HerdingChaos

The third time is the charm. The third tech from TWC was able to program two CableCARDS and get the Tivo Series 3 HD working perfectly. I proceeded to program all of our season pass information into it and away it goes.
The only outstanding issue with the Mac is the lack of the Cisco VPN client. Well I have a bit of an “in” at Cisco…. so today I emailed the development manager for the mac os x client with a problem report. Hopefully they already have an engineering build I can try.

I posted earlier about my order for a new Tivo Series 3 HD. This is my first post about my new iMac 24″. What do they have in common? They are both really really new.

On the Tivo front: Time Warner cable will not allow you to self install the CableCARDS into your own device. At first I was really upset by this because they are going to charge me ~$30/card for the install. The cards are leased for only $3/month/card so the install charge was almost a year’s lease on the card for the install. Well now that I have seen the install in action I can say that they are going to blow through the $60 some odd dollars I will be paying for the install and then some. The contractor that does the house visits and installs stated that my Tivo HD was the first they had seen. Then the fun started. We inserted the first CableCARD and called it in. It seemed to go okay. Then we installed the second card and it started a firmware update. Tivo kindly told me that this normally takes 40 min and that I could do nothing else while the second card was loading the new firmware. 18 hours later I ejected the second card. The first card is mostly working except some of the channels will pop up a banner telling me I need to call the cable company to get the card activated. And the random channels that do this are not all pay channels. FOX HD is doing it but all the other network’s HD channels work fine. This morning I called the contractor back to report the results (since they recommended the overnight wait for the firmware update). The supervisor seems to think this is an issue with the way the headend is programmed at Time Warner. But since he is just a contractor he is going to have to come out here, look at it, play with it a bit, and then file a work order for a real Time Warner cable dude to come out and take a look. I just want my Tivo. *cry*

On the iMac front: Oh my god I love this iMac. The screen is super crisp and this thing is so fast I am amazed. But this is only around week 2 of the Core 2 Duo based mac’s being released. All of the software from Apple works like a charm and I have no problems with it at all. I planned on using this iMac to replace my old aging linux box, but run a copy of linux within Parallels for Mac (kind of like VMWare for you non-mac people). Well Parallels for mac has a really cool feature that only works on the Core 2 Duo based machines. When you start the virtual machine the kernel panics and your mac reboots! What fun! I found a forum post from the Parallels guys and the internal build that they made available actually fixed the problem. Which allowed me to move onto the next problem. The Cisco VPN client for mac will install and work fine until you reboot. Once you reboot whatever the VPN client installs to run on each start will cause the system to crash and you go into a loop until you boot the Mac in safe mode and remove the VPN startup items. But the good news is I can login to work via ssh and the VPN client is not a must have.

So what is a TWCHDDVR you ask? The Time Warner Digital Cable High Definition Digital Video Recorder is simply the worst executed DVR that I have ever used. However, it was pretty much the only option to get something that even the kids could use that would work in HD at home. Well no more you craptastic monopoly! Tivo has released the Series 3 HD DVR. I own a Series 2 DVR and it has always done what I wanted, never crashed and in general helps me dig through the billions of crap shows and boil my viewing time down to the 2-3 hours a week that I really want to see. I can not wait to take my TWC DVR into the TWC office and ask for two CableCARDS in return. The Tivo is expensive, but they have earned it. I cannot think of any other bit of electronics that I have bought recently that I felt really produced a high quality product for a decent price (except maybe the macbook I bought for Becky). Anyway, once I get it in I will let all two of you know what it is like.