From the TiVoCommunity boards, this post was made yesterday by one of the TiVo staffers.

TiVoPony wrote:

Tomorrow is the last Friday in the month of March.

It’s a very, very special day around here.

Four years ago the first TiVo’s came rolling off the assembly line, were shipped to customers, and the TiVo Service, and the DVR industry, were born.

Oh, people had seen advertisements before, and demos before…from TiVo and others. But this was the very first DVR ever shipped. By anyone.

We all visited the factory, and watched the systems rolling from station to station. We wore blue labcoats. We high-fived each other. We signed the first box to come down the line (it’s sitting in a display case not far from where I’m writing this note).

It had been a grind…a ton of work. We were all exhausted. And Mike Ramsay, our CEO, told us all to go home. Take Friday off. Don’t come in, under any circumstances. He was going to padlock the doors.

Well, except for a few unlucky souls in customer service. It seems that the phones must always be manned.

And so we took a day off. And we have every year since…tomorrow makes five. The last Friday in March is always our ‘Blue Moon’ holiday, a TiVo national day of rest and relaxation.

Why Blue Moon? It so happens that in March of 1999 there were two full moons. A rare occurrence, and a great codename for our launch.

So tomorrow we won’t be here. Everyone behave. Have fun. Post nice things. Leave the poor customer support folk alone as much as you can. Get caught up on those TV shows you have stored away. Maybe throw your recorder a birthday party.

And remember that it all started in March of ‘99, by a little startup called TiVo.

I think I’ll have Blue Moon beer tonight to celebrate, while playing around on my 6 month old TiVo.

Someone posted this link on the channel, and I liked the graphics and subtitles so much I grabbed a local copy.

Do you know what to do in case of an emergency?

If you are trapped under falling debris, conserve oxygen by not farting.

With apologies to deadtroll.com…

BUSH TURNS IN CARDS FOR 35 ARMIES

George Bush turned in his cards for 35 armies today, even though he only had 3 cards. “I saw Saddam sitting there with 4 cards, and I thought… hell, I’ve got a matching set and the guy’s been a real prick tonight. if I can take him out of the game and get his cards, I can probably control Asia.”

George has so far amassed over 20 armies in the middle East, but he’s taking a big risk trying for Asia.

“George doesn’t even have all of North America or Europe. Plus, he’s enemies with almost everyone except Tony and Johnny, and they don’t control squat. If he screws this up, he’s gonna get eaten for sure,” said war correspondent and Wednesday-Risk-Night host Robbie Kowalchuk, “I mean, sure, if he can roll sixes all the way through Asia, then maybe, but even then he’s gonna have enemy fronts from Africa, Europe, and North America to deal with… if you ask me, it’s a logistical nightmare and a pretty stupid gamble. Of course, as soon as I told him that and he was all like, ‘We’re not friends anymore’. What a baby.”

Fellow player Jean agrees, “I mean, Jaques is next and it’s obvious he’s just going to sit back and watch the battle, then come in and clean up by eating both George and Saddam. What a moron.”

George, who was only invited to Risk Night because he was the only one who could afford to bring beer, has also leveled charges of unfair “table talk” between Jaques and Saddam, citing a possible alliance between those two and the red army led by Vladimir – who controls most of Northern Asia from Irkutsk to the Ukraine.

More and more groups I follow have started using these popular webboards to communicate. The biggest one I track is probably TiVo Community because it’s the best one-stop-shop for all information TiVo.

Well, anyway, when you post they let you put an ‘avatar’ of yourself online. This is a little 65×65 pixel graphic that can be your picture, or an icon for yourself. When I think avatar I think online muds, and interactive online spaces that were (and probably always will be) too far away in the future.

On these boards, I commonly use the nickname TromboneKenny — it’s unique, and more descriptive than Dave61821, or whatever other odd combo they come up with. I don’t play my trombone much anymore, but too late, it stuck. (FWIW, we still call Will Komarek Trombone Willie, and probably always will.)

