I still *want* to love you, but you're losing me

Dear TiVo,

I read two articles recently that spurred me to write you this letter.  The first article described how at the end of July 2009 you had 3.05 million subscribers, but at the end of July 2010 you were down to 2.38 million.  Five years ago this would have surprised me, but not any more.

The second article was from your site, describing the spiffy new QWERTY TiVo remote with a sliding face and a full keyboard.  I was overjoyed by the news, as I’ve been waiting for a remote like this since I bought and activated my first TiVo back in 2002.  I read the article in great anticipation, wondering how pricey the remote would be.  Hm, $90.  Not unreachable, but seemingly a little steep, which would make it in keeping with everything else you sell.

But then I got to the last paragraph, where the last sentence read:

“The new remote will work with TiVo Premiere, Premiere XL, TiVo Series3, TiVo HD, and TiVo HD XL boxes.”

No Series 1?  No Series 2 or Dual-Tuner?  Leaving us faithful early adopters behind again, are we?

Typical.  This is typical of everything I have come to expect from you over the years.  I still love TiVo-the-technical-solution, but with TiVo-the-company I have gone from love to like to not caring to being annoyed and, finally, to loathing, where I am today.

I now own and use 5 (count ‘em) TiVos, but they are all Series 2.  My disillusionment began in earnest when you released the Series3 boxes, and included things like YouTube browsing that were not made available to Series2 owners.  Now, you had a story for why this was so, which was something about Flash, I think, but I didn’t (and still don’t) buy it.  If you had wanted to make it work, you could have.   But, you chose to have those features and functions be differentiators to try and get Series2 owners to upgrade.

So close, and yet so far away

And it’s continued to be that way over the years, up through the latest insult of not letting us have the new remote (pictured at left).  You continue to add new and improved features and functions, very few of which are made available to your existing base of owners, unless they have the latest and greatest.  Now, I understand this from a business perspective, as I work in technology, so I know that it’s hard to keep the installed base happy.  It’s very easy to add new features and functions to totally new and redesigned devices, and your bean-counters are happy to see the R&D and other expenses that go into anything that will grab new customers and dollars.

I can visualize the meetings where you discussed the strategy of what to do with the installed base.  Spending money on something that will make the installed base happier is not a strategy that reaps short-term benefits, so it’s difficult for people to get behind it and make those investments.  Conversely, it’s much easier to talk about investing in the new model with the new features that will open up new markets and bring in new customers and new revenues.  *Everybody* can get behind that, and nobody gets fired for trying to grow the business.

But people do get fired for spending money on things that are difficult to quantify, like the care and feeding of existing customers.  However, the sign of a truly successful company is that they do exactly that.  It’s like flossing your teeth.  If I don’t floss today, nothing bad really happens.  If I don’t floss this month, or even this year, there may be no noticeable negative impact from my perspective. 

But if I never floss?  Eventually I’ll start losing my teeth.  And teeth, like customers, are things that, once you’ve neglected them to the point that you lose them, you never get them back.  Well TiVo, you haven’t been flossing, and you have decayed my loyalty as a customer to the point where now I hope that some viable alternative presents itself, so that I can leave you behind.

The good news, for you, is that the technology of the TiVo is awesome.  Usability is great, and you have features and functions that far outstrip anything that the cable companies offer.  However, from my cable company I can get an HD DVR for $5/month with no other out-of-pocket expense.  With you I’d have to spend $300-$500 to get the new TiVo Premiere, and then cough up another $300 for lifetime service, or $11/month for the monthly services.  Your DVR is far better than the one my cable company offers, but the three year cost for a TiVo Premiere for me would be $800, while the three year cost for my cable company’s DVR would be $180.

Not only are you more than four times more expensive, but you only have a one-year warranty, so if my TiVo has a problem in year 2 or 3 it falls to me to fix it out of my own pocket.  My cable company will send me a replacement box at no cost if their DVR has problems.

So, with TiVo I get a slicker product but at over 4 times the cost, and I also have to assume the risk of repair costs after the first year.  You’re good, but you’re not that good.  So, for the first time in eight years I am open to an alternative.  I don’t think it’s out there, yet, but if I’m ready and willing to move away from TiVo that means there are others like me who are, too.

I do hope that you figure out how to survive, and how to offer your products at a far more reasonable cost.  I know that cable companies are licensing your software to put on their set-top boxes, and I can see this being a way for you to survive.  My hope is that you are able to maintain the full feature set when provided by a cable company, because I can see them wanting you to disable or degrade certain functions so that they maintain control of their user base.  Don’t do that, please?

And I think one thing that has become clear over time is that your subscription fees are poisoning your business model.  Either make me buy the device with a huge up-front cash outlay *or* charge me a monthly fee, but don’t do both.  For a $500 up-front purchase price you should be able to provide the programming information at no additional charge.  If you don’t want to do that, then let me get the box for $10-$15/month and no up-front fee, and back it with an ongoing warranty just like my cable company does.  I’d do that in a heartbeat – get a TiVo Premiere for nothing up front and $15/month?  Sweet.  How about doing that?

But, after 8 years I feel that I know you well enough to know that you won’t do either of those things, because it appears that your corporate culture is too hide-bound to consider those alternatives.  Somebody, somewhere has decided that a monthly subscription fee needs to apply, and the huge up-front purchase price needs to apply, and that’s that.  If you have to have a monthly fee, how about making it something reasonable, like $5/month/household, and it doesn’t matter how many TiVo’s I have?

I’m rooting for you, but only a little bit.  I used to care about you, but now I don’t, because you’ve spent 8 years not caring about me.  I wish you good luck, and I hope you figure out a way to survive.  But, if you don’t, I will no longer be among those who mourn your passing, because while you had great engineering, your business side sucks.  How about listening to your engineers, who I’m sure have been trying to tell your business folks all of this all along?

But, no, conventional wisdom says that engineers don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to business.  Er, except for Google, that is.  And Microsoft.  Oh, and HP, too. 

But, what do they know?

