Richard's space

I installed Windows 7 (Love it!) on my laptop, but doing so destroyed all of my Outlook data. Then, I installed Outlook on the fresh Windows 7 installation, but I haven't started it up. Well, when I connected my phone to my computer and Windows 7 to synchronize my data, Windows forced me to destroy my association with my prior Outlook connection before Windows would let me sync up (I can only have 2 associations, and I already have one for my machine at work). Well, thinking that all my contacts were on my phone, I said "Sure, go ahead" and blew away that association.

Doing so deleted all of my contacts!

This is hugely obnoxious: I have nearly 200 contacts in my phone, and none of them were backed up on my computer. I was in full-out panic mode. I quickly checked to make sure my text messages were fine. My calendar seems to have all my appointments, too. Only the contacts are gone.

Well, I did not want to try and remember all the contacts I had in there, and their phone numbers and birthdays, etc. But thankfully I remembered that I was trying to backup my text messages about a month ago, and had used service from Microsoft called Microsoft My Phone. This little utility backed up all of my contacts, text messages, and several other things to some website somewhere. Phew. Now I just needed to figure out how to get those pieces of data back to my phone.

Well, the My Phone application is not very informative itself. I could not find a way to tell it to download pieces of data from the server. Which means it just checks to find differences between the phone and the website. Well, the tool might realize that I just deleted all my contacts so it will delete all the contacts on the server as well!

To get around this, I uninstalled the program from my phone, reinstalled it on my phone, and then ran it, carefully watching (and praying) that none of my contacts would be deleted from the server.

It worked! I have all of my contacts back, and I can finally go to bed and sleep knowing that my “brain” was not just irreparably wiped.

Note on Text Message Backup

By the way, I do not like how Microsoft My Phone backs up text messages. I was hoping that I could download all my text messages into a CSV or Excel file so that I could manipulate them. Or even get them as XML. Unfortunately, I can only get an overview of my texts (basically consisting of 30 characters from the message) as a list of the text messages, 15 per page, or view 1 full text message at a time. I have well over 1000 text messages. This just isn’t reasonable.

So, I ultimately wrote my own text backup application. It uses MAPI (I found someone else’s code to do this) to talk to Outlook mobile, loops through all my messages, and dumps them out to a file. I loaded that file into Excel and then I could easily see all the messages and back them up and sort them in the ways I needed. Thank goodness for a programmable phone.

So, I have been poking around looking at different TiVo options, and I found out something weird. I recently blogged that You Don’t Need Cable to Get TiVo. This is technically accurate, but I found out about some caveats. First, I need to explain some terminology.

There are two basic kinds of TiVos available, now: Series2 and Series3. I bought a Series2 TiVo DVRs several years ago. The Series2 DVR does not support high definition television: it only supports NTSC (the old 640x480 resolution TV that used to be broadcast until a few months ago). The Series2 TiVos I bought only have 1 decoder card in them, so they can only record 1 show at a time: so I bought a second one within a year.

TiVo Series2 DT DVR

The new Series2 DVR is a dual-tuner TiVo (hence the DT in the name), meaning it has 2 decoder cards in it, so it can record 2 shows at once (and you can watch a third show that you have already recorded while the other two are recording). Unfortunately, after poking through some documentation, I found out that the Series2 Dual Tuner DVR does not support Antenna, it only supports Cable and Satellite.

TiVo Series3 HD DVR

The Series3 DVR is a High Definition DVR (frequently shortened to HD DVR). It records HD shows, works great with HD TVs, and can even let you watch YouTube on your TV. It has many more features than the Series2, including the fact that it works with Antenna.

So, in summary, the following table shows what each DVR will support

The details on how you can configure them is available here: https://www3.tivo.com/assets/popups/popup_tivoworkswith.html

Comments on Antenna Support

There are other Series2 TiVos out there, but they are hard to find. These other Series2 DVRs will support antenna, cable, and satellite. This is why I thought that any Series2 DVR would support over-the-air broadcasts. Unfortunately, the Series2 DT TiVo DVR does not have the hardware necessary to decode Broadcast television, either NTSC or HD. It is designed only for Cable and Satellite. There are other Series2 DVRs out there, but they are not Dual-Tuner DVRs, and are much harder to find (TiVo does not sell them directly).

For complete details on Antenna Support, go here.

If you have a Series2 DVR (Not DT), then here are the instructions on setting it up for Digital Antenna.

I am a TiVo addict, and frequently I want to help people become fellow addicts: your TV life will get a lot better. However, there is one thing I hear all the time whenever I mention TiVo: I don’t have cable. I want everyone to know: You don’t need cable to get TiVo.

So what do you need? 2 things:

1. A TV signal
2. The Internet or a land-line telephone

A TV Signal

TiVo takes in a TV signal and records it. That signal can come from Cable, Satellite (Direct TV, etc.), or just an over-the-air broadcast. Now that we have digital TV broadcasts, you may need a converter box for translating the digital TV signal for the TiVo, but you probably already have one of those just so you can watch TV. You just need to splice the TiVo in between that converter box and the TV and you are good to go.

