Although nothing is perfect, I have fairly good dealings with Time Warner Cable these days. Oh, I end up paying them what seems like a lot of money each month, but I do get some good services. I have always been a Road Runner fan, and I very much like the Digital Phone. My digital TV pictures are excellent. And probably most of all, I love my DVR (Digital Video Recorder) that enables us to record and save programs, instant replay, etc.
But one thing that always bothered me is that TW never seems to be very effective at telling people about new updates or changes to their services. TV channel numbers change, or new channels are added, and you have to find out by looking. In this case, there were recently some fairly major changes to the programming in the DVR and I just discovered them.
Many of you might not know, but there is a small computer in your digital set top box or DVR. Since this computer is connected in effect to a network, it is possible to download fixes and updates into the computer from the cable. Downloading of programming (or sometimes the term used is microprogramming) is something that I did some pioneering work on in the 70's - we had the first piece of hardware that was able to download updated programming automatically that I know of.
So, I was attempting to find a particular program the other day and, low and behold, things had changed. Just to keep you all informed, I will let you in on the secret.
The main change is in the Program Guide. Once you bring up the Guide by pressing the Guide button on your remote, you can select by Time (the default), Theme, or Title. But the problem with searching by Title was that you could specify only the first letter of the title - after that you had to scroll to find your target, and that sometimes went through hundreds of possible titles. It was very slow and annoying.
On my DVR (not, unfortunately on my regular set top box), the Title entry has now changed to Search. When you select Search (by pressing the red C button) you can now select searching by Title or Keyword (press C again to switch) and then you can build your search letter by letter by selecting each letter in turn from the alphabet box on the left. This makes life a LOT easier for me.
Another feature that seems to have crept in is faster forward/rewind. In the old programming, you had three speeds and that was it - still slow if you want to quickly skip down the recorded program. But if you start forward/rewind and then press the right or left arrow buttons (around the blue Select button), you go back or forward by 15 minutes increments. Again, a vast improvement.
So, why doesn't TW let us in on this stuff?
While watching TV to research this column, I found out that the SciFi channel is not the only venue of poor science fiction made-for-TV movies. I stumbled into "Jules Verne's Mysterious Island" on (of all places) the Hallmark channel. I saw it stared Kyle MacLachlan and Patrick Stewart - both with considerable scifi credentials. But my hopes were dashed. I have read both "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" and its sequel "Mysterious Island" in their original form, but the second was always my favorite. Although it carried on the theme of the first, it was about engineers marooned on an island and how they invented ways to have electricity, telegraph, etc. I loved the book.
But the Hallmark presentation had nothing in common with the book, other than it had something to do with Captain Nemo and the Nautilus on an island. It did have the bad scifi requisite stupid giant lobster monsters - not to mention a pirate character that was actually and unintentionally a hilarious job of bad acting. After viewing for a while, I realized that this was obviously a made for children production. But why does a children's production have to be stupid and not faithful to the book. Sigh…
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)