Sincerely,

EngineerBoy

Related posts:

1. Review of Amazon Unbox for TiVo
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3. EngineerBoy’s Review of the Litter-Robot

Dogs eat it, flies swarm to it

I thought I’d try to be a little more gentle on the environment and use an ‘organic’ fertilizer for our yard.  I found Scotts® Organic Choice® Lawn Food at the local Home Depot and decided to give it a try.  I just spread it this weekend so I can’t speak to its greening or healthifying effects on the lawn, but I can state, unequivocally, that my three dogs and every fly in the general area *love* it.

I first spread it on the front lawn, without any drama, and the only slight warning sign was the very…er…’organic’ smell of the stuff.  However, it smelled like it could be a rich source of nutrients, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Then I spread it in the back yard, where our dogs have access to the fenced yard.  I locked them in the house while I spread it, and as soon as I finished and let them back out all three of them started snuffling around the entire yard like prized truffle pigs.  Things took a turn for the worse when I noticed that all three of them were also licking the grass and ground and ingesting the fertilizer grains.

I also noticed that there were flies all over the yard, landing randomly all over the grass, apparently drawn in by the organic lawn food.  Note that I’m pretty meticulous about keeping our yard clean of doggie bombs, so the appearance of swarms of flies is not normal.  Also, the flies weren’t hanging around any dog piles, they were all over the yard.

I locked the dogs back in the house and figured I’d try watering the Scotts into the yard and see if that would help.  It didn’t, it only seemed to add an irresistable ‘gravy’ to the granules and made even more attractive to my dogs and the flies.

So, now, here I sit with my dogs locked in the house, waiting for the time when (I hope) the Scotts has lost its mojo enough that my dogs won’t continually graze on it.  The stuff claims to be safe for kids and pets, and there’s even a picture of a kid and a pet laying in a grassy yard on the label, but I bet this stuff isn’t designed to be a dietary supplement. 

I checked the Scotts site here, but they don’t have any helpful information, and as of the time of this posting the “View Label” button on that page returns:

“We apologize for the inconvenience, but this information is no longer current and accessible.”

Similarly, the ‘FAQ & Help’ tab says:

“Sorry, no F.A.Q. material for this product is available.  If you have product questions Scotts experts are available by email and phone in our Help Center.”

Which neither answers my questions nor is helpful.

So, if you’re like me and you’re exploring more natural ways to keep your lawn green, and you’re wondering about Scotts® Organic Choice® Lawn Food and your dogs, I can tell you that I won’t be using it again.  My dogs haven’t seemed to suffer in ill effects, but still, I don’t want them eating this stuff.  Also, the flies were just the icing on the cake and completed my disappointment in this product.  I mean, even if I didn’t have dogs, who wants to have a fly-infested green lawn?

Not me.

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Build It By Yourself, We Won't Help

We were doing some Christmas decorating on the outside of the house, and it turned out we needed a couple of things to finish off the process – like one last string of icicle lights, green extension cords, stakes to hold down a big snowman and nutcracker, etc, etc – typical Christmas stuff, in other words.  So we headed out to Lowe Depot, as we like to call it, as our town has a Lowes and a Home Depot across the street from each other, and we typically use them interchangeably and as alternates when we can’t find what we want at one or the other.

Today is Sunday, December 14, 2008 – Christmas is still eleven days away.  We had noticed that both of these stores had started putting out their Christmas merchandise before Halloween, if you can believe that.  Well, today, fully eleven days before Christmas, we were surprised to find – at both stores – that the Christmas merchandise was already being taken down and replaced with regular hardware and gardening stuff.  In both stores the “Christmas Section” was a pathetic little cluster of huddled, leftover crap.

Now, I’m a realist and I understand we were buying this last-minute stuff late in the season, but this wasn’t just slim pickings, this was the store actively taking down the Christmas stuff and getting it out of the way.  When you couple with with the pre-Halloween setup of the Christmas stuff, and we now have a “Christmas Season” that, at least from a retail perspective, runs from before Halloween up until mid-December, then gets shoved out of the way before it can become inconvenient, or something.

It was very dispiriting.  I mean, I know Christmas has a commercial aspect, but this is ridiculous.  Do they really need to be that coldly calculating as to start taking down the Christmas merchandise before Christmas?  I mean, shouldn’t they have healthy sales of the merchandise until at least New Years?  Don’t “The Holidays” equate to Christmas + New Years?  Are they trying to avoid having to sell the stuff at a discount after Christmas?

Sad.

Related posts:

1. A Christmas Story (****)
2. Burn Notice (***½)
3. My dogs eat Scotts® Organic Choice® Lawn Food

They say that money can’t buy happiness, and they’re right, but there is a certain amount of joy in finding a product or service that provides you with happiness and utility far beyond the purchase price.  These can be inexpensive doo-dads or expensive gew-gaws, the key to making our list is that the product give us smiles that far exceed the pain of parting with the precious pesos.

Here’s the list:

Oxo Good Grips Magnetic Clips (large and small):  We have dozens of these little guys all over our refrigerator, both the large and small versions.  The big ones work great as chip clips and for larger clipping jobs, and the small ones, which actually have stronger magnets, do great at holding pictures/papers/doodads to the fridge, and also for smaller clipping jobs.

Perfect Tear Chrome Paper Towel Holder:  In my lifetime I’ve bolted at least a dozen crappy paper towel dispensers to various walls and cabinets, and they all sucked.  Either the roll would fall out, or it would be so tight that it wouldn’t rotate causing the towels to tear, or it would be so loose that a quick rip would unspool paper towels like a magician pulling a string of handkerchiefs from his sleeve.  The Perfect Tear solves ALL of these problems, plus it’s cheap and it looks great.  The trick is that the rolling mechanism has a ratchet-like feel to it as you turn the roll, putting just enough pressure to be both a) loose enough to allow for easy dispensing and b) tight enough to allow towels to be torn off with a wrist-flick without the danger of a runaway unspooling disaster.  This is the only paper towel dispenser I will EVER buy.

Dogs: Our dogs, Weagle, Biscuit, and Ruckus (plus our cat, Bouncie).  The amount of joy we get from our pets far, far, FAR exceeds any expenses.