So I made an avatar that had a pic of me I found as the background, and the TBK icon in the foreground. I think it turned out pretty neat, and I put it in the banner at the top of my website. I guess I should take the one ring down now.

The things we do when we were up until 0530 and slept until afternoon and now it’s midnight and we cannot sleep. We hates that. . . Precious.

Vegas, baby! I just got back from my long first-round-NCAA-tournament weekend vacation to Las Vegas. I got to spend a little time with Marc on his birthday, and then headed to LVNV and stayed at NYNY. I was pullin’ slots, making sports bets, watching basketball, sitting at blackjack, drinking comp drinks, watching craps… Had a great time. It really is Disneyworld for adults.

I didn’t isolate my spending from my gambling money (I should have!,) but I didn’t spend nearly as much as I thought I would, and pretty much played even. Most of the time when I played blackjack, I came up 1-3 times what I put in (which was usually $40.) And then I proceeded to lose it on the slots, and try all over again later. On the weekend, it was impossible to find $5 BJ tables, and I didn’t trust myself to play the $10 or $15 tables, even though I had a huge hunk of cash burning a hole in my pocket. I figured I’ll loose it at the boats for $3-5 a table.

I did a small bit of sports betting, but not much. I won $10 on Tulsa, but didn’t put any money on the Illini after I saw almost everyone in our group lose $10 when they didn’t beat the spread on their first game. However, I picked up the odds sheets. Bears winning the superbowl pays 40:1, and Cardinals sweeping the NL is 7:1.

I didn’t predict the Illini falling so soon in the tournament, but I did predict their unsteady play. It’s typical for a young team never exposed to that kind of pressure, or exposure, to be rough. We’ll only get better as our team matures, and we should be a pre-season top ten next year, for sure. My online brackets are doing nicely, as I called a lot of the first round games. That doesn’t mean much after the next round, though, when the points/win go up.

Nate was right. The flight out of Vegas is probably one of the sadder plane trips I’ve been on recently, but after being there four days I was ready to be home. I don’t know if I would recommend going on a tournament weekend — it was really, really busy. Next time I go, I know where I’ll stay (Luxor — the pyramid one that paid me $100 at BJ one day,) and I’ll do a better job of planning what I want to go/do/see.

Anyway, our connection at Denver back to O’Hare was delayed. The fortress door that protects the cockpit (The cockpit, what is it? It’s a room in the front of the plane where the captain sits, but that’s not important right now.</Airplane>) from the passenger cabin was broken/malfunctioning and it delayed them over 3 hours getting out of LA to Denver. So our flight, which was supposed to be the earlier one of the evening getting back at ORD at 10:20pm didn’t wind up leaving Denver until 11pm, getting in at 0200. By 0300 I was back at Marcs, and decided just to push on home. At 0530, I sent email to Chuck saying I didn’t make enough money to quit my job, but that I wouldn’t be in the office today. And then crashed. As a comp for making us stay up so late, they bumped our tickets up to business class (pretty much the same as first class,) on a 747. Now that’s a swank ride — it’s going to make my next economy class plane ride a real letdown. The United ground crew and plane people were really nice about it, and even let us take a tour of the cockpit and sit in the captain seat if we wanted — even while we’re at war. Today has been restful, and given me time to cleanup from the trip and get readjusted to ‘real life’.

For Eric, since I couldn’t remember the quote or find it last night when we watched the movie.

“By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State.”
– Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Today, while poking around on my system, I found the old TromboneKenny graphic. It’s in the header on my website now.

Today’s date can be written as 03/04/03 — Cool.

Today’s date can be written as 03/03/03 — Cool.

This is a test to see if my homebrew trackback engine is working. Because I’m the first one in my clique of friends who blog to implement this, I needed to test it off someone who already has a working trackback system. I got most of my implementation info/tips from http://www.hitormiss.org/projects/trackback/ and so this will trackback to his article.