Suckitude in Ice Storm Land

There was one electronic casualty of the ice storm. The TiVo bit the dust after repeated power on/power off cycles. Yes, I should have remembered to unplug it. No, I didn't remember. I was trying to get the baby's things packed up for our flight to the MIL and FIL's and I didn't unplug everything I wanted to unplug before we left.

After calling the company, for a fee, we could trade in our old box and get a refurbished unit of the same ilk, then send back our old and busted box. They'd then transfer our lifetime service to the "new" (to us) box and we'd be good to go.

It took some time to get it shipped (just arrived today, we've been TiVoless for about a week and I appreciate the service more now, I think) but there was one real bitch of a problem to work out...although all of our config data was pre-loaded onto our new box so that we didn't have to re-authorize the new box or any of that unpleasantness, we lost all of our season pass information.

Those of you who have TiVos may have taken a gasp of horror at that point, and the rest of you were thinking, "So the $**()#*$ what?" A season pass list, with its quirks and hierarchies and "this program runs one minute over" subtleties, is cultivated over time, like a fine cheese or wine. It's constantly tweaked. Programs fall out of favor. New ones come into vogue. It takes forever to get it to "just that lovely place" where it catches things that you would have missed (like our wishlist search for Lewis Black that gets his appearances on talk shows and on Comedy Central, though not his appearances on The Daily Show, regrettably) and doesn't record the wrong thing because your hierarchical list was in the wrong order.

"So sit down and fix it," you may be saying. Ah, but I can only search for programs that the TiVo knows about, and it has limited guide information at this time (though I forced it to update about fifteen minutes ago, and we'll see if that helps a bit). Plus, things like 24 that won't premiere for weeks yet wouldn't appear in the guide anyway, so I can't really put it in my list.

I've done a bit of sneaky scheduling via the Yahoo TV website, where I already had our box information configured (here's hoping the hoo-hah that TiVo did when it switched the boxes on our account will keep that Yahoo->TiVo box link working, which I think it will, as our "new" box knew what the old box's name was) and I hope that will be part of what this forced reload will update on my box.

Now I'm off to do some real work around the house, before I look into boxing up the old TiVo to ship back to them either later tonight or tomorrow.