Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

And, later I saw on my screen the message that my Digital Cable Service had been disconnected, and the number to call. Only I couldn't get through...the number was busy, and stayed that way for quite a while.

Not a total loss, I have ReplayTVs...so I had other stuff to watch while I was waiting for a sign. I also noticed that my regular STB was also doing the same thing, so that meant I probably wasn't recording The Screen Savers like I would expect it to. I switched over and confirmed, so I deleted the recording.

Didn't think to check the beginning to see if the 'outage' started during the show. wouldn't surprise me, last year I missed an episode because they did some kind of software update right around 7pm.

Later, sometime after 9pm, I noticed that the HD DVR was recording...."Las Vegas" from NBC HD. But, it was still showing the disconnect message and scrolling the please call stuff.

Then around 9:30pm, I saw that my regular STB was working again and did a quick check and confirmed that I could receive digital content again. But, the DVR wasn't working.

I thought that since it is showing the disconnect message, it probably won't hurt to reboot it. That didn't help. So, finally I decide to call the cable company. Suddenly there was a live person on the call, guess after the system pulled up my account info they knew what I would be calling about.

She explained something about a recent software upgrade and it disabled everybody's boxes. And, that it would just take a second to hit my box and make it work again. And, a few moments later it was working again.

Surprising thing was that the show that started recording at 9pm....did in fact record and was mostly there. Except an interruption from the reboot, another from the hit, and well, not knowing that this would be the case...I cancelled the recording at 9:44pm.

Not a big lose, I have the same show recorded in 'standard' from analog cable and again in 'medium' from down-converted OTA HDTV.

And, so far everything is good again....