BC - Tue, 10/6/09

Let me preface this by saying I only saw part of the show. We had a power outage/surge/something-or-other and I lost some of the show. My TV was off at the time, but suddenly a woman speaking Chinese started blaring out of the speakers that I have connected to the TV. Now THAT was weird. When it powered back up, my Tivo continued to record AMC, but since we have Soapnet here, I foolishly stopped the continued recording, planning to just wait for the Soapnet one. Except ... when I got up today (in the afternoon), I saw a page for the weekly emergency broadcast signal test which was from 2:54 am. The Comcast box got froze at that point, so I missed the repeat of Tuesday's episode _and_ today's ABC AMC _and_ a movie I recorded overnight. F**king cable box.

Wow, that overhead paging operator is a little excited. I'm pretty sure they train them to be a little more even-toned, not matter HOW dire the situation is. She sounded like the sky was about to fall as she urgently paged Angie. She also said over the speaker that it was an MVA. Don't they usually use CODES for things like that? Otherwise you have NON-medical people getting all stressed out (even more than they already ARE), pestering the staff and generally getting in the way.

Angie seems surprised that Frankie was in the car with Madison, who was just rolled in from the ambulance. That's kind of weird, considering they were talking mere SECONDS before about him driving Madison to Oakhaven; in fact, their conversation about FRANKIE DRIVING THE CAR was interrupted by the overhead page).

I lost whatever happened after the 30-minute mark on Tuesday (after Jake and Amanda discussed how David would eventually implode without any plotting and scheming on their side), then got a little bit back in a smaller segment. I saw Liza hand the baby over to Bailey to spend some time with him, saw Tad talk to Colby and recommend that she cut Liza some slack, saw Madison being wheeled out (with reassurances from her father -- you know THAT won't end well), and Frankie told Randi that Madison confessed to killing North, thereby letting Frankie off the hook.

Robin "What happened after that?" Coutellier

OT Comcast Rant:
Why do Comcast boxes (and it doesn't seem to matter which brand it is) have SO many problems? I very rarely have problems with my Tivo, and it actually RESPONDS quite quickly to its remote control, whereas the Comcast ones are always sluggish. Every few days you have to unplug it as the response to the remote gets more and more sluggish, sometimes to an extreme degree (30 seconds to a minute to respond to a SINGLE button press, assuming it responds at all). I can SEE the light on the box flash, indicating that it received a signal from the remote, so it's not like the signal completely missed the box and flew off in the direction of a coffee pot. Even on a good day you can never stop playback where you WANT it to stop except by sheer luck, and sometimes (quite often) you can't get it to stop at ALL when it's racing forward or backward. What pieces of crap! There's NO excuse for such universally crappy equipment/software for so many years. I had been without a cable box for about a year before I recently moved, but the ones I had prior to that (I went through several of them), although not DVRs, had similar problems as far as the remote response went. If my 4-yr-old Tivo can do these things just fine and in a peppy manner, why can't newer Comcast boxes do these very basic things?

The Comcast box I have now is a dual-tuner DVR, and the single-tuner Tivo gets its signal from that box. Sometimes I deal directly with the Comcast box if I want to record two programs at once or if I want to watch On-Demand, but trying to watch playback from the Comcast box is like pulling teeth -- it's not even worth it to TRY to go back a few seconds if you missed what someone said or to try to speed through commercials (which may be an underlying STRATEGY to try to force you to watch them). I've finally come to the conclusion that the best method of watching shows I record on the Comcast DVR (Pace brand, in this case) is to set up a manual recording via Tivo to record on Channel 1 for the specified amount of time, then go to the Comcast side, navigate to the recorded program or On-Demand choice, and then start playback of a program to watch later on the Tivo. It's annoying to do it that way, and I don't get the actual program title (other than the vague description of "On Demand" in my Tivo program list, but it's a much more pleasant experience to actually WATCH it that way.

My sister's Comcast box freezes quite often (sometimes DAILY), and if she unplugs it for more than about 5-10 seconds, it loses ALL her recorded programs. My Tivo has experienced NUMEROUS power outages, but I think I've only lost all my programs ONCE in 4 years, if that, and I think it was just a fluke, not a power outage.

F**king cable box.