SimpleHuman Dish Rack:  Our little country cottage doesn’t have a dishwasher, so we do dishes the old fashioned way – in the sink, then drying on the rack before (theoretically) putting them away.  This little dish rack works EXACTLY like we need it to, and has taken years of use and abuse in stride.

2000 Ford Expedition:  We have a 2000 Ford Expedition Eddie Bauer 4WD with about 120,000 miles on it, and we LOVE it.  Yes, it’s getting a little squidgy around the edges, but it still runs like a top, it’s comfortable as hell, and it holds us, our family, our dogs, and all the crap we regularly haul in it, from groceries to electronics to furniture to gardening supplies to lumber.  Plus, Mynagirl LOVES the seat heaters and EngineerBoy LOVES the cold AC!

Emerilware 12″ Frying Pan:  We bought this frying pan as an add-on to the 10-piece set, which we also love, but we use the frying pan 4-7 times a week and it’s fantastic.  Solid design, nice heavy bottom with a copper disk, easy clean up, and cooks eggs without sticking (even though it’s not non-stick)!  The entire Emerilware line seems like a bargain, with the performance of the esoteric, high-end stuff, but a much lower price than All-Clad (which is who produces the Emerilware line).  And the stainless steel cleans up like a dream with Bar Keeper’s Friend and a scrubbie.

Deco Breeze Fans:  Our little cottage doesn’t have central air-conditioning, so we depend on window unit AC to get us through the hellish Texas summers.  One key to effective cooling is the use of fans to circulate the air through the house, but most fans are ugly and even the best-looking ones are mostly utilitarian in design, and certainly don’t complement one’s decor.  However, Deco Breeze makes interesting-looking fans in a variety of designs, and the two we have both work and look great.

DeWalt Cordless Drill:  If you do ANY kind of home repairs or construction, get one of these.  Seriously, don’t even think twice, go get a DeWalt’s cordless drill and you’ll NEVER regret it.  They are tough, reliable, well-designed, and just seem to last forever.  We have two of them (his and hers) so that we don’t have to share.  The cheaper ones don’t compare, and nobody makes one better.  Still don’t have one?  What are you waiting for?!?  Go!  NOW!!!!  Sheesh.

TiVo:  Our TiVo is kind of like our DeWalt – even though it’s not cheap, we never question the expense.  TiVo will change your relationship with television, in a good, positive way.  First of all, although it may not seem possible, TiVo frees you from your television.  Actually, it frees you from program schedules.  We don’t really know when the shows we watch come on, exactly.  We track the day that certain shows are on (e.g. House is on Tuesday), but mostly our TiVo spends its day quietly and reliably recording the shows that we might want to watch, so that if and when we get a few minutes to veg out, there’s (almost) always something on that we want to see.  Our TiVo’s also let us move shows from room to room to watch wherever we happen to be, and we can also copy “keepers” off the TiVo and onto one of our home servers (we’re computer geeks) to watch/rewatch/burn to DVD as we see fit.

Books:  Is every book we purchase a winner?  No, but every dollar we spend on books is well worth it.  There is always the chance for a clunker, but that risk pales in comparison with the ability of books to impart information, expand imagination, enlighten, explain, and entertain.

Doggie Dooley:  We have three dogs, each bigger than the next, and a relatively small back yard, so we started to get a problem with flies, which are attracted to…well…dog poop.  We feed our pups high-quality food, so they have a low poop-per-puppy-pound ratio, but the three of them still manage to mine the yard pretty thoroughly.  However, the Doggie Dooley has allowed us to develop a routine of going out back with them each day and moving all the poop-bombs to a contained area, where enzymes and bacteria break them down and leach them out like a septic system.  The Dooley comes with a primitive poop-rake, but we prefer this one.  We still get the occasional fly, but our backyard is usable again.

WordPress Blog Software:  That’s the software running this site right now.  It’s flexible, fun, fast, functional, and FREE.  There’s an entire subculture of people who develop and extend the WordPress environment, virtually all of it available at no charge.

Indoor/Outdoor Thermometer + Atomic Clock:  If you don’t have one you might think that they’re just for weather geeks, but they are infinitely useful.  We have three of them (bathroom, living room table, kitchen) and we find we refer to them multiple times a day.  It’s nice when getting ready in the morning to see the temp outside and also know the exact time.  Yes, one could flip over to the Weather channel or look it up on the web, but once you get used to getting accurate outside temp and time with just a glance you can’t go back to not knowing the accurate time and temp.

Tori Richards Cotton Lawn Shirts:  Tori Richards makes Hawaiian-esque shirts, and I particularly like the ones made of cotton lawn fabric.  It’s thin and breathable, but the shirts can go from the washer to the dryer to the hanger to the shoulders without any special care (no ironing, no dry cleaning, etc), they wear like iron, they hang like silk, and they look fantastic (if I do say so myself).

FARK.com:  FARK.com is a strange website that aggregates not-news stories, and endlessly mocks and derides…well…just about everyone and everything.  The specific focus of this paragraph, though, is Total Fark, which is the $5/month membership site, which provides access to even more distracting derangement.

Amazon Prime:  You may have noticed that a lot of the product links in this article go to Amazon.com.  FYI, I’m not a shill for Amazon in any way, however, as a former big-city-dweller who now lives in a small town I can tell you that our lifeline to good products is Amazon.  We buy a LOT of stuff from them, and to facilitate our consumerism we belong to Amazon Prime, for which you pay a yearly fee, but then all your Amazon purchases are shipped 2nd day air at no extra charge, and overnight shipping is a flat $3.99 per item, regardless of size and weight.  Amazon Prime is limited to items shipped and sold directly by Amazon, so partner products aren’t eligible.  For us out here in the sticks, with only a super Wal-Mart, it is a wonderful lifeline to wonderfully wide selection of actual quality products.

Godaddy.com:  Simply put, we use Godaddy for all our domain registration and hosting needs.  They aren’t perfect, but they provide a terrific value for the dollar and give us a one-stop-shop for all our domain/hosting needs.

