Life Just Got a Bit More Interesting

...because she can pretty much walk with impunity now. She's been teetering on the verge for awhile now, but the needle's pointing at "I'm walkin' now, so there" without a whole lot of question. (In the interests of full disclosure, she does still revert to crawling when she gets to a new environment until she's sure the floor is solid and safe, but I regard that as a good, safe reflex for her to have.)

Love, Actu—Huh?

So, I mentioned before that our last TiVo bit it in the power outages from the last ice storm, and that we'd done a replacement with the company and were set up to TiVo again.

However, we did lose everything that had been on our old TiVo, some of which was quite old and was sort of a bonus to have there if one of us woke in the middle of the night and had trouble going back to sleep. On that list of stuff on "keep until I delete" for months (or in some cases, well over a year) were several episodes of Good Eats, a couple of Futuramas, three episodes of the first season of the new Doctor Who, and the movie Love, Actually. It was Love, Actually that was the go-to program for me most of the time, being pressed into service whenever I needed something reassuring on in the background to allow me to go back to sleep.

While I have the movie on DVD, we don't have a DVD player in the bedroom and who wants to get up at 2 am to put on a DVD anyway? I set up a keyword search on Love, Actually, assuming one premium channel or another would dust it off and program it for the Christmas season.

Instead, USA network put on a "basic cable safe" version of it. As a curiosity, as I am probably the closest thing on the planet to someone who would gleefully collect Love, Actually curiosities, it is interesting to watch. Billy Mack's tirade of swearing in the recording studio is replaced with an emphatic "Ohhhhhhh!" When Natalie meets the Prime Minister, instead of swearing several times in front of him, she instead impulsively kisses him. Jack and Judy, the body doubles, basically seem to have had to film their entire appearances in the movie twice...once with rampant nudity and once without.

It's just so odd that there's enough stuff in the movie that it wouldn't have made sense in a purely censored version, and the makers of the film actually saw it coming far enough in advance to film entirely different versions of scenes that would make the storylines nonsensical by their omission.

I actually might keep this version, just because it seems like some sort of weird ultra-rare, like a foil Charizard or something. It does suck with the commercials in, though.

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.

Trees of Glass

On the drive home this past Monday, we saw a rather stunning side-effect still lingering in the aftermath of the ice storm. Tree after tree seemed to be sculpted from glass. Any tree that didn't have any leaves left was basically encased in a thin layer of ice. Even the dead grasses on the ground were individually frozen.

The picture above doesn't do it justice, as I was taking it from a moving car and trying to track along with the forward motion of the car to keep it focused. This was probably my most effective attempt.