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people don't actually program universal remotes
Sunday, January 27 2008
Time is money, so one ever wants to spend too much time trying to fix something broken that can be replaced for cheap. Back when my time was worth almost no money, I could piddle away an hour trying to fix a five dollar flashlight and not feel too depressed about it. Today, though, I piddled away what might have been two hours trying to restore a $15 universal remote to full functionality. But something bad had happened to it, suddenly rendering it too unreliable to use.
There was a reason I was willing to sacrifice so much time on this cheap remote (which had been made by Philips). It turns out that the money spent in purchasing a universal remote is actually a small fraction of the investment made when adding it to one's arsenal of gadets. The biggest fraction by far is the time investment in configuring it to operate all the various devices. For that Philips remote, this had involved the researching and punching in of two three-digit codes (for the GE TV and the TiVo), the systematic scanning through a range of codes (for the Sansui VCR), and a whole course of education as I demonstrated every function of the Magnavox DVD player's remote to the universal remote, since it had no database of its functions to draw on. After all that, I still had to manually enter the arcane key sequences allowing the remote to control the TV's volume and power while it was in TiVo mode.
These procedures are so complicated and exacting that's it's hard to imagine anyone but an obsessive gadget freak actually carrying them to completion. And the facts on the ground bear this out; I don't think I've ever visited anyone who didn't control their multiple entertainment components with multiple remotes, yet often some of those remotes are indeed universals. In other words, my household is the only one I know of that takes full advantage of the potential of a universal remote; normally our four-component video entertainment system is controlled by a single remote. The fact that I had that remote working so well was the reason I spent hours trying to get the damn thing working again. Ultimately, though, I had to give up. I got it working well enough to control the television and the TiVo and called it a day. I vowed to buy a replacement for the universal remote, one not as cheap and disposable as the Philips had been (it hadn't even lasted a year).
This evening Gretchen thawed out some injera she'd bought at an Ethiopian grocery in Silver Spring, and we ate it with various mushy dishes that bore a close resemblance to vegan Ethiopian wats. The resemblance wasn't quite enough for Gretchen, who warned me that I might prefer leftover vegan lasagna instead. But she was wrong and it was great. I stuffed myself with it as we watched Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The problem with stuffing oneself with injera is that its yeast is still active and it continues to rise in your stomach, or so I've heard.
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