Tragedy struck my household on Friday night when I switched over the TV to watch some Tivo. It was frozen even though the red light said it was recording and it wouldn’t respond to any remote control commands so I decided to reboot it. All looked fine for a couple of minutes until it rebooted itself and then got stuck in a rebooting loop. Can you imagine the horror knowing that I had over 30 hours of television shows and no other way of viewing them?

Since the tivo is mainly proprietary hardware it isn’t easy to just stick in another motherboard and keep going. Luckily I knew that Graham had an inactive one sitting under his tv waiting for him to set it up so I knew I could always ask him if he would allow me to do some testing on his.

The symptoms didn’t really indicate to me that it was a hard drive error but it was the easiest test to try first so I pulled out an old 30GB drive and put the oztivo image on it. An hour or so later I had a working system happily recording and changing channels like a maniac. This was the best case scenario because otherwise I would have to start looking at buying replacement tivos or even the Foxtel IQ (which is a little unattractive with it’s $395 install fee and $6 a month subscription that could be raised on a whim). Unfortunately I couldn’t leave the 30GB drive in there because I’m used to having a 4 week backlog of tv shows. So I’m going to buy a new harddrive. I was thinking that I got pretty good service out of the Maxtor 120GB drive I was using. 2-3 years of constant hard drive access on the tivo was a pretty good life span. Then last night while I was sleeping I had a revelation.

About two weeks ago I bought the xbox game Dance UK which is similar to Dance Dance Revolution. If you have ever seen kids jumping about in a games arcade manically like they are stepping on hot sand you’ll know the game I mean. You get a dance mat with the game and the whole premise is to step on arrows on the mat that corresponds with the arrows on the screen – in time to the music. This was my big idea to get some exercise so I have been busily dancing about to artists like Junior Senior, M (pop music), Jamelia and Mis Teeq. This is an extremely odd thing for me to do as I have a long and varied history of being a “non dancer”.

The term “non dancer” started in 1991 when me and four of my friends attended a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert at Festival Hall. 3 of my friends jumped and bopped along to the guys with flames coming out of helmets while the other friend and I stood completely still grooving to the music in our heads. They thought we were dickheads for not dancing and we thought they looked like dickheads while dancing. After the concert we had an argument and the non dancers ended up being split from the dancers as we walked through the crowd. Each of the groups made their own way back to the house we were staying at which was difficult in Brisbane after midnight. I think we ended up walking a very long way then catching a cab. At the house there was a cold reception and we all went to bed grumbling at each other. The next morning as we walked to the bus to go home to the Sunshine Coast the argument turned in to a full on war with the dancers and non dancers shouting at each other across the street. At the bus stop it got even more heated. I’m sure the other people waiting with us were very confused as to why these young girls were getting so upset about dancing and non dancing. In the teenage hormonal heat of the moment it looked like the argument was going to end a few long standing friendships. Then the bus arrived so we got on and it took off. One of the dancers (Claire) wasn’t prepared for the jerk and ended up falling in to someones lap. Claire isn’t the most co-ordinated person in the world and it made all of us crack up laughing. This was enough to chill us all out so by the time we got to to the city we were all apologising and feeling sheepish. I don’t think I’ve ever had an argument as big as that ever in my life and it was over something so minor.

Other horrible dance experiences in my life have been when I performed at a ballet recital and my mother called me the dancing elephant (not due to my size but due to my movements), the multiple times I got out of formal dance practise by pretending I had religous reasons why I couldn’t dance and my performance as a yellow brick road in the school musical where when I reached up to the sky my outfit virtually went over my hips so you could see what was under my black tights (I’m exaggerating a little here)! So you can probably see why it’s surprising that I went out and bought a dance game.

This is the bit where I turn you back from the tangent that I put you on and return you to the revelation I spoke about way back about 3 paragraphs ago. Ok, so the revelation was that I realised that just before I switched over to the broken tivo I had been aggressively dancing to Dance UK. Now bear in mind that when Pauline drove the car in under the house while I was dancing she was thinking that the floor needed reinforcing it was wobbling that hard (it’s a queenslander and I’m quite animated). So from all this I can pretty much conclude that my over zealous movements in front of the tivo caused the heads on the hard drive to misalign and cause the catastrophic failure of the tivo.

Thus, the lesson for today is…

Once a non dancer, always a non dancer.

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