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.