TivoWith my birthday around the corner I’ve been scouting out potential gift ideas for those who are more inclined to purchase a gift for me than a simple money exchange. Some people feel that it’s impersonal to slip a few dollars into an envelope and others would rather take the “money route”, not knowing what to get the person. The fact is, there are some people that are hard to shop for and some, like me, are exceptionally easy.

Truth be told, my interests fall into three categories; books, games and movies. Games being the video game type and not necessarily the cardboard type and books generally having to deal with movies and fantasy peak my interest and fuel my imagination. My wife, however, feels that video games are a complete waste of time unless it’s SimCity, in which case she enjoys immensely — especially with the infinite Simoleon cheat.

For my pre-birthday this year, my wife and I took a trip to Staples and purchased a Linksys router and adapter. Afterwards we picked up a shiny new Tivo at $249 with a $100 rebate. Configuring the wireless network for our apartment was painless. Setting up the Tivo was an entirely different experience. You see, the Tivo, while touting its advanced digital video recording technology, needs a phone line to set up the channel lineup and other necessary items. The problem was that our apartment does not have a landline, therefore I hauled our Tivo to my inlaws, hijacked their phone and let it configure itself overnight (a total of 5-8 hours since it uses the internal 56k modem).

This morning I picked up the Tivo, brought it back to our apartment and hooked it up. The reason it needed “x” amount of hours was to upgrade the OS and add the channel lineup for the next two weeks. There is supposedly a hack where you can bypass the Guided Setup by phone and use your broadband network instead, but despite numeorus tries we couldn’t get it to work.

All said and done the unit itself works fine, perfect even. It’s a blast setting up shows to tape during the day when we’re at work and coming home to the shows we assigned. One of the cooler features of Tivo is the Season Pass, which allows you to configure Tivo to record the entire season of a specific show specifying whether you want reruns, first runs or both.

Aside from my vicious head cold, it’s been a great pre-Birthday for me.