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Open the pod bay door, Mittens

We are a pet-intensive household.  Currently we have three dogs and a cat, but we used to have two dogs and three cats.  Having three cats teaches you that maintaining a litter box is an endless, thankless, hopeless, gross, stinky, unhealthy, unending chore.  We used to use the LitterMaid, and went through three of them over the course of five years.  They worked…okay.  However, they had some significant engineering flaws, such as the fact that the rakes became caked with kitty poo, the receptacle filled up super quick when three cats were on the job, and they simply wore out after a year or so.

When we moved to our current house we decided to forego yet another LitterMaid and search for a newer, and hopefully better, solution.  The search led us to the Litter-Robot, pictured to the right.  It’s kind of space-age looking, and looks kind of big, and looks like it might freak out a cat or something, and maybe, just maybe, might refuse to open the pod bay doors.

The good news is that the Litter-Robot works, and it works extremely well.  It’s hard to describe the mechanics of it, but the large, round part on the top is simply sitting in place by virtue of gravity, it’s not attached or connected to the base in any way.  The orb has a couple of windows on the side (you can see one of them in the picture, it’s the black blotch on the side), and when in the normal position those windows are blocked by panels from the inside. 

The orb sits on the base, and the base beneath the orb is open to the drawer below.  Sensors in the unit determine when your cat has used the litter box, and seven minutes later little wheels (hidden from view underneath the orb) start turning and spin the orb counter-clockwise.  Inside the orb is a mesh grate and retaining pocket for the litter, and as the orb rotates the litter flows through the mesh grate and into the retaining pocket.  Anything a little bit bigger than a couple grains of litter can’t go through the mesh, so continue to roll along the inside of the orb as it rotates.

After the orb passes the rotation point where all the litter is contained in the pocket, the movement of the orb engages a lever that starts opening the panels that block the windows.  When the orb is fully rotated, the windows are completely unblocked allowing free access for any dropping droppings to fall into the drawer below.  After a short pause, the orb rotates back clockwise, the panels close the windows, and it eventually returns to the fully upright and locked position. 

Note that on this return turn, it over-rotates by about 15-20 degrees, then comes back to completely vertical.  This movement leaves the inside with perfectly level litter, but the first time it happens it doesn’t make sense and, if you’re like me, you might think the thing has slipped the chain and gone into rotational hell.  They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I guess that means a video must be worth a million, so here’s a video of what I just tried to describe:

It’s not nearly as noisy as the LitterMaids were, and there is zero, and I mean *zero*, smell of litterbox in our house.  With two cats we had to empty the drawer twice a week, with one cat we empty it once a week.  Standard garbage bags can be used as a liner for the drawer to make cleanup even easier.  And it only uses a tiny bit of litter each changing, because you only have to replace the litter that falls out clinging to the refuse.

Some caveats – the floor must be level, and it works best on a hard floor as opposed to carpeting.  Also, don’t overfill it with litter – the whole system works by sensing a cat’s weight stepping into and out of the litter box, and the whole unit rocks forward and back about a 1/2 inch during ingress/egress.  If there’s too much litter it can falsely trigger the sensors, and carpeting can dampen the rocking motion and make the unit not sense usage.

Also, the people at Litter-Robot are very nice and their support is very helpful.  When we first got ours I had a lot of trouble getting it working (due to unlevel floors and overfilling!), so I stuck it in the garage for a year.  When I pulled it back out I realized I had lost a part of it that I had loosened while tinkering, and the Litter-Robot folks were happy to replace it, free of charge, even!

Our cats took the the Litter-Robot within a couple of minutes, no hassle at all.  It takes up about as much floor space as a large litter box, but it’s about 2′ tall and requires the freedom to rotate, so you can’t smash it up against the wall or pull the drapes over it or anything.

The bottom line is that the Litter-Robot works great, it has a fabulous design, it’s easy to clean, our cats love it, there’s no smell, and it’s actually a conversation piece instead of being a sh*tbox.  What’s not to like!??

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3. Review of the Westinghouse 47″ LCD HDTV (TX-47F430S)

Just over a year ago we purchased a Westinghouse 47″ LCD HDTV (Model TX-47F430S) from Best Buy.  This model is priced at the cheaper end of the spectrum, but it seemed to fit our requirements (reasonably good picture, reasonably cheap, from a trustworthy brand name).

The bottom line is that we love the picture and the features, but some of the fit, finish, and quality are lacking.  We expected this because of the lower price, and are happy (so far) with the price-performance compromise.

The Good
First, the good things.  The picture quality is excellent and sharp, and the highest resolution is 1080p, which is the highest HDTV standard resolution.  I’ve heard rumors that Westinghouse has changed to a different LCD panel for this same model number for the new sets being produced, and that the new panel isn’t quite as bright and sharp, but don’t know that for certain.

The connections are also great.  There are four HDMI connectors for HD content.  There is a PC monitor port which allows you to drive it has a super-high-resolution PC/server monitor, and also takes the sound output from the PC as well (great for PC gaming).  It has composite and component/S-video inputs as well.  You can get more technical specifications here.

We have several things hooked up to our TV, as follows:

Regular definition cable TV via TiVo: We get regular cable TV programming through a cable box, which feeds our dual-tuner TiVo, which feeds into one of the component inputs of the TV.  Movies that are broadcast in widescreen can be expanded to fill the entire screen and look really good (but not as good as true HDTV, of course).

HDTV via DirectTV: We also have DirectTV in order to get the NFL and other (selected) sports in HD.  DirectTV only goes up to 1080i, which is interlaced and not quite 1080p, but is still super sharp looking.

Computer: We have a computer hooked up which we can use with a wireless keyboard/trackball, allowing us to display anything PC-based on our television in very sharp resolution.

Wii Console: The Wii console is connected via the component interface and looks good, but not great.  This is a function of the Wii, however, not the television, as the Wii doesn’t support any native high-resolution formats nor HDTV, so it looks a little pixellated when scaled up on our 47″ TV, but still fun and playable.

