Small Victories

Time Warner updated the operating software on all of their cable boxes in my area this week. It happened to the standard-def box I have in my bedroom first, and I was quite annoyed when it happened because it managed to delete (seemingly randomly) about 2/3 of the scheduled series recordings I had set up.

This morning, I noticed my HD box in the living room had been updated. Same annoying problem. But, a new behavior out of the cable box: on non-HD channels, instead of putting up stupid, ugly gray vertical bars on either side of the 4:3 picture to make it fit in the 16:9 window, it now outputs solid black bars. I might actually be able to watch non-HD programming on that expensive TV without wanting to throw things at it. Like I said, it's the small victories...