don't use London

While I was "enjoying" my mammoth driving day last Thursday I saw a sign that said:

"During the Olympics avoid driving in central London"

This amused me quite a lot.  I wonder if the advice applies to everyone that lives and works in central London as well?

The Olympics are only a couple of weeks away.  I'm already saving things up to watch on my PVR as I'm anticipating a bit of a dearth of watchable stuff for me.

Don't get me wrong - I've nothing really against the Olympics as a sporting event.  Indeed, I think they're good things from the sporting point of view, it's just they are, on the whole, a collection of sports that I just don't care about.

And I guess, to be honest, I don't mind that they'll probably absorb all the TV hours that there are - it will give me an opportunity to do other stuff.

And mentioning that, my PVR it's still not working right.

The problem is a bit of a weird one.  Basically, when I put it in standby what should happen is that the clock stays lit showing the time.  This is an outward manifestation of the PVR tracking the time so that it can switch itself on when a recorded program comes up.

It now doesn't do this.  If I put it in standby it just shows a dash-dash-colon-dash-dash patter you will be familiar with from new appliances which have a clock that you haven't programmed.

As such, it's not tracking the time and so when a recording time roles around it just sits there and does nothing.

However, where it gets weird is that if I put it in standby while it's recorded a pre-recorded program, then it holds the time like it should, even after the program stops recording.  And the key there is it's a pre-set recording.  If I just set it to record and then put it in standby it doesn't hold the time either.

However, the above is all quite erratic - occasionally it will hold the time even if it's not recording a pre-scheduled program.  And it will always do pre-recorded programs if you leave it on, which means sometimes I've had to leave it on all night and all day to record stuff that's on late or on in the day.

It reminds me quite a lot of what happens when a CMOS battery fails, and really the PVR is just a computer in a VCR style box with appropriate connectors and a specially designed operating system.

In those cases when you switch the computer on after the power has been off it will ask you to set the time.  But then if you turn it off without turning the power fully off it will hold that time.  IT's only when you turn the power off that it would use the CMOS battery to help it store the time.

The difference is I'm not turning the PVR off, just putting it in standby.

There has actually recently been an announcement that a new on-demand TV thing will be rolling out quite soon and of course my current box doesn't have HD at all, so I'm actually tempted to buy a new box with these other features.  However, in the meantime I've bought some cables that should allow me to connect the PVR to my computer and then do something roughly equivalent to a bios update in the hopes that what's actually happened is software related.

If not and it's something in the hardware it may essentially make the decision of buying a new box for me.