Overall, the good is really good on this television.  But unfortunately it’s not all good…

The Not-So-Good
There have also been some annoyances with this set, as follows:

• The Closed-Captioning simply does not work.  It gets a few of the words/text, but it’s very jumpy and misses random parts and just doesn’t work.  We rarely used captions, but sometimes it’s nice to have the news on with the sound down and the captions up, so that you can still read what’s going on without the noise intrustion, or when watching a quiet movie that you don’t want to blast the sound way up.  This is a nagging issue, but not bad enough for us to have tried returning the unit, and we didn’t discover until about 90 days in, meaning we couldn’t just go back to Best Buy and exchange it, we would have had to have done some kind of swap with Westinghouse, and would have almost certainly gotten a refurb unit to replace our brand-spanking-new one.
• The PC input doesn’t auto-center the input.  When we switch to view our PC, the video is about 25% of the way moved to the left, leaving a fat wide black bar on the right.  We can jump into the TV’s menu and hit “Auto Adjustment” under the PC options, and it quickly centers the picture properly.  However, we have to do this EVERY SINGLE TIME WE SWITCH TO THE PC INPUT, which gets very annoying.  Again, it’s annoying but fell into the category of “to be expected at this price” for us.  Also, the audio input from the PC has a background buzz if you turn the sound up.
• The remote control doesn’t work well from 10 feet away.  You have to be really close, like 7 feet, for it to work reliably.  This tends to defeat the purpose of a big television that you sit back from to enjoy the splendiforous big picture.  It’s even worse if you’re off to the side and not dead-on center when using the remote.  Again, something to be expected on a cheaper television, but annoying.
• On the regular TV component input, the televison occasionally doesn’t sense that there is a sound channel input, and so sets the status as “no input detected” (or something like that) and won’t play the sound.  We have to switch away from the TV input and then back to get it to recognize the input correctly.  Annoying.
• The audio is two-channel stereo only, so no 5-channel surround experience.

Overall the not-so-good parts are more annoyances than anything else, and each of them individually could be expected for the low price.  However, combined together they make us unsure if the annoyance was worth any cost savings.  However, all these annoyances could be moot because we are now having a REAL problem…

The BAD
Two weeks after our warranty expired (that’s right, two weeks), our television developed a bright green line of pixels down the left hand side, which shows on all inputs and even shows when the TV is powering up.  I have been on the phone with Westinghouse and they have confirmed that it’s a repair issue, but only after first telling me that it was “pixel memory” and making me turn the TV off and unplug it for 24 hours.  A bright green line is NOT pixel burn, but they wouldn’t proceed until I tried it.  Now I’m going to have to fight with them to see if I can get a waiver to get this repaired for goodwill or something, since the it’s out of warranty.  I don’t have high hopes.  I’ll post the results back here when all is said and done.

Related posts:

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2. Review of the NordicTrack CX 995 Elliptical
3. Review of Amazon Unbox for TiVo

We recently moved from a patio home in the big city (Houston) to a cottage in a small, country town (Brenham). In Houston we didn’t really have any outdoor living space as we shared a common courtyard with neighbors, but here in Brenham we purposely bought a house that could provide a nice outdoor lifestyle. We purchased in the fall of last year and since then we’ve made improvements to the backyard, such as putting up an 8′ privacy fence and driveway gate, giving us a private, shady retreat to enjoy.

However, this being the southern half of Texas, the coming of spring and summer meant that the mosquitos ended up taking over and driving us back inside most mornings and evenings. Also, since we have two permanent dogs, and one temp dog that we’re babysitting, our backyard has a certain amount of…how to say this delicately…um…organic….err…excretions? Natural…fertilizer? Canine compost? Okay, dog poop. And with dog poop come flies. We’re excrutiatingly uninterested in policing the poop, and we feed our dogs a very high grade of dog food, so the volume isn’t huge, particuarly for the size of our dogs (80lbs, 80lbs, and 25lbs). Nevertheless, the flies were also annoying and gross, but fortunately not the biting kind.

So we started on a project of figuring out the best way to take back control of our backyard. I won’t say that money was no object, but we weren’t going to penny-pinch and were willing to spend into the low four figures for a good solution. We first looked at the wide variety of mosquito traps out there, such as the Mosquito Magnet, SkeeterVac, Mega-Catch, etc. What we found was that while the underlying concept behind these devices appears to be sound (catching mosquitoes with CO2 and other lures), the implementations were horribly unreliable and the results were spotty.

These devices almost all work by luring the mosquitos in with some set of attractants, such as CO2, lurex, octenol, lights, and/or heat, then using a fan to suction the little buggers into a holding net where they remain stuck until they die. Also, it seems that most of the mosquitos in your yard actually live in your yard, meaning if you can trap and kill the ones in your yard, you break the cycle of population and then only have to deal with ones that stray in from the surrounding area.

But for every story of success, there were three stories of device failure, with most failures occurring at the start of the second season of use when trying to get the traps to start up again after having been stored away for weeks or months. I wasn’t able to find a single personal account of anyone using one of these devices for more than one season without having issues. Also, the company that originally introduced the product and concept, American Biophysics with their Mosquito Magnet, had gone bankrupt and their acquiring company seemed to be completely disinterested in any type of customer service. This reinforced my take that while mosquito traps could work in the short term, and the scientific concepts appeared sound, the engineering has fallen short. And at $300-$1,000 per device it was a little too expensive to roll the dice and deal with a string of lemons year after year. We’re keeping our eyes peeled and will probably buy one if/when somebody proves they can make one that both works and lasts.

After ruling out these devices, the field of possible solutions became much less clear. We knew that we didn’t want to fog our yard with insecticide or any other toxins. Bug zappers seemed particularly useless. We were so desperate we even considered the SkeeterBag, which appears to be one of the Seven Wonders of the Redneck World (and, truthfully? we’re still considering it because of its simple and logical design). We also didn’t want to have to slather anything onto ourselves, even if it were natural and safe, as having to get gooped/slimed up every time we wanted to enjoy the cool of the evening just seemed like a zen-kill.

