Bhagwan @ Large

Enter the land of Sadness

Tivo has died.

Not cable, not cable service or the tuner card tivo uses to speak to them, but Tivo itself. Less than 24 hours after I removed the lesser of two boxes from the network, the greater of went kaput. Receives a signal, but refuses to recognize it. Still talks to the internet, still talks to all my computers, just not the cable company.

This makes me sad. Very sad.

Three hours of life support between me, the cable guy, the cable guy’s tech girl, and then eventually the Tivo guy can not restore the hearing and sight of my 27 month old box, 15 months out of warranty.

A replacement is available to me for the “bargain” price of $149, through tivo. this will come to me some ten days after I Ship my wounded soldier back to them. Alternately, I can consent to have a $300 hold placed on my credit card, have a new box shipped out immediately, then have all but $149 refunded to me upon receipt.

I paid $200 for the box in 2008. There is a math exercise here for those what know me. It goes something like this. Current value of a box that will record, but not receive channels is almost $0. I say almost, because it costs $13 out the door for the service I’m not receiving, and we derive benefit from the functions that still operate (amazon.com and netflix access). negative dollars plus perceived value is greater than 0. A quick replacement is $149, but Comcast had one at my house, for free, and hooked up inside 3 minutes.

Free is better than $149, but not better enough.

I’m currently scouring the intarwebs for any price less than 150, or greater than with better options. mind you, it could most likely be repaired, but any research down those lines must also come up sorter than $149.

I have 90 days to make up my mind. Damnit.

UPDATE: Have just this minute discovered that despite my strenuous objections, and contrary to their (Tivo’s) stated promises, I have already been charged for a replacement Tivo unit. apparently I no longer have an opinion on the subject that is not SUCK.

Current Plan end date = 09/20/2010. 7 X $13 (+7x $4 for the cable card from Comcast) = $119. 7 x $5 (the cost of the Comcast unit which will leave my house at any time) is $35. Added together they do not equal the money I’ve just been charged to do nothing.

Rage…building…

Monday, Monkey Monday

Perhaps not as much monkey as we were led to beleive. So much the better.

Today is the first day in a very long time that I actually have something to do that is not sit/lie on the couch watching television before playing video games. Correspondingly, here I an awake at 3 AM, and then writing on this newly redesigned and resurrected web page.

On my couch, of course. iPod ownership continues to pay fantastic dividends.

I am this close to being tired enough to sleep. Then my stomach started growling a fair pace, which actually bodes well for the rest of the day. If I can maintain that “lean edge” throughout the rest of the day, that old creative fervor may kick in.

It was going in spades yesterday, as I migrated the main site over to a new, more 21st century format. Oddly enough, it’s very much like what I wanted to do back in 2002 when I first started working on bhagwanx.com. Just better, and not designed by me.

I do take no small amount of pride in saying that my original ’02 pages still hold up well. Almost all of the 04/05 non-blog content will need editing and revision, but the foundation on which my online empire is made is still strong.

So much so that those pages and their solid internal structure are proving remarkably stubborn to update to the spiffy new, looser and enhanced format. I may just cobble together a new style sheet for the legacy stuff with a nav bar similar to the site’s theme, and be done with it.

But that’s a project for much later. Before the digression into me, I was going to write about my characters, and their inability to let me be. Thinking about the new novel and the transitons taking place in the next 5k words or so is not very sleep friendly.

I blame my success for my failure. During November’s writing spree, I was writing sequentially through some pretty tight action when I realized that something was about to happen to one of the cast.

Something important. Something so big, in fact, that it ties together all the other stories into one blanketing whole. A completely unexpected plot element which not only gives me a good hook into the next book (this one is set in a science fiction universe in which I have written another treatment), but redefines and enhances all I’ve written in this one.

So I had to jump ahead. I needed to write the revelation, and in doing so, lost my focus on the action. Now knowing in more concrete terms–rather than my nebulous story point outline–where things are heading, I found it difficult to fill in the lines.

So much so that I in fact wrote the first chapters of an entirely different universe and book instead.

Four times. Each time I did so, the characters told me more and more about themselves, until I was left with something very much like my original story nugget, but far more compelling and publishable. Taking ten days off from one book to write another does not help the first one along.

Especially when the story for that one has been percolating since the final edit of the book currently out for consideration. The very same story that kept me from substantive progress on the sequel/second book/ continuation of that soon to be rejected masterpiece this last summer.

I managed to come back to it while traveling in December, but it’s slow going at present. And the reason is very apparent to me.

Shiny things are shiny. Like rice in a gourd, they can trap a poor monkey writer unwilling to let the grains out of his grasp.

Time to shake things up a little. Perhaps the morsels will fall free from the wrist-sized hole, once my authorial fist no longer blocks it.

Plus, it’s 5 AM. Time for bed.