Aimee was a TiVo devotee (TiVotee?) long before we started dating, and the TiVo came with her when we got married and pooled our AV equipment. And everything else. Anyway, the original TiVo from her Brookline days began dying in Rochester, starting with a pause or a skip here and there, eventually making it so it was impossible to watch a recorded show without it skipping every few seconds, and finally, when we moved to L.A., we couldn’t even get it to boot up. We thought about trying to replace the hard drive, but the introduction of the new Series 3 HD TiVo was imminent, and it didn’t make sense to throw money after a standard-def machine when HD is the way things are going. So, we took the plunge, and three weeks (and three Time Warner technician appointments) later, we’re finally up and running. We only get about a half-dozen HD channels, but the machine works beautifully, with the already-great TiVo user interface augmented with the ability to freeze and rewind and record beautiful high-def programs. So most of them are underwater travel shows, or PBS science specials, or old episodes of ‘Homicide’ on TNT-HD, but nonetheless, they look great. We only had about two weeks worth of hassle with the whole cable card debacle, but that seems to be sorted out now, and I can start filling up the hard drive with more gems from Turner Classic Movies. HD seems to bring with it its own strange variant on the color bars or other oddities you might see when something has gone wrong; as I was waiting for the cable guy to show up, this strange scene appeared on the screen, with circling smilies, rotating color wheels, and scrolling text that says ‘OK, Wise Guy, let’s see you code this.’ I reached for my camera when it was happening but I didn’t catch it in time; then I remembered, I’m TiVoing it, at all times… So I rewound it, and snapped this photo.