One thing fixed, several more to go...

Well, yesterday I got the replacement RePlayTV that I bought off eBay earlier this week to replace my RePlay 5060, whose hard drive tragically gave it's last spin sometime last Saturday night.

The new one is a RePlay 5540, which means I lose 20 hours of recording time and some features, like commercial skip, where it automatically skips commercials - which isn't actually a huge deal, since I never used it, because it had a habit of skipping randomly through shows if they had lots of black space - think Law and Order.

What I gain, though, is a lifetime subscription. I had stupidly been paying $10 a month for the last 6 years or so - I could have bought a lifetime subscription many times over. Now I just need to call RePlay to cancel my current subscription. I paid $160 shipped for the replacement, which is a pretty good deal - if I use it for more than a year and a half I will have recouped the fees I would have paid.

So at least now I can watch TV. I do still need to get bsom to look at my old receiver to see if it's fixable - it's been sitting in my cube at work for the last couple days - and buy a replacement if not. And my toilet is still in pieces, and probably will remain so for at least the next couple months.

I have to admit that living without TV for the last week has been surprisingly painless. Once I got a DVI to VGA connector, I simply plugged my work MacBook Pro into my 32" LCD, which has a VGA port, and streamed shows from Hulu. It took a little tweeking to get the resolution to work, and since I don't have wired networking on the lower floors of my townhouse, I had to use wireless, so I had the occasional "buffering..." hickup, but for the most part it was painless.

If I ever get hard up for money, and had to cancel cable TV, I think I could survive... as long as I could afford to keep broadband internet.