Then we came across the CedarCide site. The site itself looks kind of rough around the edges (note to the folks from CedarCide if you read this – we do web site development and would be willing to barter web services for cedar oil goods!) which made us skeptical that they were not a “real” company. But the more we read the more sense their story seemed to make. The basic concept is that the majority of bugs out there are repelled by cedar, including mosquitos and flies. The folks at CedarCide extract the oil from red Texas cedars and package it in various liquid and solid forms for consumer use.

Also compelling was the long, long, list of testimonials on their website. Now, normally, I place no stock in testimonials for products that are placed on the site selling said products, as they are handpicked and in some cases seemingly falsified, as they quote company prose as they describe the wonderfulness of their purchase. But I don’t know how to describe it, these rang true and seemed “real”, for lack of a better word.

The bottom line was we figured that we could try their products for no great cost, cedar oil couldn’t really hurt anything, and if it worked then great, if not then lesson learned for small number of dollars (compared to propane-based mosquito traps). So we ordered the YardSafe concentrate ($49.95 for a gallon, including a hose-end sprayer attachment) and the Vet’s Choice ($99.95 for a quart, but dilutes quite a bit) bath/dip.

We first tried the YardSafe by spraying our whole backyard. I included the wooden fence and the sides of the house as well as the part of the driveway the extends to the back, and I also gave the lawn furniture a light misting. That night we went outside in the late evening and encountered zero mosquitos or bites, whereas previously we would have been chased in with dozens of bites within a few minutes. We still had a few flies hanging around, but greatly reduced from the previous evening. The beneficial effects lasted for several days, then it rained for a couple of days, and on the next non-rainy evening we went out and the flies were back in increased numbers (but still less than before the treatment) but still no mosquitos. I gave area a quick refresher spraying and that chased off all but a few flies.

We’ve been using the spray now for a couple of weeks and we have only a few occasional flies, and after about a week after spraying (or two or three days of heavy rain) the mosquitoes start to return (but only a few). Our general process is to give the backyard a good spraying every weekend after mowing, and then to do quick spot sprayings as needed if the rain interferes with effectiveness.

And that process has given us back our backyard!! It’s actually amazing how quickly and effectively it chases away the mosquitoes. In fact, even if at some future date we get a propane mosquito trap, we’ll probably still use the CedarCide because it is *immediately* effective and it doesn’t take weeks like the propane traps to have an impact.

We also dipped our dogs in the Pet’s Choice and they smelled really nice. Not sure if had any effect on fleas (not sure they had any), but it didn’t hurt them and they smelled really good. Not sure the Pet’s Choice is worth money, but we’ll use up this batch and see if it has a better cumulative benefit.

All in all, we’re going to be buying a lot more YardSafe over the years. If you have a backyard plagued with mosquitoes, flies, and other bothersome pests, you may want to give it a try!

Related posts:

1. My dogs eat Scotts® Organic Choice® Lawn Food
2. EngineerBoy’s Review of the Litter-Robot
3. Review of the NordicTrack CX 995 Elliptical

If you own a TiVo there is a new service available to you from an Amazon/TiVo partnership called Unbox. Also, if you don’t yet own a TiVo GO AND GET ONE RIGHT NOW!!!!! I’ll wait…

Amazon Unbox is a service that allows you to locate movies, TV shows, and other video content on Amazon, purchase or rent them, and have them download directly to your TiVo for your viewing convenience. No schlepping down to the video store, no waiting for DVDs to arrive in the mail. Just an hour or two of download time, and it’s ready to watch. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it?

It is, kind of. You see, the technology is pretty good, with only a few quibbles, as follows:

• You only get the main feature, none of the DVD extras (deleted scenes, commentary, etc)
• Video quality is not nearly the same as DVD, for example, there is noticable artifacting in dark scenes
• Sound quality is simply “stereo”, not 5.1 or any other home-theater-quality sound
• No hi-def content
• You have to wait for the entire movie to finish downloading before you can start watching it
• You can’t transfer downloaded content between your TiVos or move it to a PC running TiVo Desktop

Other than that, it works pretty good – you log into Unbox with your Amazon credentials, locate a movie you like, click to purchase, tell it which TiVo of yours to download to (if you have more than one), then wait the 30-120 minutes for it to download, depending on the length of the feature and your available download bandwidth.

The big disappointment, however, is the number of titles available for download. When I heard that I would be able to download movies from Amazon directly to my TiVo, I was ecstatic – FINALLY entertainment technology that worked how I wanted it to – I figured with Amazon’s huge selection of DVDs that I would have virtually anything I wanted at my fingertips. But it ain’t so, not by a long shot. As best as I can figure, Amazon carries about 190,000 DVD titles. And how many are available for download to your TiVo? About 3,300. That’s a little less that 2% of the available DVDs. And that makes Unbox extraordinarily frustrating.

Since the service went live a few weeks ago, I’ve looked for, conservatively 150 different titles on Unbox. How many have I found that were actually available? Four. Four measly titles that I’ve wanted to get from Unbox. For this article I combined the top movies from both IMDB and the AFI to get their combined Top 20 films of all time – in other words, the twenty greatest films that have ever been produced according to IMDB and the AFI. Check the table below – one, count ‘em, one of these films is available from Unbox for TiVo:

Now come on Amazon, what the hell? If this is the best you could do, you should have delayed the launch of this new product until you had some semblance of an actual library of available films. Now, I’ll give Unbox this, it has a whole lot of recently released Hollywood crap, that’s for sure. What do I mean by crap? Glad you asked:

