A Break and New Tasks

I haven't done anything with the wood today. I have one and a half ranks of wood in, and have made a big dent into the initial load of wood that was delivered by my FIL. But I needed time off from that activity and have been working on other things.

Yesterday, after working on the wood all morning, I stopped and working on wiring a new coaxial cable from the satellite dish (which can accept up to 4 discreet lines from it; we're now using 2) to the bedroom. I couldn't finish the project until after M got home, as I didn't want to punch holes in the wall without her seeing the project and having a say in where.

Late last night we got the wiring done and today I spent the early afternoon moving TiVos around and setting up the satellite receivers in each room. We now have it is installed so that the single tuner TiVo is in the front room with the HD receiver, and we will use it to record stuff on the networks primarily. The dual tuner TiVo is in the bedroom with the SD receiver, and is setup to get both cable and satellite. Since the SD receiver does not have the channel changing issue of the HD receiver (see post), we are setting up the TiVo in there to do the bulk of the recording. Then, we will use the TiVo transfer functions to copy programs between the two TiVos and watch where we are most comfortable (most likely in the front room, or on a PC if we need to or are going to be away for awhile).

I also checked the older TiVo and contacted Weaknees.com about a potential problem. It turns out that when you add additional hard drive space to a TiVo, the primary drive "marries" itself to the secondary drive. When M had the primary drive fail on her in December and bought a replacement primary, it no longer could speak with the secondary drive. Due to an interesting twist, the techs at Weaknees are not certain that a new secondary drive can be married to our new primary drive (a lot of technical reasons I won't go into here). So, if we want to get more room now, we have to either send both our new primary and our older secondary drives to them and they will do what they can, or we purchase a larger primary.

With shipping issues and costs, it will likely be less expensive to simply get a larger primary drive for that one if it turns out we need it with our current arrangement. But we will delay that decision for a bit while we see how our setup works now. On the plus side, both those drives are high-quality, 80 gig drives, and M and I both have uses for them in our PCs. So we may repurpose, reformat, and reuse them with our computers if we do get a new, bigger primary (we are going to do that with the secondary anyway, as it doesn't work for the TiVo any more).

I will have to hit the huge pile of wood again tomorrow, but my aging, arthritic body needed a day off and some of the aches and pains are finally lessening. I need to remember to take more breaks and not carry as much when I start back on this tomorrow.