I discovered this feature today on Google Maps when I didn't like the directions that were given to me. This is just pure awesome. It's some pretty slick pathing logic.
"The fact that a segment of the world worships an inferior product in the Premiership is their business..."
"In England, our league is considered second class, but I honestly believe if you took a helicopter and grabbed a bunch of MLS players and took them to the perceived best league in the world they wouldn't miss a beat and the fans wouldn't notice any drop in quality."
- Alexis Lalas - GM of Los Angeles Galaxy and former US National defender
I should find the quotes from a recent Clint Dempsey interview discussing the raising of the bar in what he had to achieve on his move to the English Premier League. Oh Alexi, you used to be so wild and fun crazy. Now you are straight up crazy.
I used to think, back before I was a father, that the generation of children being raised now are the most spoiled generation. I called then the "on demand generation". Everything they could want or need is just a button press or click away. When I was growing up, VHS was making its way into the marketplace. Before then, we were lucky if a network picked up a movie so we could possibly see Star Wars for the third time in 5 years. If you wanted to watch a cartoon, you had to get up before Donahue came on, fight with your older sister for the right to watch Scooby-Doo instead of General Hospital, or wait until Saturday morning. We didn't have Cartoon Network, we had Nickelodeon (those of us fortunate to have cable) and that wasn't all cartoons. Enter "God's machine": TiVo or more generally DVRs.
TiVo allows us to record shows without having to worry about clunky recordable media. We can tell TiVo to record for us an entire season of a show. We can have TiVo record what we think we will like. We can do the impossible with TiVo by pausing "live" TV and rewinding back. The TiVo gives us the ability to fast forward past annoying commercials. Most importantly, TiVo frees its users from the shackles of television schedules and watch the shows they want to watch when they want, at the pace that they want.
Last Sunday morning, the wife woke me up telling me that the TiVo was not working. The TV screen displayed the "Powering up..." message. "It's been like that for 10 minutes", the wife told me. I gave it 5 more minutes and no change. Still in a daze from getting dragged out of bed, I tried the first step of troubleshooting a electronics problem: hard reboot. After I unplugged and replugged in the TiVo, the message was there and it stayed unchanging. Now, it was time for the Internet to save the day. Some research on the TiVo community forums lead me down the path that the TiVo's hard drive was corrupted. "Well, it's hosed and there is nothing we can really do about it", I told the wife. I unplugged the TiVo and handed our fate back to the hands of the network.
During this whole process of troubleshooting, the wee one had been patiently waiting to watch one of her favorite cartoon shows that we had recorded on the TiVo. We told her that we couldn't watch that one episode but that something else was on PBS. She was fine with it and started watching the show. "I wanna see it from the beginning", she had asked. "Honey, we can't. The TiVo let us do that", we responded in the most soothing voice possible. "Why?", she inquired. We had no answer, but we told her that the TiVo was broken and there was nothing we could do about rewinding TV anymore. Later, she had to go to the restroom and stated "Pause it please, I have to go to the bathroom". "We can't pause it. You are watching live TV and we can't pause it". Luckily she accepted this quickly and once her show was done, she turned off the TV and read her library books.
I gave the wife an ultimatum that she needed to figure out what were gonna do: buy a new TiVo or subscribe to the Comcast DVR. This was a big decision because up until then, we were given as a gift this TiVo as well as a lifetime subscription. The thought of having to pay for the service irked the wife so I left the decision up to her. By the end of the day, we still hadn't made a decision.
That night after the wee one was down for the night, the wife and I turned on the TV and entered a brand new world. What are we going to watch? How do we find what is on now? The wife changed to channel to the USA network to find Law & Order: SVU reruns airing. "Thank goodness for SVU", she responded. Our mannerisms while watching changed with the loss of the TiVo. Getting up during a show and making a snack was something we would do while watching a show with TiVo because if something interesting happened, we could always rewind. One time, the wife got up to get herself a snack and I forgot to tell her the show came back on. Something that we have not had to do for over 2 years. The fact that my wife was watching commercials humored me because she is the type of TiVo watcher that will find something else to do, if watching live TV, just so she has enough buffer space to skip all the commercials.
The solution to our TiVo problem came the following Monday, when I messaged a couple of former co-workers that the TiVo had died. Kelev stated that someone else from our group had their hard drive fail and had success in repairing it with a upgrade kit from WeaKnees. I found out the specific item he ordered, and ordered one myself considering getting the overnight option and choosing the 3 day service instead.
The day the hard drive arrived, I installed it immediately and the repair was a success. The new hard drive also doubled our previous capacity which was a nice surprise. So the absence of the TiVo changed my mind about the "on demand" generation. The wee one handled the loss of "power" better than the wife and myself. Perhaps its not a generation that has been corrupted by having access to whatever they want instantly, but us as a culture.
omg, maybe we will get Safari to support Vox finally.
Construct a big water slide.
These two songs are cemented in my mind right now. I actually picked up the Silversun Pickup album and only bought the "Young Ones" single. Oh fun summer music. Oh yeah, female bassists are just hawt by default.
