The bad thing about living in Silicon Valley was there were very few lightning storms and even fewer thunderstorms. In the almost four years I lived out there, I think I heard thunder once and saw lightning a small handful of times. Thanks to my friend Chris (who called me in the middle of the night to let me know there was cool lightning), I was able to capture one of the few times I saw lightning over Milpitas.

Now that I’m back on the east coast, it’s great! So far this summer we’ve had at least ten good thunderstorms, each with spectacular lightning and some loud thunder. Woohoo, me love a good thunderstorm. Last night was no exception. The lightning was amazing. For a good solid two hours there was more lightning than darkness. Streaks and bolts jumping across the sky, ground contact, scattering flashes… good stuff.

One unreachable goal I have is to create a nice glass dome / observatory on the top of my house, popping out of the attic so I can hop up there and watch lightning. Some day…

TiVo is giving away their 40 hour units for free when either a 12-month or lifetime subscription is purchased. When you activate your TiVo, be sure to tell them I referred you! Just enter my email address: pjhansen -at- mudslide -dot- net when prompted during service activation. Yes, it’s that simple to give me some referral points.

Ok, so my free TiVo arrived at my doorstep via UPS this morning. I am still miffed at the fact that an analog telephone line is required in order to set up a TiVo initially. There are many posts online that claim there is a way to perform the initial guided setup over a broadband connection – but this does not seem to be the case. Here’s the detail of my adventures in TiVo-land.

I unpacked the boxes and connected up all the video cables. I then connected my USB Ethernet adapter to the back of the TiVo and plugged it in to my home network. Finally, I turned on my TV and connected power to my TiVo. Up popped Tivo’s Guided Setup. Cool.

Here are some things I’ve run into while setting up my new TiVo.

ERROR: Failed While Negotiating
During the initial guided setup, I encountered a “failed while negotiating” error during the initial phone call to the TiVo service. After some troubleshooting, I found this to be caused by the fact I had my network connected to the TiVo during the initial guided setup. Simply unplugging the Cat 5 network cable fixed the problem.

Test call failed.
Even if I make a minor change (like adding a dialing prefix) to my phone setup options, the TiVo forces a test call. There appears to be no way around this, because backing up takes you to the phone options screen with no way to proceed except by making a successful test call. If the test call fails (like when you’ve already put the long phone cord away), you’re out of luck.

Indexing… 99%
After the second phone call to the TiVo service, my TiVo began to index all the listings and content it downloaded. This was progressing nicely until it got to 99%. At this point, it just sat there for about 15-20 minutes. This was frustrating because I had the TiVo set up in a temporary location while I set it up.

That annoying TiVo light
The newer Series 2 TiVo boxes have a very annoying white light on the front panel, that makes the TiVo logo glow. There is an option to turn this off, however when the TiVo connects to the TiVo service or restarts, this light comes on. I woke up in the middle of the night to find the whole room lit up by the darn TiVo light. I wish the option to turn it off really meant it would stay off. The default should be off, so when it reboots it doesn’t come back on unexpectedly.

All in all I’m happy with my TiVo. This is my second unit, so now I can transfer shows between them. And of course, the home media option (now free) allows me to play all my MP3s and browse photos from my TV. Me like.

Well, not really. There is never enough time to get things done. I’m the type of person who finds it difficult to go to bed at night before projects I’m working on are complete. We’ll come back to this.

Hello. I get bored really easily. I need to be doing 15 things at once, otherwise I get sick of doing the same thing and become unproductive. Ok, basically that’s just an escuse for how easily I get distracted. I’ll start writing an email, get halfway through it and log in to my Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball league to see how I’m doing (I’m 1.5 games out of first, btw). While typing up this little post, I’ve sent IM’s to people, sent a few emails, and checked out weather and headlines. If I don’t keep track of what I need to be working on, I’ll reach the end of the day with 10 new projects, in addition to the ones I should have been working on.

Ok, back to the original point. So much to do, so little time. I keep starting a bunch of projects and want to get them all done, but between working, eating, and sleeping… I don’t have any time! Aarrrggghhhh.

Damnit. I’m bored.

First comes the house. Then the engagement ring. Now it’s time for our own domain name. Yes, a domain name. Leanne and I have been engaged just over a week and I was thinking… we should get our own domain name. My next thought was, why stop there? So I went out and purchased leanneandcraig.com and craigandleanne.com. I was good and stopped there.

Of course, that is the ultimate in geekdom but it allows us to keep our friends and family up to date on what’s going on with us, the wedding, the cats, etc.

Now for the big secret. I purchased these back in January and didn’t get around to setting up the site until today. Don’t tell anyone, but it’s really June 6th. We’re here putting up the announcement for the party and I didn’t feel right leaving the rest of the site naked, so I back-posted this here entry.