Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Traveling in Dreaded Real Time

Traveling can be fun and enriching.  Exploring new venues.  Seeing new sights.  Sampling new foods, meeting new people, daring new adventures.

But traveling, whether for work or fun, can be tiring. There always is something from home you wish you had with you that provides comfort, whether it is your own bed, comfy pillow, or ratty sweatshirt.  Maybe the dog who greets you at the end of the day with a happy wag. Or having a washer/dryer close at hand in the event of a mishap. Even the choice of clothes one's own closet offers which is not available in the space of a suitcase.

I love to travel but there is one thing I miss from home more than all the other comforts combined: TIVO. or more accurately, my digital TV recorder.  I don't watch all that much TV, whether at home or on the road.  But at home TV viewing is never in DRT (Dreaded Real Time).  I don't even know when the shows I watch actually are aired.  My digital recorder records them and I watch them, "buzzing" through commercial interruptions whenever I need a fix of some TV show.

The problem is not that I am missing some particular show.  TIVO, or generic TIVO, is on the job recording any show I may want to later view.  While traveling, at the end of a long day of sight-seeing, for example, if I should need an NCIS "fix", chances are at any given time a re-run of that show is on some channel.  The problem is, that and most other shows are subject to long commercial interruptions. By the time I sit through several minutes of commercials I either have lost interest in the program,  fallen asleep or both.

Even on commercial-free cable channels, such as HBO, if you do not have a digital recorder you have to actually know when the program is on and be there at the TV to watch at the appointed hour.  Either way, you are living in DRT and subject to the schedule of the television broadcast rather than it being subject to your schedule.

Without a traveling-TIVO TV is just too demanding.

DOROTHY'S IDEA OF THE DAY: Why not have a portable device that allows a person to access the shows he or she has recorded on a home TV recorder and watch them while traveling. Or put a DVR in hotel rooms so travelers can record something worth watching when they return to their room after a long day. The hotel even could let you set up your list over the Internet before you got to the hotel.

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