is a huge problem with the TiVo device.

UltimateTV also automatically started the recording a bit before the scheduled time and let it run over a bit after to account for variations in TV stations' schedules. It saved us from missing the very beginning or end of shows many times. It's also smart enough to not let that extra time cause conflicts and prevent adjacent shows from recording.

TiVo doesn't have this automatic feature: you have to choose to enable it and if you do, and that extra recording time (they call it "overtime") would result in a conflict, it doesn't treat the overtime as separate: whichever show is higher in the priority list wins. That's a problem, although I'm not sure how big that will be.

Turning the device off (or putting it in "standby" for the DirecTV TiVo device) requires several steps: there's no way to do it with one button on the remote. Instead, press the DirecTV button, press channel down to page down to the last item in the list, and press Select. Urgh.

And speaking of the user interface: it doesn't let you roll around to the top or bottom. In well-designed programs, pressing down at the bottom of the list causes the cursor to roll around to the top, and doing the same at the top rolls around to the bottom. Instead, in the TiVo, I get the error gong.

We'll have to learn to live with this device because UltimateTV isn't sold any longer, but I'm surprised how frustrating the interface feels. The way people have talked up TiVo in the past, I thought it was a generation beyond UltimateTV.

See the download.ject section of the Microsoft Security site to find out about a critical update for Microsoft Data Access Components. It's beginning to show up in Windows Update, but it wasn't there for my machine when I checked this morning so I went straight to the Download Center. I didn't have to reboot after installation, either: nice bonus.

I'm glad we signed up for the Full Circle Farm CSA program. If we hadn't, there's no way I would ever have eaten baby beets and their greens. Before this, my only exposure to beets was in mediocre borscht or as wiggly gelatinous red slabs from a can that came with lunch in grade school.

I thought I hated beets.

I can't say that any longer. We started with fresh organic baby beets. We cut the stems and greens off, then steamed the roots for about half an hour until they were tender. Dawn rinsed them to cool them down enough to peel them while I steamed the greens until they were tender (about five minutes). I then put them in a bowl with about half a tablespoon of butter and tossed until the butter was melted. I seasoned with some kosher salt and fresh-ground black pepper, then covered the bowl to keep them warm. I put another half-tablespoon of butter in a skillet and heated it over medium heat until the butter melted. Dawn cut the largest of the baby beets into halves or even quarters so that all the pieces were roughly the same size. I added them to the skillet and tossed in the butter to coat and warm them up again. Once they were warm, I added about two teaspoons of balsamic vinegar and shook them around until the vinegar had evaporated. I added them to the greens and served.

The flavor was sweet, complex, a little bit earthy, and just absolutely fantastic. Normally anything I have on the side with a good steak ends up playing a distant second fiddle, but I liked these beets as much as the organic, free-range, grass-fed New York strip that I had grilled to perfection.

Who would believe it?

This photo has some technical flaws, and I sure wish she could have taken it without the flat on-camera flash, but it definitely captures the "decisive moment" and that's something I am never able to do. Bravo.

I just discovered something very nifty with Lynx, the classic text-based Web browser. With the character encoding of a page set to windows-1252, Lynx recognizes "smart" typographical symbols, including curved quotation marks and apostrophes, and em dashes. When displaying, it converts them to their 7-bit representations, including em dashes (displaying them as --).

Very impressive, especially considering the version I tried was from July 2001 and running on a FreeBSD machine where I have a shell account.

BTW, if you visit this page from an OS that isn't Windows, would you let me know how the typographical symbols look in this post? Rather than leave the encoding of the page as utf-8 or ISO-8859-1 and express the typographical symbols as numeric entities (’ and so forth) I'm putting the 8-bit characters directly in the page and setting the encoding to windows-1252.

Why am I doing this? Because I like posting with BlogJet, but it doesn't handle the typographical characters in the most-portable way. In fact, BlogJet doesn't give you any way to input the characters at all, but I wrote a nifty little AutoHotKey script that gives BlogJet Word-like autoformat as you type behavior. It's quite fun. If there's any interest, I'll probably post the script.

I shouldn't let Dawn see this, since she does tend not to drink enough, but there's an article at WebMD that debunks some myths about how much water we should drink. The myths:

1. We need to drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day
2. Caffeinated beverages make you dehydrated
3. By the time you feel thirsty, you're already becoming dehydrated
4. Drinking plenty of water can help you lose weight

From Patrick Berry's Vertical Hold.