My PVR is DOA, OMG!

My PVR, which Verizon refers to as an STB, is DOA.  Not the whole thing, just the part that records.  I can’t even rewind live TV to catch a line that I can’t believe someone said.

I started noticing skipping and pauses on Saturday evening.  I’ve seen that happen before and I had myself convinced that it was a result of the hard drive defragmenting.  See, it usually skipped and jittered about 8-10 hours after I’d deleted a bunch of recorded stuff off the drive. However, during the skipping and freezing on Saturday the whole box rebooted.  Not good, even if it was defragmenting.  Maybe especially if it rebooted in the middle of defragmenting.  I reset the box using the menus and I also reset the router.  The NAT table in Verizon routers supposedly get clogged up and benefit from regular rebooting.

On Sunday I was able to magically make everything lock up by pressing the Record button.  I called Verizon.  While I was on hold with Verizon I noticed that I had no recordings left, not even the last game of the World Series, and that one was Mrs. Ender’s.

The Verizon techie was pretty good and seemed to listen, and discard, my suggestions that the problem was tied to the hard drive.  But, I played along and let him try to reset the box three times.  Each of the first two resets errored out on his end, maybe, I suggested, because I didn’t have a working hard drive?  After an hour of resetting the box and the router (hey, hadn’t I already done both of those?) we stopped.  I had a working TV, but I didn’t try recording anything.  If I had, I would have saved myself a call.

Not only were all the recordings gone, all of the settings for series recordings were gone as well.  I set up to record "Boardwalk Empire" and all seemed fine. While the reset-check-reset was going on, the TV kept coming back to a station that was showing the movie "Serenity."  Since I just recently got the full TV series (Firefly) I was very interested in seeing the movie.  Because the Verizon guy kept resetting everything, I was only able to see bits and pieces.  I was watching the end of that movie when "Boardwalk Empire" started, and evertyhing froze.

I placed a call to Verizon and when I mentioned that the set top box had been reset more than nine times over the previous 24 hours, that the router had been reset twice (also requiring that I reenter all the settings) and that I could magically freeze everything by touching the Record button, they quickly set me up to get a new box.

I should get the box tomorrow or Wednesday.

I went right to Amazon and "rented" Serenity.  I might watch that tonight.

Amazon began shipping the Fire tablet a day early.  Mine is due to arrive tomorrow.

I tried to make a very small batch of bright red soap.  My intention was to make a tube of red soap, cut it across the circular shape and them put the cuttings into a batch of white soap, making a red and white stripped soap that smells like peppermint.

Lesson 1.  A really small variance in the ingredients of a batch of soap is magnified when the batch of soap is really small.  Three ounces of soap is too small.  Next time, make a bigger batch and use the leftover to make bars of red, peppermint soap.

Lesson 2. Get really, really bright red coloring.  My peppermints would have looked like white and adobe instead of white and red.  Keep in mind that red plus sorta-yellowish soap makes brownish soap.

The tube of soap came right out of the length of PVC piping I used as a mold, but it’s really, really soft.  It will be the end of the week before I’ll be able to unwrap it, and I’m likely to just toss it.  It’s too soft and it will take too long to harden.

Have I mentioned how quickly hair grows when it’s really clean?  My soap leaves my hair really clean — yes, I use my soap as shampoo — and it’s been growing like crazy.  I’m nearly ready for another haircut, and it’s at least 3-4 weeks early.  When I told my hair cutter what I use to make my soap she did say that those were the things that makes hair healthy.  My healthy, clean hair is growing really fast.  Really, did I mention really?

Ender is out.