James Chamberlin

It’s now getting to the point where this is hardly worth mentioning. It was another quick trip this morning, but it was busy as hell. It’s Friday and from what I’ve seen, Fridays are by far their busiest day of the week.

Since everything seems to be healing well, I won’t be going in on Monday. Instead, it’ll be Tuesday. I was told early on that as I healed, I’d go in less frequently and it’s already happening. I wasn’t sure how long this process would take, but I’m quite pleased with it thus far.

I’m now able to sleep an entire night of sleep without having to wake up and adjust my position in bed. Sure, there is still some pain in my left hip, but it’s vastly improved since March 25th, which was my first visit.

I know I didn’t mention this last one, but I was busy. I went to the doctor again to get another adjustment and things seem to be progressing rather well. Although all of the pain isn’t gone, it hasn’t been as bad today. My left hip has been hurting more than my back, so I am pleased by that.

I’ll be going back Friday morning for another adjustment. I hope my body continues to heal at the pace it has been. I’m very pleased with it so far.

This time of year is never my favorite period, but I always manage to get through it. Going through receipts is never a fun thing to do, but thanks to TaxCut, this year’s taxes were as easy as ever to do.

I used to use Turbo Tax but they moved self-employed support to a higher-priced product, meaning the ‘premium’ version wouldn’t work, and I’d have to pay for a more expensive product. H&R Block’s TaxCut was just as easy to use as Turbo Tax, I’m happy to announce. I just hope they don’t change things like Turbo Tax did.

This visit over and done with quite fast compared to yesterday. I did get an adjustment which was painful, but wasn’t as bad as the first one.

I feel better today than I did yesterday. I’m trying to stay ahead of the bulk of the pain by icing it every two hours like the chiropractor suggested.

Still, sleeping is a bitch.

After dealing with pain in my lower back for what seems like forever, I made an appointment to see a chiropractor. Now I’ve never in my life ever been to see one of these types of doctors, but I’m glad I went, so far.

After filling out paperwork and waiting for the doctor, I got in to see him. I would say he’s 30 or 31 years old. It’s a family practice and it was his father who worked on my mom’s back about a decade ago when she had some problems.

Anyway, a few x-rays showed something I wasn’t expecting: my right leg is shorter than my left leg, throwing off my hips. My left hip is a few mm above my right, causing a nerve to be pinched, which has been giving me fits for years.

So he made an adjustment in the office and holy crap, did it hurt! I embarrassingly swore at the time, but, hey, what’s a guy supposed to do when he’s in pain? Cry?

After a little walking around, the pain began to subside, but the trip home was terribly uncomfortable.

I set up another appointment for tomorrow morning. I have no idea how many adjustments this is going to take, but I know that he’ll be fitting me for a shoe insert, to help balance out my legs.

I wish I could say I was pain free this afternoon, but that would be a big lie. It would have been nice to have this fixed in one visit, but the guy isn’t a miracle worker, but if he is able to help me get everything balanced out and pain free, he’ll deserve a medal or something. I’m not exactly looking forward to going tomorrow because I know it’s going to be another painful visit, but now that I’ve started getting treated, I’d hate to stop and start all over again. Hopefully this won’t take too long. The visits aren’t as expensive as a trip to the ER or anything, but they will add up since I don’t have health insurance.

So after back problems off and on for what seems to be ever, I’ve decided to give a chiropractor a call. I’ve got an appointment set up for tomorrow morning.

I know my weight is no doubt a problem, but it’s impossible to do much to correct that when you can’t really even walk without pain.

It’s been taken care of. I planned on waiting until Monday, but I decided to take care of it all today. The TiVo has been canceled and has been shipped back to Texas. I also canceled my HD service with Charter and got back my old SD cable box. The way I look at it, there’s no point in receiving HD if I can’t record and archive it. So piss on it. I’m back to square one now. :-/

Read my previous post if you haven’t read my update on the TiVo experience I’ve had so far.

So after watching and recording CSI and recording another program at the same time, TiVo’s video/audio froze up again and I’m now considering sending the unit back. I just noticed they have a 30 day money back guarantee which is very enticing considering I have only been using the machine for a week. I just with the TiVo were as good as it was supposed to be. Initial reaction to the TiVo was very positive, but now it’s clear that the thing has issues, whether it’s software of hardware. This is really frustrating the hell out of me to tell you the truth.

