TiVo love

After several years of valiant service, the hard drive on our Tivo finally crapped out last week, after several weeks of funkiness. I took the main drive out (I added a 2nd drive soon after purchasing it), ran a diagnostic, and confirmed that there were several disk errors. Bummer. Several days later, a nice new 500Gb drive (up from our current 160Gb) showed up, and I proceeded to download the software needed to rip the data from the old drives and onto the new one. I kicked the process off, and it failed immediately, reporting disk errors. No duh. So I took the next step, and did a low-level copy of the data from the main disk to another. This succeeded, only losing about 1700kb due to errors. Unfortunately, some of those k’s must have been important k’s, because the copy could not be backed up, nor would it boot up in the Tivo unit. After several days of trying every last thing I could think of, I finally gave up, ordered Instantcake, and configured the 500Gb drive with a fresh clean image. So now we have Tivo again, much more space, but no old recordings. We’ll live. The only thing I have left to say at this point is how, and why, do you people out there without Tivo do it? Watching regular TV for 2 weeks was like torture! There was nothing on, I couldn’t rewind to catch stuff I missed, and I didn’t know when anything was on. It was horrible. Who wants to flip around the dial and have to settle on some garbage you couldn’t care less about? Ridiculous. I love you, me Tivo. 

TV on Comics

So it appears the new trend is continuing cancelled TV shows in comic form... Cool!
 
Last season, two of the shows my wife and I watch were cancelled: Jericho, which I was lukewarm on, and Veronica Mars, which I loved.

Both were cancelled, but recently one was renewed due to fan support, and the other seems to be headed to the graphic arts medium.

I'm glad both have been given a second change, but unfortunately the one that is best suited to comics is going to be returning to TV, and the one best suited for TV is headed to comics. Bummer.

Jericho, while an interesting story, moved too slow for TV, and could have used better writers. It's post-apocalyptic story would have been perfect for a long, on-going comic, where one good writer could have explored the new world at a nice pace, for an indefinite amount of time; kind of like Walking Dead is doing.  From the start I thought it would have made a better comic than TV show.

One of the strengths of Veronica Mars, on the other hand, was the great cast. The stories were good, but the actors really made the series a big winner.

But no, now we have each playing to their weaker elements, rather than two home runs (OK, Veronica Mars wasn't a ratings home run, but it was a fun show) we have two doubles that might get stretched into triples. (OK, I don't really care about baseball, so there was probably a better analogy there.)

Oh well. I'm still glad both are continuing in some form, and I can't wait to read the Veronica Mars series; it might even force my wife to read a comic!

Da Vinci's Inquest

Good news, a new (US) release of Season 1 of my favorite TV show, Da Vinci's Inquest has been announced! Amazon has the pre-order up here. Even though I already have the Canadian release of Season 1, this new version is important for two reasons:

1) The possibility of extras. The Canadian release is as barebones as it gets, so the possibility of anything additional is exciting; doubtful, but exciting. My guess is that it will be a straight port.

2) The prospect of the eventual release of Seasons 2-7. It's a shame that a show this good hasn't had a proper full release yet.

If you haven't seen the show yet, get on that Tivo. The show is about the Coroner's office in Vancouver, BC, and the associated police and homicide investigations. Kind of the grandfather of the CSI ilk, but better.