Saturday, September 30, 2006

TiVo coders discover the Meatgrid

I alluded briefly to a TiVo gripe in my previous post. Ok, here's the gist - my TiVo is basically a special purpose computer, connected to the internet. It updates itself every now and then, and sometimes new stuff shows up. For instance, now if you accidentally delete a show, you can go recover it if if hasn't been overwritten yet. Pretty spiffy. So clearly, they've got programmers who can tell my TiVo what to do. And yet... A couple weeks ago, I get a mail message more or less like this:
If you have a subscription to "CBS Evening News", you'll need to change it to "CBS Evening News with Katie Couric"
Ok, leaving aside the obvious commentary on why CBS is monkeying around with show names, why can't my little TiVo box check my subscriptions, and update them itself if appropriate (I don't subscribe to CBS Evening News, so I didn't even need to see this particular bit of tv mail). This is a classic case of coding the Meatgrid - instead of writing computer code to work with the box, they wrote a serious of paragraphs to tell the human operators (the Meatgrid) how to update the box. Sigh.

Who's that blogging over there?

If you're a die-hard "gotta read whicken's blog" fan (and really, if you got this far, what else would you be, seeing as there's been no activity for months), you might want to check out the new Hear Here blog. This is a group blog for MusicIP, which will contain posts from different employees in the company. I'll still use this blog for random stuff, like griping about my TiVo, but things more directly related to MusicIP will be over there. So go read Hear Here there, okay?