The Internet or a land-line telephone

The TiVo box needs to connect to the central servers from time to time (usually once per day) so that it can download programming schedule updates: basically it downloads its own TV Guide. To make this connection it either needs to connect to the Internet through your current Internet connection, or, if you do not have the Internet, it needs to use your phone line to make the connection. It cannot use your cell phone, so it needs to use the phone that you get at your house that you plug into the wall.

That’s it. Most of my shows are on the major broadcast networks. Most of the rest of my shows are on USA or Discovery (4 or 5 shows, total). I occasionally pick up other shows on other networks, but those shows are not very important to me. So, I would say that TiVo greatly improves your broadcast TV experience, and you definitely do not need cable to use it and love it.

Just thinking about most approaches to reform health insurance, the approaches do not make health care more affordable. The most sure-fire way to make anything more affordable is for a product or service to become more available: increase supply. But, at the same time that a product is more available it must still be profitable for those people who supply the product. Otherwise why would they produce it? If Apple looses money with each computer they produce, why would they continue producing it? Even though Hulu looses $200 Million each year, and facebook looses even more, both of these companies must start showing a profit soon, otherwise investors will quit giving them the money they are expending. Profit does not have to equate to money, but it usually does. Sometimes it equates to power, prestige, flexibility, etc.

Anyway, to make health care more affordable, there must be more supply: more doctors, more nurses, more hospitals, etc. With more supply available, people have more flexibility to find the health care they want. Which also means finding health care that fits their price range.

With the health insurance reform approaches, more people will be able to purchase health care without considering the costs. This is an increase in demand (more people can get it), but not an increase in supply (no increase in doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc.). Costs will definitely go up, despite the claims that it will not. All these approaches do is make health care more ignorable: people care less about the cost because someone else is paying for it. But what really needs to happen is to make health care more affordable.

I had a lot of exchanges with a few people over the last few months, which I have generally been unsatisfied with. These were political exchanges, but each was unproductive for both parties involved. As I think about the conversations, I see a common thread that underlies them: someone was putting truth above relationships. That person was me, the other person, or both. Frequently both.

Now, by "truth above relationships” I mean that someone was so determined to prove that the other person is wrong, or that they themselves are right, that they did not care about the quality of their relationship with the other person involved in the conversation. It is generally obvious that the truth-bearer is not listening to the other person they are talking to, and consequently, instead of using persuasion, they just state facts using words with personally-known meaning (“socialist”, “compassion”, “free market”, “evil”, “nazi”, etc.). Each word is loaded with meaning to one person, but is subtly different or nonexistent to the other person, and so persuasion does not happen.

I watched the season premier of House M. D. this week. As always, it was a very compelling show. But one of the basic themes of that show is that House pursues truth with a vengeance. Without truth, he cannot solve the difficult cases in front of him, but because of the truth, he is perpetually distant from other people. Unfortunately for the premier, House was supposed to learn how to forgive himself when he fails (falls short of truth or perfection in his eyes), but the close of the episode gave me the impression that House had really been proven that his pursuit of the truth was, in fact, necessary for other people’s happiness, but not his own, which he learned over and over again in prior episodes (for people considering watching the season premier, there is one scene that is likely to make you uncomfortable. You will recognize it when you see it. You can just fast-forward past it and you will not miss anything from the episode). The same theme of truth being paramount underlies (pun intended) about the show Lie to me* (which is a fantastic show, by the way). The lead characters doggedly pursue the truth, but consequently they make themselves distant from the people they interview or help, and even their friends, family, and coworkers. Lie to me* takes an interesting approach, though, in that coworkers are allowed to keep secrets from each other so that they can better-maintain their relationships.

So, what do I think is the solution is to this problem? I believe that it means putting relationships above truth, or being persuasive instead of being right. Not that I want people to persuade others toward evil instead of truth, but that people should put their relationships as paramount in conversations. The Doctrine & Covenants has a great conversation about this approach. It states that “power…ought to be maintained by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned;…that he may know that thy faithfulness is stronger than the cords of death.”(D&C 121:41-44) I believe this is how God acts, and how he expects us to act.

God does not compromise on truth and cannot tolerate evil; and yet He lets us live even when we make mistakes. He is willing to forgive us every time we fall short, and is there to help us grow toward Him (perfection and truth). He is patient with us and persuades us constantly, but will never force us to do anything. He knows how we think, and provides us knowledge in languages we can understand: not just English, Japanese, Thai, etc., but also in experiences that are tuned for our knowledge and situation to help us grow. He does this, because He has placed our relationship with him as paramount, even above forcing us to confront the truth when we cannot. We must always confront the truth at some point, but our relationship with Him is more important. Although we cannot necessarily design situations for other people, ought we not to also persuade via language that other people understand?

I know that I am not very good at putting relationships first…yet. But I hope to improve as I gain experience with learning how to see other people’s perspectives and trying to persuade them accordingly.