• Ten Adam Sandler films
• Eight “National Lampoon” movies (not counting Animal House, which they have and which was great)
• Both “Jackass” movies
• Nine films with Rob Schneider
• Six films with Martin Lawrence
• Alien? Nope. Aliens? Nope. Alien Resurrection? Yup. Alien vs. Predator? Yup.
• Truman Show? Nope. Cable Guy? Yup.
• The Matrix
• Four Michael Bay films.
• Nine Ben Stiller movies.
• Original “Godzilla”? Nope. Crappy “Godzilla” remake? Yup.
• Original “Stepford Wives”? Nope. Crappy “Stepford Wives” remake? Yup.
• Original “Swept Away”? Nope. Crappy “Swept Away” remake? Yup.
• Original “Psycho”? Yup. Crappy “Psycho” remake? Nope. (so they get some things right, so what?)
• Original “Poseidon Adventure”? Nope. Crappy “Poseidon” remake? Yup.
• Original “Alfie”? Nope. Crappy “Alfie” remake? Yup.
• Original “Village of the Damned”? Nope. Crappy “Village of the Damned” remake? Yup.
• Original “Carnival of Souls”? Nope. Crappy “Carnival of Souls” remake? Yup.
• Original “Fun With Dick and Jane”? Nope. Crappy “Fun With Dick and Jane” remake? Yup.
• Original “Manchurian Candidate”? Nope. Crappy “Manchurian Candidate” remake? Yup.
• Original “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town”? Nope. Crappy “Mr. Deeds” remake? Yup.
• Original “When a Stranger Calls”? Nope. Crappy “When a Stranger Calls” remake? Yup.
• Original “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”? Nope. Crappy “Guess Who” remake? Yup.

Now, I’m a bidnessman, and I know that they’re going to focus on the films that they can a) get the rights to allow for digital downloading and b) generate the most revenues. That’s the way it works. However, today, Amazon Unbox is like the video rental counter inside your grocery store – stocked only with titles that appeal to the least-common-denominator. It appears that Amazon is expanding their available inventory by a couple of hundred titles per month, so progress is being made.

But, for now, for me, Unbox is really just a frustrating tease – a taste of the way things *should* work, but don’t yet. My fear is that Amazon is running into licensing issues with studios and other rights-holders who are either resisting making their products available for download or who are trying to be too greedy about their licensing terms. One hopes that video media rights holders will look at the example of iTunes and see that, yes, making content available digitally is a good thing to do and will both generate revenues for them while preserving their copyrights.

Related posts:

1. How I went from loving to loathing TiVo…
2. Review of the Westinghouse 47″ LCD HDTV (TX-47F430S)
3. EngineerBoy’s Review of the Litter-Robot

4/6/2006

Today is the first day of our quest to install HardiPlank siding on our house. We aren’t going to actually do the installation, but we will be identifying local contractors, putting out for bid, hiring someone, managing the process, and posting the progress here along the way. Currently I’m looking for recommendations for a local HardiPlank contractor in Houston, so if you’ve had some work done by somebody you’d like to recommend, please drop me a line at engineerboy@cleverdonkey.com!

Our current siding is in sad disrepair. There are several rotten places and several places with loose boards, and it just looks crappy in general. We’ve wavered at the cost of HardiPlank, but have determined that it’s a worthwhile investment. We don’t want to simply replace with wood siding, as we’d still have all the potential rot/termite problems of wood, and vinyl is just…well…vinyl. It seems like the high-end vinyl isn’t bad, but it’s still just…vinyl siding.

Today marks the first day of our quest because we have made all the necessary decisions and lined up the means to do so. We have been pondering it for quite some time, but today is the day we really start the process of getting new siding. Keep tuned here for updates!

6/12/2006

We’ve narrowed down the potential contractors and this week they’re coming out to measure and provide estimates. We’re looking at the following potential contractors:

• All-Tex Exteriors
• Allied Siding and Windows
• Houston Siding

These seem to be the most well-recommended in the Houston area. Several years ago we got a quote from All-Tex but at the time it was cost-prohibitive, we’re hoping for better pricing this time around!

6/20/2006

Well, we’ve made our choice, and it’s Allied Siding and Windows. The price was very competitive, and we also asked them to quote alternatives of vinyl or wood, both of which were cheaper but not by much. We also asked Allied to provide a quote for replacing all of our existing windows, which are older insulated glass models that have leaked and so have a smokey or mildewy appearance between the sheets of glass, some to the point where you can’t see through them.

The bottom line for the whole project came in within our budget, so we’re having Allied do everything, as follows:

• Remove and haul away the old siding and trim (which is wood and is basically disintegrating at this point)
• Replace any bad/rotten studs (their quote includes up to 32 feet of stud replacement)
• Wrap the house in Tyvek
• Install Hardiplank siding and trim
• Replace all the windows with new Simonton Reflections vinyl windows
• Paint the Hardiplank, trim, existing cedar scallops, and miscellaneous remaining wood with two coats of Sherwin-Williams Superpaint

6/23/2006

We signed the paperwork and put down a deposit. Allied did not specifically require a deposit but we put one down anyway for a variety of reasons, namely that we had it available and also that if a business has some of your money it’s easier to get their attention, if needed. We don’t anticipate any issues but we do want to be in the position of approaching any issues from the standpoint of having paid for some of the work already.

7/2/2006

We haven’t heard from Allied about start dates, but we’re still within the two week start window explained to us, and it’s been a bit rainy lately.

7/4/2006

Today Julio came out to do the final measuring (note that he’s out on the fourth of July). He let us know that Allied was running behind due to the weather but that they’d be starting this week.

7/5/2006

Today the distributor delivered the Hardplank and Harditrim, in the pouring rain. It’s now sitting in our driveway. We’re getting closer!

7/7/2006

Here we go! The crew is here today getting started, and siding is coming down, baby! They’re starting on the south wall (no windows) and after removing the wood siding found there was a layer of sheetrock beneath the siding. Very strange. Studs look good even though the siding was mostly rotten, good news.

7/9/2006

Progress continues, siding is up on the south wall, siding is down on the east wall and Tyvek is up, crew went home mid-day due to torrential rains (also it’s Sunday).

7/11/2006

Crew continues to make good progress, back wall and both side walls planked, from has been stripped and Tyvek’ed. Also time for some pictures:

The Before Picture (house on the right)

7/11/2006 View of Front

7/11/2006 Old Front vs New Side

Note that the front was completely Tyveked before they left for the day, but pulling into the driveway to a bald house front was shocking (and exciting)!

