30 Days...

The wife and I are usually late to clue in on most of the really new hot T.V. shows that come out every year. There are so many choices that if the premise doesn’t immediately appeal, we usually don’t give it a try.

We didn’t get hooked on “24” until after the first season was over. The premise didn’t sound all that great (“A 24-hour day presented in real time”), but our daughter-in-law really recommended it so we took a chance.

We caught up by renting the first season DVD’s from NetFlix and just about couldn’t do anything else until we finished it in about four days. It was that good!

Then we dumped our cable company and were exposed to TIVO from DirectTv. I originally thought I was simply replacing the VCR with a tapeless substitute. How wrong I was. The DVR feature of recording two shows at the same time is a nice upgrade but the real surprise was how well the software in this thing functions.

Since I come from that software engineering background, I really appreciate how intuitive and reliable this machine is to operate. In addition, this machine has a feature called “Tivo Picks” that I initially didn’t think I’d come to like or appreciate.

The software analyzes the types of programs you record and watch. It then records other shows that it guesses you might also like. When we run out of “our” list, we check the machines suggestions.

To our surprise, there have been several “suggested” shows that we turned into “favorites”. This seasons “Tivo picks” have some real potential keepers in ("Eureka": Area 51 in small town Americana) along with some real early losers ("Dead Like Me": Slacker H.S. grad gets hit by a space junk toilet seat to become a Grim Reaper).

Fortunately, the keepers can be rated “thumbs up” while the losers can be rated “thumbs down” to fine tune the Tivo box on future picks. It works really well for us.

Because we’ve been “tuning” the Tivo box for a couple of years, it no longer suggests any reality shows like "30-Days". It was only a fluke that I saw the promo ad: “An unemployed American ventures to India for 30 days to observe the effects of job outsourcing on the Indian culture”.

I guess expecting Tivo to scan online blogs and resumes might be a bit too "Orwellian"