Okay, I think it’s actually heat and not humidity.

A few months ago, I had the same problem with my TiVo. At the time, it was sitting on top of the DVD player. I fixed the problem simply by setting TiVo beside the DVD player instead of on top of it.

Anyway, I’m going to keep track of what it is doing until the air conditioning gets turned back on. And it is recording the choppiness, sadly (I tried transferring the recordings to the computer to watch but if they were recorded when it was choppy, then they were choppy on the computer too).

March 25 - was okay in the morning, became choppy around 3pm, temperature in the apartment was between 85-88F, TiVo’s internal temp was between 43-47C
March 26 - recordings ceased to be choppy around 2:15am (a recording at 2am was choppy, one at 2:15 was not); became choppy again sometime between 10am and 3pm; I reboot at 8pm which cleared it up for about 10 minutes, apt temp was about 83-85F, TiVo’s internal temp was 43C
March 27 - stayed choppy throughout the night; at 7am, apt temp was about 81F, TiVo temp was 40C, reboot; stayed normal until about 3pm
March 28 - stayed choppy throughout the night; at 7am, apt temp was about 81F, TiVo temp was 42C, reboot; stayed normal until about 3pm (noticing a pattern?); at about 7pm, TiVo temp was 43C
March 29 - stayed choppy throughout the night; at 7am, apt temp was about 81F, TiVo temp was 42C, reboot; stayed normal until about 2pm; at 6pm, reboot and taking a suggestion from Ben, I moved the unit out of the entertainment center into the floor, and it has stayed normal since
March 30 - still normal at 7am, TiVo temp was 40C
April 2 - air conditioning is working! TiVo’s temp is down to 37C so I can move it back into the entertainment center

Stay tuned to this post for more *exciting* updates.

Here’s a few posts I found on the subject on TiVo’s support forums that support my theory:
http://forums.tivo.com/pe/action/forums/displaypost?postID=10249072
http://forums.tivo.com/pe/action/forums/displaypost?postID=10180383

Anyone want to donate a fan?

And now for a real update…

Not a lot has really been going on lately.

The apartment complex is being renovated, and they have been working on it since sometime last fall. From what I understand, they fired the first group of people and then hired some new ones. In the meantime, my balcony was closed off for the entire winter, and supposedly they are adding new doors and windows this week. The biggest problem? They shut the air conditioning off.

It is regularly between 85-90 degrees in my apartment during the day, even with windows open. Now, I’m a naturally cold person and I like heat, so while that’s an annoyance, it’s not THAT big a deal to me. The thing that annoys me the most is that the humidity in my apartment is messing up my TiVo. It’s nearly impossible to watch because the audio constantly crackles. It only does it every now and then, but this afternoon it wasn’t letting up (I was able to watch “Splash” this morning without having any problems). I didn’t understand why this was going on at first, so I spent 20-30 minutes googling the problem. And finally I narrowed it down to: it’s too humid. Today is probably the hottest it’s been in here (at least while I’ve been home) so that would explain why it’s being so relentless today (since I’ve had the windows and sliding door open). As far as I can tell, it’s not recording the crackles, so as soon as the air conditioning comes back on (they say it will be on before April 1…still a week away) I should be able to watch the stuff I’ve recorded crackle-free. And I can usually watch stuff at night when it’s not so hot in here. But I was trying to get some sewing done, and wanted the TV on for background noise. And a staticky crackling sound is NOT good background noise.

As for everything else, I went to Michelle’s baby shower yesterday. I took a few pictures, which I’ll add in a little bit. I went and saw “300″ a couple weeks ago, which I recommend. Ben’s birthday is next weekend. MTAC is in three weeks. I’m doing good on costumes (I think). Right now, I’m at: Misa - 100% done, Celes - 50%, Aeris (Wallmarket) - 90%, Terra - 90% (I need to do some touch-ups), Locke - 5% (I’ve bought some fabric and that’s about it), and Cloud (Wallmarket) - 70%. It’s hard to get motivated with it being so hot in here.

I think that’s about all that’s been going on.

If you were ever curious as to how many Sims are in my neighborhood, this post is for you.

I downloaded a Family Tree maker and entered all of my Pleasantview Sims into it. I estimated birth and death years using my self sim as the basis (I put my peer’s birth year as 1980 and went from there). Of course, before I started really keeping track of all my sims, it was a little confusing, which is why you see Steve having children at age 16, but the way I organize the game now is much more manageable, so I can make sure that older siblings are actually older than younger siblings, etc.

Anywho, the program constructed this little webpage, where you can see a list of all the sims. I plan on adding pictures of all of them eventually. http://familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/w/i/n/Jessica-Winn/index.html

And for the true effect, check out this PDF of the entire family tree: http://www.sweetvenus.org/images/2007/03/simstree.pdf

It’s insane how many there are.

Don’t worry, the Wii party is still on. I guess.

On Friday, Wayne was visiting and we all decided we wanted to play Tales of Symphonia (yes, again). So I put the disc in the Wii and turned it on. Nothing. After messing around with it, it eventually turned on, but said that the system was corrupted. Our poor Wii. Of course, we are supposed to have “Wii Party, Part 2″ this weekend, so this was even worse.

Ben called Nintendo and they said they would overnight us a new Wii and then we could ship our old one back. They would then transfer our account to the new Wii, so we wouldn’t lose our points or the games we had downloaded. We bought an SD card and backed up Zelda, WarioWare, and Wii Sports, and put all our Miis on the remotes. We thought we were in the clear.

Out of curiosity, Ben decided to try formating the Wii to see if that helped at all. He came back after a while and said:
(15:28:53) Ben: made it to the option
(15:29:17) Ben: wanna format it?
you sure?
you wanna do it?
yes yes yes
formating…
(15:29:19) Ben: …
(15:29:20) Ben: …
(15:29:41) Ben: system format complete restarting console noEEEEEEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHGG
(15:29:52) Ben: restart
(15:29:54) Ben: nothin
(15:29:58) Ben: restart
(15:29:59) Ben: nothin
(15:30:02) Ben: restart
(15:30:13) Ben: figure i’ll wait a minute (no idea why)
(15:30:21) Ben: push the A button
(15:30:25) Ben: k
(15:30:30) Ben: select language
(15:30:45) Ben: now on this screen i thought it was very interesting
(15:30:50) Ben: it froze almost instantly
(15:31:05) Ben: but right before it did i was able to move the pointer for a couple seconds
(15:31:13) Ben: and somehow it was upside down
(15:31:32) Ben: like as if i had the remote completely turned upside down to make the finger point down
(15:31:52) Ben: now if whatever is wrong with it can make it do that im pretty sure its compltely screwed

But we were content in knowing that Nintendo had shipped out our new Wii already. (By the way, they said that a few of the first wave of Wiis had an issue with the latest update and that’s why this may have happened).

And then….

I was checking on the price of Mario Party 8, since it was supposedly coming out today and I was going to pick it up on my way home from work.

The date got pushed back.

To June.

…

So, we are still having the party. And we should have a functioning Wii. But we won’t have Mario Party. *sigh*