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Now that Kelli’s gone, grep has been as fussy as I had always expected him to be about not having FULL AND TOTAL ACCESS to the house. Yesterday was the first time he made a real fuss that didn’t involve just wanting his wet food, and he made it repeatedly. Interesting.

I got a condolence card from the vet where we took her body. I hadn’t asked B about the details of getting her back until the card reminded me, and he said that along with her ashes we’d be getting an imprint of her paw. I took a moment to be really creeped out, and then decided that was pretty nice.

So, moving on: I’ve had a real grunt of a week.  I did a software install that I stopped halfway through, because there was a conflict I was expecting, and it happened, and I went to follow the instructions to fix it and…you couldn’t follow them.  My settings didn’t look like the instructions’ settings, and that should have been my tip-off, but I was so freaked I opened a trouble ticket and waited.  And waited.  And finally the Borg called me back today and…that conflict was in a previous version of the software.  And the thing I thought I broke turned out to look broken in the first place because of something entirely unrelated.  So it wasn’t broken, and I should be finishing now, but I’ve got rotini with 9-cheese sauce (I had a lot of little bits leftover in the fridge) in the oven and, you know, eh.  I’ll get to it.

We got FiOS TV a couple of weeks ago, and the feature I love the most is On Demand.  What we had from Dish was all pay stuff, but with FiOS we’ve got a boatload of stuff for free from the channels we pay for.  So we’re watching The Tudors (need to hurry, it disappears on the 18th), and I’m watching Tell Me You Love Me experimentally right now.  It appears to be highbrow porn, not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I don’t know that I’ll keep watching it except as filler.

I am a little pissed, though.  When we switched, I told them I really liked Dish’s multi-room DVR, which was actually just one DVR but there was some magic switcher in the attic that allowed us to watch the living room DVR in the bedroom.  Verizon encouraged us to get two DVRs and I didn’t really get the spiel why, but it turns out it’s because their multi-room is a pale shadow of what we had before.  All we can do in the bedroom is watch TV or watch recordings from the living room DVR.  Except we CAN’T watch any HD recordings in the bedroom, and we cannot schedule any recordings or pause live TV in the bedroom.  It absolutely blows chunks, but I haven’t decided if I will wait for them to get their act together or get a separate DVR.

Or just buy a couple of TiVos, because no other user interface comes close.  It really is astounding, how much everything else – digital cable, Dish, FiOS – has paled in comparison.  It’s really way too bad that they’ve never gotten the hang of licensing it.  (Actually, BeyondTV was awesome, I really liked it, but I doubt we’ll go there again unless we decide that two good PCs are better than one TiVo Series 3.  I don’t much want to have to sysadmin my DVRs that much.)

And now my dinner is just about ready.