Last year after I’d done a fair amount of hourly paid work on top of my everyday job I decided to go out and spend the extra money I’d earned on a new tv. I ended up getting a 40″ Samsung LCD telly and I love it. The picture is so much crisper than our old analogue television and the screen is so big too. I at first thought it was a bit too big for the space it’s in but it’s amazing how quickly you get used to it.

Now the world of digital television stations was opened up to us and GO, channel 99 is just fabulous – probably more so for JJ than me. He’s now an expert on all the shows that were around when I was a kid – Get Smart, Bewitched, The Flintstones, The Jetsons (or his combination the Jetstones). There’s other kids shows on like Pinky and the Brain that Steven Spielberg produces that he just loves and he made me sit down and watch an episode of it with him one day.

I’m getting into watching Frasier. I never saw it when it was on tv ten or so years ago and I eagerly watch it now. I’ve even watched a few episodes of Seinfeld which I did watch when it was on but a repeat every now and then I don’t mind.

Not being used to how digital and analogue work, however, I hadn’t realised that my old video recorder would only record the analogue tv stations and not the digital ones. I set it up to record what I could though but the recordings weren’t very good. They were a bit jumpy and of course there was no widescreen. Because I couldn’t record anything on the digital stations this left out a lot of programs from GO, ABC2 etc which was getting annoying.

So, as a Christmas present I decided to buy a digital video recording device. I did a bit of research and ended up buying a TiVo. Of course I’d heard of TiVo by watching Sex and the City but it’s relatively new here. What initially turned me off buying it was the relatively small 160Gb recording amount and being tied to buying a proprietary external hard disk if I wanted more space. But in December last year a 320Gb TiVo was released and that’s what I ended up getting.

It was pretty easy to setup and now we love it. I think JJ TiVo’s a lot more than me as it’s so easy to record programs. I love how it records automatically too when you give things the thumbs up, although it doesn’t record everything I’ve given the thumbs up. I need to do some more research into how the smarts work.

My favourite thing, however, is being able to pause television. A couple of weeks ago I began to watch The Seven Ages of Rock on the ABC and someone rang just after it began. Normally I would have let the answering machine take the message but sometimes it’s good not to have to remember to call people back and this was one of those times as it was a call to do with JJ’s cricket. When the phone started ringing I paused the TiVo, spoke to the caller for five minutes and resumed the TiVo after the call ended.

With our purchase we got the Home Networking Package as well but I haven’t set that up yet and don’t know if I’ll bother. I haven’t read that much that’s great about it and all I would want to do is put stuff on DVD.

Now the only problem with our foray into the digital world is that the stereo is in the same room as the new telly so if I want to listen to music and the lad wants to watch tv, there’s a clash. I could buy a set top box for the old tv but don’t know that I’ll bother just yet or at all until the analogue signal is turned off. He can still watch some tv on it and use it for Playstation.