We’re also narrowing down the paint color choices, and right now we’re leaning towards a terra cotta color with white trim and a green door, as shown in this mock-up from the Sherwin-Williams site:

Possible House Colors

We’re not absolutely positive on the colors, but we’re pretty sure that’s the way we’re going to go.

7/15/2006

Well, no crew today. I’m not complaining about them taking the day off, but knowing they wouldn’t be here today would have been convenient as we made plans to stay home to let them in to the house for window replacement. However, they have really been working hard and we have no complaints about the progress or quality of the work. The last of the hardiplank and trim is up, the seams and nails have been caulked, and they finished up last night by power washing the unpainted outside of the house.

Here are some pictures of the current state:

Sided But Not Painted Front and Side

Windows Delivered and Also Unreplaced Window in Front

Now we’re waiting for the window replacement and the painting!

7/16/2006

No crew again today (Sunday). Again, not working Sunday is a-okay with me, but we’d sure appreciate a little proactive communication from the crew about when they’re going to be working, particularly now that we’re approaching the window replacement phase and we’ll need to do a lot of pet management, including our rottie cross that really doesn’t like all this hubbub going on around her domain.

7/17/2006

Contacted Allied today to get an update on when the crews would be back as we were planning an out of town trip. The person at Allied called back and said they’d be out tomorrow, but we asked that they not come back until Thursday, as we were going out of town and need to be here to unlock the gates, corral the dogs, etc. The person at Allied said she’d have the crew chief call me to coordinate. He did not call.

7/18/2006

Well, we didn’t hear back from Allied so went out of town. I hope they didn’t show up and find out they were unable to make progress.

7/19/2006

We returned from out of town last night (a day early) and this morning the crew showed up to paint, even though today is Wednesday and we had requested they not return until Thursday. Again, not a huge deal but we sure would love to see better communication about the crew schedule. That’s still our only real complaint, so overall we’re very happy with Allied.

And by the end of today the crew had the first coat of paint on the house. Here are a couple of pictures:

First Coat on Siding, Trim Not Yet Painted

So far we’re very happy with the way the paint looks, and can’t wait for the second coat and the trim work. After that comes the replacement of the windows, and that’ll be it.

The Last Few Miles

Well, the house is finally done. The windows have been replaced, the trim up and painted, and the punch list complete for the most part. There was the inevitable chasing things down with Allied to get things finished, but nothing too difficult or unexpected. Overall we are very satisfied with the job that they did and the price that we paid. I’ve gotten that question a lot – how much did it cost? Well, I don’t want to put Allied in a difficult position of having to match our price, but I also want to let you all know the rough cost of a job like this. I’ll put it this way, Allied did all of this:

• Remove and haul away the old siding and trim (which is wood and is basically disintegrating at this point)
• Replace any bad/rotten studs (their quote includes up to 32 feet of stud replacement)
• Wrap the house in Tyvek
• Install Hardiplank siding and trim
• Replace all the windows with new Simonton Reflections lowE, argon filled vinyl windows
• Paint the Hardiplank, trim, existing cedar scallops, and miscellaneous remaining wood with two coats of Sherwin-Williams Superpaint

For roughly $20,000. Our house is two stories and approximately 1900 square feet. And here’s the finished product:

All Finished!

Related posts:

1. The Best Petsitter in the Houston Heights (or all of Houston, for that matter!)
2. Vince Johnson, The Garage Door Doctor (Highly Recommend)
3. EngineerBoy’s Review of the Litter-Robot

Well, it all started with that Anna Nicole Smith ad. Once the media flap started, I had to hear what the big shakeup was about the food we feed our cats and dogs. If you’re interested, here’s the big site dedicated to educating you about all the alleged abuses by Iams: http://www.iamscruelty.com/. Iam’s counterpoint site with video’s of “inside the pet facility” is here: http://www.iamstruth.com. The videos are very heartwarming and well, from my perspective, a bit hard to believe. PETA is a histrionic organization to be sure, but I’m more likely to believe what they say they found — or at the least the general tone of it — than a “damage control” belly-scratching video that Iams put out after the fact.

But regardless, that whole dust-up gave us a reason to search out a new pet food. The dogs hated Iams, but I wanted to feed them something “healthy” so that’s all we gave them — I figured Iams must be healthy since it was the most expensive stuff you could buy at the grocery store. I meant, the dogs would snarf up cheap stuff from the store but that’s hardly the best stuff for them, right? So, once Iams was out of the picture we started on a quest for a healthy food that they’d really like. Engineerboy came across the following link that rated pet foods by their ingredients:

http://animalark.eapps.com/animal/PetFoods.nsf/$$PetFoodsByRating?OpenForm

There were several dog foods in the four-star range that we thought we might try and find, with a couple local retailers listed. We ended up settling on Canidae, which we can buy locally at the yup-scale “hardware store” Bering’s (really a fancy gifts / chocolate / gewgaw store, but it does have feed store – type stuff there). Canidae sure sounded good — the first five ingredients listed were Chicken Meal, Turkey Meal, Brown Rice, White Rice, and Lamb Meal. I mean, I’m a vegetarian, but I know that dogs evolved as carnivores and believe they should be fed meat. Those ingredients sure seemed pretty healthy for the hounds.

As a bonus, the dogs loved it as much (if not more) than any junk food cheap-o stuff from the grocery store, easily making its $45 price tag for a 40 lb bag worth it. Their coats look wonderful and shiny, and I think Biscuit the super-shedder might even be shedding a little less. One can hope. We also got their cat food, Felidae, and the cats seem to be snarfing that right up. Even our picky “can I please have wet food” tabby has calmed down a little and begged a bit less for the canned stuff, so that’s a miracle as far as I’m concerned.

As a side note, the PETA Iamscruelty.com site does not list Candidae Corporation responding to a survey saying that their organization doesn’t do animal testing, so I may give another of the four-star foods a try, since there is one listed (Azmira) that’s also on PETA’s list of pet foods that doesn’t do animal testing. I need to do some more research on that.

Related posts:

1. My dogs eat Scotts® Organic Choice® Lawn Food
2. Homemade Cat Food
3. Kefir, the wonder food