Falling Out of Love After 10 Good Years

It’s never a waterfall, with a steep, sheer drop off, the kind when you get to hear a rumbling sound off in the distance, long before the current speeds up and you approach the precipice, but rather a lazy drift, down calm waters, where one day, you look around and you don’t like where you are anymore.

Well, that day is upon us and we have decided to sever ties. All of them. That’s right, ten years of comfort and familiarity, made unworkable in the space of thirty days, with differences that took on an irreconcilable shape. It’s over and there’s no going back. We have officially fired Dish Network and Tivo! We’re done, through, finished and kaput.

Ahh, how I remember the early days, when this combination first befuddled and perplexed my lovely young bride- “Why on earth would I want to watch more TV?” she queried. Dish Network carries O Globo, from Rio de Janiero and Tivo allowed for recording around the time-is-fluid Brazilian programming guide (the programs never lined up with the guide). We soon actually watched less TV and began our journey down the lazy river.

Fast forward to today and the proverbial back breaking straw was HD. Tivo and Dish are having an HD urinating contest- the Tivo HD recorder does not work with Dish and the Dish version of Tivo is horrific and unusable (our friends have it and would like to throw it out the window). So what to do? Fire them both. It’s really quite easy.

Get an over the air HD antenna and supplement with Netflix DVD+Streaming, Hulu and a library card. Windows Media Center has it’s own version of Tivo and with a little plugin, *automatically* skips the commercials- sweet- can’t wait to set it up. We don’t watch much TV, but after the little Mongrels go to bed, there’s an hour or so we like to switch gears and wind down. The funny part is, now that we have a gazillion more choices, it’s actually harder to find something to watch than with Tivo, where there’s just a handful of recorded programs to choose from.