…to our commie.

<rant>

When our 5 years old projection TV went kaput last December, we got it fixed by a local TV repairman. Recently, the Sony unit decided to get creative and started rendering the picture all in hue of blue or sometime of green. Other times, it’d paint several long red arches across the entire screen. And once it is on long enough, the unit would decide that some napping is in order by flickering a few red flashes and turns itself off. The darn thing is starting to develop a mind of its own. But I digress, this entry is about the Commie!

Anyway, I decided to cancel our subscription to Comcast HD cable TV a few weeks back. I mean what’s the point, when my HD shows are in monochrome! 🙂 While we’re watching analog TV now, it does feel great not living under the control of The Commie. I had discovered that some users began to call the Comcast DVR, The Commie– appropriately I thought.

You see, the Commie sucks. In fact, it really really really sucks! There had been many occasion that I came close to throwing its ass out of my window. I’m not exaggerating. The darn thing infuriates me! I’ve never had a worse user experience with an electronic gadget in my entire life.

Here are some of things that bug me:

  1. Slow as a 2000 years old tortoise. You change the channel or clicking any of the button on the remote, you wait for a delayed response. Unbelievably annoying.
  2. Search sucks. It seems I’d have to “type” a lot to search for anything. Entering a letter is a pain since you scroll through the entire alpha bets, one letter at a time. Hello? These Commies are built by Motorolla, couldn’t these geniuses learned a thing or two from the phone engineers in terms of keypad input?
  3. Long boot time. Whenever unit is unplugged, it means we’d have to wait for a few minutes before rebooting completes. It’s worse than my 2 years old Windows desktop PC.
  4. Crashes and freezes. The unit would sometime crashes or freezes– fixing it requires you to unplug it, which leads the problem above: long boot time. Argh!
  5. Unresponsive. Often, I have no idea how to get the sucker to respond to me. Not infrequently, it would freeze, but not really! :0 This happens a lot. I’d press Channel Up and nothing happens because the unit freezes up, so you press the button again, again, again… but nothing happens, until the Commie wakes itself up and executes the last 12 commands queued up. It ends up jumping 12 channels. As I noted, this happens a lot with my unit. I had to deal with this almost everyday. One minute, it’s unresponsive and the next minute, it runs 10+ commands. This is the most horribly infuriating thing about The Commie.
  6. Stupid warnings. Some of the warning messages are so brain dead. For example, if my unit is low on empty space, it’d warn that “Your unit is low space: 10%”. Why tell my percentage? I’d have to do some math to figure out that means I have 8 hours of recording left. Give me a break! Why not just say that!
  7. Dumb UI. Too many instances, but I’ll point out just an example. The unit has 2 tuners which the unit makes them too painfully obvious. The user has to aware which tuner he’s using. If I starts a recording and then attempting to change the channel, it wouldn’t let me. I’d have to hit a button on the remote to swap to the other tuner. Why doesn’t it switch the tuner automatically? Why require the user to be so aware of which tuner he’s using.
  8. Repeats. Even though I specified no repeat, my unit kept recording repeated shows; we’d have 6 recording of the same South Park episodes each week. Wassup w/ that?

The Commie was crap. It’s the Fidel Castro of DVRs. These Commies are bad for TV experience, bad for your blood level, bad for your psychological health & sanity. The Commie can shorten your life span. I can’t believe Comcast is pushing thousands of these crappy units out to their customers.

I have acted: out with The Commie! Let freedom rings again in our living room…

</rant>