A recent issue of Business 2.0 magazine has a feature with a number of top executives and business world celebrities (Balmer, Zander, Cuban, etc) providing advice and insight. Most of them are the typical “power of positive thinking” type of thing, but a couple of them were really pretty good:

Never write when you can talk. Never talk when you can nod. And never put anything in an e-mail. — Eliot Spitzer (NY Attorney General)

I really like this one because all subtlety is lost in email or IM. It’s so easy to fire back a quick response without reading it from the recipient’s perspective… and without the benefit of tone-of-voice or facial expressions, statements that were meant to sound neutral can seem overly direct or even derisive (I think this is especially true for tech professionals, many of whom are either very direct to begin with or not always strong on social subtlety).

Sometimes, you just have to pick up a phone or walk down the hall to make your point — in addition to making sure that the message is received the way it’s intended, it’s also often faster. For all the convenience of email and IM, the lack of subtlety and clarity often means it takes three and four replies to get a point across. So what might be a five minute conversation in person takes an afternoon to resolve via back-and-forth messages.

When you get out of bed in the morning and think about what you want to do that day, ask yourself whether you’d like others to read about it on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. — Warren Buffet

This one struck me because it’s so easy to go through the day bouncing from one task to the next without thinking about the big picture or how the outcome of those tasks is received. If you’re planning your day with accountability to a larger audience in mind, you’re more likely to focus on the right thing instead of just the next thing in front of you. It’s not hard to imagine that larger audience — your company’s management, its shareholders, your customers, your family, etc.

A week or so ago, we added ourselves to Tivo’s priority list for their new online applications and Yahoo partnership. The software update arrived within the last couple of days and I spent some time yesterday tinkering with it.

Most of the new stuff is found under the “Home Media Option” section of the menu (called “Music, Photos, and More” now) and it falls into a couple of categories:

1. Yahoo Services
2. Games
3. Online Media

Yahoo Services — In this category were things like Yahoo’s Traffic, Weather, and Photos. Basically, you just use Tivo to log into your “My Yahoo” account. After you supply a zip code (or even multiple zip codes), you get a weather forecast and current traffic reports. I don’t have any pictures in the Yahoo Photos services, so I didn’t test that but the weather and traffic seem to work fine. It’s not quite as fast it would be through a browser, but it’s workable.

Games — There are three games on the menu now, all of which are single player games and can be played with just the remote. One of them is a “Connect 4” clone, one is a “Jawbreaker” clone, and the third is sort of like a one-person Scrabble game where you make words to earn points. High scores are recorded for each game. It’s kind of a novel idea, but I don’t see anyone playing a whole lot of games with just a Tivo remote. It also suffers from speed issues.

Online Media — Under this category are a Podcast retriever/player and a client to listen to Live365 Internet Radio.

First, the podcasting interface… it works, but is just barely useable. Up front, there are a few categories (Entertainment, Technology, News, etc) and each category has several podcasts already in it. You can also enter your own URL, which is horribly slow and painful with just a Tivo remote. Try entering http://www.itconversations.com/rss/recentWithEnclosures.php by navigating one letter and symbol at a time. Tivo really needs to provide a better way to subscribe to podcasts via URL — maybe using the Tivo Central Online service or the Tivo Desktop client that runs on PCs.

Once you’ve subscribed, you see a list of the shows/episodes for the feed, along with a little graphic (if the podcaster provides it in their feed) and brief description of the show. You can then hit Play to listen. Unfortunately, your controls for playback amount to “Play” and “Stop”. You can’t fast-forward or rewind and there’s no way to stop something at a certain point and then pick up at that point later. I suppose if you really want to hear a certain podcast show, it’s passable but I don’t see this getting adopted very widely until its much easier to subscribe to feeds and control playback.

On the Live365 Internet Radio front… it’s not bad. You see a list of genres and then a list of the internet radio streams under each genre. The streaming was a little choppy at first, but it seemed to settle down and stay consistent once it was running for a minute or two. I didn’t find a lot of great stuff on there, but I’m not much of a broadcast radio listener.

Overal Impressions

It’s an interesting first step and I really like that Tivo is planning to take advantage of the broadband connections that many people have in their homes. I hope we’ll see more experiments like this. The main issues with this first release that I see fall into two categories:

Interface Speed – It was noticeably slower to navigate through the online options and menus. I couldn’t see whether it improved over time through caching, but even navigating around an on-screen keyboard to enter a URL was pretty slow. It’s frustrating when your button pushes aren’t registered right away, so you push it again, only to have the cursor then jump twice at once.

Remote Control – I’m hoping that they soon make it possible to set up options or subscribe to podcasts via either the Tivo Central Online web interface or via the Tivo Desktop client that runs on PCs (for the Home Media and TivoToGo capabilities). Otherwise, these new features will get very limited use, at least in our house. It’s just too much of a pain to do things character by character using a standard remote control.

Last weekend, our Tivo Series2 box started making a very high pitched ringing/squealing sound. It didn’t seem to bother Michelle much, but was quick to give me a headache. Even worse, it was that “your hard drive is on its last leg” type of sound.

I got behind it and verified that it wasn’t the fan making the sound, so then I was faced with a decision. Do I wait it out and see if it passes? I tried this for a day or two, but it was driving me up a wall. Do I go buy a new hard drive and swap it out? I could, but all the directions I found online make it look like more of a project than I wanted to get into. When it involves opening another computer and swapping drives on an IDE channel, booting to Linux floppies, and command-line partitioning… well, I could work my way through it but I’d rather not.

I head over to www.tivocommunity.com, where the hardcore Tivo folks hang out, and came across a site called www.weaknees.com. They seemed to have a good reputation there as a busines and were also pretty active on those forums helping people out.

On their site, I found a 160GB replacement drive for our model Tivo… for $159. Sure, I could get a bigger drive at CompUSA for this much, but their offer was great because:

• The drive was already set up to be plug and play with Tivo — including the latest Tivo OS already installed.
• They included instructions (PDF) for swapping out the drive, complete with lots of pictures.
• They included the two Torx wrenches I’d need to open the case and swap the drive.
• They took PayPal, had it in stock, and their shipping was reasonable.

I emailed them some initial questions I had about what to back up and how current the OS was on the drive I’d get… I had a response in an hour or so telling me just what I needed to know.

So I went for it and WOW am I ever glad! It arrived yesterday and took all of 20 minutes to swap the drive, including the 5 minutes I waited for the power supply to discharge (recommended in their instructions).

Once the drive was swapped, it fires right up and goes through the guided setup. Best of all, it was whisper quiet.

The only potential downside with going this route is that you lose Season Passes, Wishlists, and obviously any recordings. But Season Passes are easy to write down and re-create, we don’t have that many wishlists, and there weren’t many recordings on there that we were too worried about (mostly some kids’ shows that can be replaced in an hour on Noggin). If there had been important recordings, we could have always used TivoToGo and burned a disc.

Your box’s Tivo service is unaffected because its tied to an account number that’s stored directly in the box’s hardware and not on the drive.

In any case, it was a great experience all around and I’d highly recommend using www.weaknees.com if you find yourself needing to replace/add parts for your Tivo.