A Singer, A Song

It wasn’t my imagination after all.

I asked for this toy literally year after year when I was a kid. At first my family really did try to find the thing… or at least they told me they had. Then they started saying that I’d imagined it and that the game didn’t exist. Now, some 33 years later, vindication!

I know what I’m asking for this December 25.

“God never asks us to think less of ourselves;
He only asks that we think of ourselves less.”

   God, you’re my last chance of the day.
      I spend the night on my knees before you.
   Put me on your salvation agenda;
      take notes on the trouble I’m in.
   I’ve had my fill of trouble;
      I’m camped on the edge of hell.
   I’m written off as a lost cause,
      one more statistic, a hopeless case.
   Abandoned as already dead,
      one more body in a stack of corpses,
   And not so much as a gravestone—
      I’m a black hole in oblivion.
   You’ve dropped me into a bottomless pit,
      sunk me in a pitch-black abyss.
   I’m battered senseless by your rage,
      relentlessly pounded by your waves of anger.
   You turned my friends against me,
      made me horrible to them.
   I’m caught in a maze and can’t find my way out,
      blinded by tears of pain and frustration. 

   I call to you, God; all day I call.
      I wring my hands, I plead for help.
   Are the dead a live audience for your miracles?
      Do ghosts ever join the choirs that praise you?
   Does your love make any difference in a graveyard?
      Is your faithful presence noticed in the corridors of hell?
   Are your marvelous wonders ever seen in the dark,
      your righteous ways noticed in the Land of No Memory? 

    I’m standing my ground, God, shouting for help,
      at my prayers every morning, on my knees each daybreak.
   Why, God, do you turn a deaf ear?
      Why do you make yourself scarce?
   For as long as I remember I’ve been hurting;
      I’ve taken the worst you can hand out, and I’ve had it.
   Your wildfire anger has blazed through my life;
      I’m bleeding, black-and-blue.
   You’ve attacked me fiercely from every side,
      raining down blows till I’m nearly dead.
   You made lover and neighbor alike dump me;
      the only friend I have left is Darkness.

From Engrish.com:

Back in October of 2001 I purchased a Series 1 TiVo on a whim. Didn’t know much about it, but it sounded like a fun toy and so took the plunge. My wife and I were immediately fans! I hacked that first unit to upgrade its capacity, enable show transferring, install TivoWebPlus, etc. I went for the lifetime subscription. Life was good.

Some time a year or two after that I got sick and tired of dealing with Charter Communications and so jumped ship to DirecTV and an HDVR2. I was able to sell my hacked Series 1 on ebay for more than I’d paid for it, I hacked the new HDVR2, and enjoyed all the same great things that I’d enjoyed on the Series 1. On top of that, I was able to record two programs while watching a third. Life was better!

Then my HDVR2 went out — a cracked circuit board — and DirecTV would only supply me with an R10 replacement. In retrospect I should have repaired that unit, but hindsight, they say, is always 20/20. (The HDVR2 is still in my garage, by the way… anyone want to buy it?) When the R10 arrived and I only found out after the fact (yes, my fault) that the R10 wasn’t hackable, I resigned myself to the situation and lived life as one of the many red-headed stepchildren in the extended TiVo family. It eventually became all too obvious that the cool network-enabled features I’d loved with my HDVR2 were never going to materialize on the R10 because DirecTV was intentionally marginalizing its TiVo user base as they sought to place their own in-house DVR. Boo, hiss, DirecTV!

“Record-two-while-watching-a-third” was the thing that kept me immobilized for years. And as much as I had the bug to upgrade to HDTV, I knew it would be an exercise in futility with a standard-def (albeit digital satellite) signal. So I was stuck. As DirecTV’s “100 digital channels by the end of the year!” promise loomed, I felt like my hand was being forced. Should I capitulate to DirecTV’s strategies and go entirely with their service and equipment, or should I somehow find a way out from under DirecTV so that I could become a full-fledged TiVo user once again? All the networked features that I’d enjoyed years ago were, in some form or other, pretty much all available as supported features in the newer TiVos. But there was that blasted record-two-while-watching-one conundrum….

Then [cue ethereal music!] the heavens parted and the angel hosts delivered the TiVo HD to earth. It took me completely by surprise because I’d been out of the TiVo loop for so long. (What good would it do for me to try to keep up with the changes introduced by TiVo any longer? I was a disenfranchised R10 user. What point was there in reading about all the cool things that other users could do? I mean, my R10 unit was stable and did what it was supposed to do, but it was a dead-end street.) So when I heard that TiVo had come out with the very thing that I thought I’d never see — a two-tuner, HD-capable unit that was in my price range — I jumped on it with the enthusiastic desperation of a drowning man! I went down to the local Buy More (for you Chuck fans out there) and, using the $250 gift cards I’d gotten as rewards from my credit card accounts, walked out the door with a new Tivo HD that I effectively paid $70 for (I felt like I was shoplifting!). I brought that little puppy home, browsed to TiVo’s website, and never even blinked when I forked over the three-year prepaid subscription fee to TiVo, an amount that a lot of people were saying was way too much. I didn’t exactly giggle while doing it, mind you, but it was a price I was more than willing to pay. Then I made my way over to weaknees.com and purchased a 750gb drive to upgrade my new unit with. Set up the appointment with Charter (the only part of my happy little story that leaves me with regret), and in short order I was enjoying digital HD goodness in my newly-equipped home theater. When I saw the opening TiVo video on my 40″ Samsung HDTV for the first time, I think the grin must have just about split my face in two.

And so now I’m “home” again, and in the very month of my 6-year anniversary with TiVo. I’m no longer one of the poor, ill-conceived, red-headed stepchildren sired by a soured DirecTV/TiVo union. It took a long time for the planets to align, but align they finally have.

I’m glad to be back. Life is great!