Cable guys are here, very nice. They dismantled the existing box, then tested my cable connection.

After that, he installed the multistream card (into the correct slot). He had to call dispatch and do some sort of signal and number dance. We saw an “Acquiring channels” yin-yang spinner for a bit, then everything went gray. We were waiting for an error message, but nothing happened.

Eventually, he hit the tivo button to go back and poke around. All the backgrounds on the tivo are now gray. He is now trying a second card. But didn’t ask for signal which seems more than a little wrong. then he switched back to the original card and rerequested a signal.

I am no longer hopeful. He is puzzled to an extent that concerns me.

WOOT

After more fiddling, the tivo repowered itself into the sunrise “Welcome! Powering up…” screen

This could be good right?

OMG it is good. After rebooting I was getting signal to all channels, including the premium and HD stuffs. This took about 45min start to finish. Not too bad. They even didn’t mind my cats helping* with the recabling, helping* them use their cable testing equipment, or helping* to write down 30 digit numbers and transmitting them to the

(* helping: Cody stalking the dangling cables, pressing the buttons, and batting the pen while writing. Pumpkin observing from on top of the TV by licking the gel out of the cable dude’s hair.)

I AM LUCKY. I WIN I WIN!

Still have to repeat guided setup, then hopefully my Tivo will make SPIRIT FINGERS ON JAZZ HANDS.

The guided setup asked me new questions about my premium channels, then went to make the network call. The “Preparing” initial step of this took MUCH longer than before, but the rest was pretty blazing. “Loading info” will probably take a good deal longer.

Um… ok in the midst of the “Loading data” spinner (only at about 20% complete), I got automatically thrown back into the creepy “This screen displayed on behalf of your cable provider”. My only options are refresh and exit. The cable installers are gone. What to do? I’m going to go with exit. Yikes. I hope this is the right choice.

That took me back to the Getting Program Info screen, and the loading is still in progress. Eventually this finished up, and everything seems to be in working order (although it only snagged the first 24 hours of programming, rather than the full monty. Is that a download thing, or a database optimization thing? Whatever. Hopefully back to normal++ tonight. Time to go to work.