I'm a woman who firmly believes that the backside of the entertainment center is a male domain. At least in every household I've lived in it is. Audio RF serial red yellow white input output video3...it's all just a dialect of Geekery* to me. My eyes glaze over, I don't understand it, and I really, honestly don't CARE to either. As long as the TV turns on when I hit the power button and all the gadgetry else works properly, I'm perfectly happy leaving the tangle of cables back there a mystery.
Except when the designated household male has his own projects during the move-in process that take priority.
So I plugged a bunch of thingamajigs in the back of the TV-watching-cool-stuff (I had resourcefully made a cheat sheet before unplugging everything). I crossed my fingers and everything turned on! (Wait, it gets better...)
...Except that I couldn't receive any actual shows through the Tivo. So I went into the Tivo setup and figured out that since we had changed zip codes, it needed to be reset. That involves it connecting up with the internet, most easily via a phone line.
I dug around and found the longest piece of phone cord known to man (Ok...just 20 feet, but that's still pretty long!) and plugged it into the nearest phone dealie and told Tivo to update. No dice. Oh yeah, we don't have local phone service. That's a problem. Ok. I'll just hook it up to the cable modem thingy with any one of a bunch of colorful network cables (I picked green, my favorite color). Nope. Nowhere to plug it in on the Tivo. Just the USB holes - and no matter how much you poke at those, network thingies just don't fit (and I'm thinking it probably wouldn't work anymore even if I did manage to cram it in there). Now what?
I couldn't imagine being the only person who ever had this kind of problem, so I went to the Tivo website for help in getting this stupid machine working - preferably BEFORE the NCIS premiere tonight. I researched the problem (I love research) and found a solution. It needed a doohickey and then everything would be peachy-keen. But only a select few doohickeys would actually work. Remembering that the computer store (aka CompUSA) sells all SORTS of doohickeys and whatchamacallits, I looked up the different doohickeys that were recommended on their website. Score!
All by myself (sans any male geek counterpart), I went to the computer store, found not one but two of the possible doohickeys that would work. One regularly priced $80, and one on sale for $29.99. I got the cheaper one, of course. I got home, plugged whatchamacallits into the doodads it looked like they'd fit into, crossed my fingers again. Woohoo! It worked. Tivo updated, NCIS recorded. And I got a deal.
All is good in at Casa de Madre. Now that I've mastered this mystery of the masculine domain...on to barbequing!
*Geekery - The strange and wondrous language of "computerese"