family The gift of time

A few years ago, my dad offered me a present of “the gift of time,” meaning he’d buy me a bigger hard drive for my UltimateTV. At the time, the only way to replace the operating system on a new drive was over a landline phone, and then, as now, I didn’t have one. So in a diner in Long Beach, California, I politely declined.

Over the intervening years I got more and more frustrated at this. I had about 35 hours of recording time on this box, and over and over again things I actually wanted to see got erased to make room for things I didn’t really care about. I watched a lot of TV very efficiently, because that’s what a DVR does for you, but I spent a lot of time being frustrated and annoyed.

Then Jeff found that people had figured out a way to put the operating system on a blank drive as a disk image, and therefore replace the hard drive in an UltimateTV without a phone line. So I bought a new drive.

And it sat there for a year.

Then last week, when once again something I cared about was erased to make room for something I didn’t, I said “screw this” and started talking to him about it again. He sent me the disk image, he sent me the instructions, and I took the drive over to Lisa’s and attached it to her desktop PC and did it.

And it didn’t fucking work.

And I put the old drive back in, and that no longer worked.

And that sucked.

So I tried again, and that time, for some reason (my theory: because Jeff was on the phone with me when I did it), it did work. So now I have more than three times as much recording space as I did before, and things are good.

But before I took the old drive out, I deleted everything, and I saw something I’d never seen before and will probably never see again. This.

Cimg0283

Specifically, the upper right.
Cimg0284