Well the TiVo honeymoon is over, I’m sorry to say. I’ve begun to run into issues with my TiVo. Actually, it’s just one issue: picture freezing. When watching a show, sometimes it’ll just freeze. The only way to fix it is to change the channel, but this isn’t ideal because if I’ve got both tuners recording, one of them is going to stop recording something.

This happened to me today in fact. A minute or so of the show seemed to stop recording, leaving a big black screen with no audio.

From what I’ve read, it seems to be a problem introduced with the v11 software and that was at the start of the year. We’re in March now and they still haven’t figured it out.

This seems to be a common occurence on both the official tivo forums and the huge forum at tivocommunity.com People have gotten refurb units which work fine for a while, but after the auto-updater runs in the middle of the night, they begin having problems.

I’m very frustrated right now. I thought that this TiVo would be the solution to my recording needs, but I’m having second thoughts now.

I’ve been waiting for a Tivo for years and I finally got one this past week, along with a subscription to Charter’s HD tier of TV programming. I got the programming before the Tivo got here, but I still managed to enjoy a few days of HD programming.

Anyway, when I got the Tivo, I was unaware of the need for CableCard Decoders. I figured I could just use the HD cable box from Charter, but no, of course not. So a call to Charter got a cable guy out to the house this Friday afternoon. He was supposed to show up sometime in the afternoon, but no specific window was given… just “the afternoon”. He showed up ten minutes after noon, which was fine and I had the area around the Tivo all cleaned up and ready to go.

There’s an instruction sheet for the installer, but my installer didn’t use it so he didn’t understand why the card didn’t work immediately. Silly guy. So he called Charter and got it working within a few minutes but Charter screwed up.

In order to activate the CableCard, they had to remove the cable box from the account. And in doing so, they somehow managed to remove the HD service too. Just as he was ready to have me sign off on the work, I decided to check the channels and noticed the problem. He called Charter and learned of their mistake (not the installer’s, from what I understand).

I’ve been on a recording tear for the weekend, recording two dozen or so shows, most of which are HD. And the quality is superb. I wasn’t sure what to expect of Charter’s HD service, but I’m very happy with the quality of the picture and sound. And there is absolutely no loss in quality from the Tivo.

Tivo has been around for quite a while and I’m sure it has improved quite a bit since it’s early days. I really only have one major complaint with the Tivo and that is with the hard drive. A 160GB drive is laughable for recording HD television and/or movies. And Tivo is only offering one other HD model, the XL.

The 160GB model costs $300, while the 1TB model costs $600. That’s a $300 price difference! Aside from the hard drive size, the only difference in the two models is that the XL has THX certification. I don’t know how much this costs Tivo, but $600 is ridiculous in my opinion.

One of the things I like about the Tivo website is that the TV listings are much more accurate than the listings I can get on TitanTV and most other TV listings sites. Some of those other sites list channels I don’t even get, even though I’ve correctly selected my zip code and cable provider.

Also, Tivo’s website allows you to schedule a program remotely. One glaring feature that they are missing is the ability to see your Tivo’s “To Do List”. This is simply a list of programs the Tivo is set to record. I would like to be able to see what my Tivo has scheduled to record while I’m not physically able to be there.

Still, why I really wanted the Tivo is the Tivo Desktop feature which allows someone to backup the Tivo recordings to your PC. I absolutely love this feature and is principally why I have no interest in using Charter’s DVR. My only complaint with the feature is that the transferring/encoding of the file is painfully slow. An hour-long show takes more than an hour to transfer. It’s the re/encoding of the file that slows it down. The Tivo isn’t just doing a simple transfer, which would go quite fast since it’s using Ethernet. I wish this process could go a little faster, but it’s a minor complaint considering how happy I am with my purchase.

To anyone considering getting a Tivo with CableCards, make sure you know which cards you are getting. The customer service rep said that they only had one type of card and was absolutely clueless as to whether it was an M-Card or an S-Card. The Tivo has two tuners, making it capable of recording two programs at the same time.

The M-Card has the ability to decode two streams, while the S-Card can only decode one stream. I ended up getting an M-Card, much to my surprise. If you’re getting S-Cards, order two. If you don’t know what you’re going to get, order two anyway, just to be sure.

Also, make sure all of your channels are working before you let the technician go. I was on the ball about this, but I know some may not even think of it.

Now I just have to wait for Food Network to arrive in HD here. I don’t get that one. 🙁 I’m not recording any Food Network shows until I get them in HD so that I can compare quality.

Eric, I hope I answered your questions about my experience. I know you have Charter too, and I would recommend the Tivo and CableCards.