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TIVO’S BIG SELLING POINT for many customers was the idea that they no longer needed to live their lives according to the TV schedule. What many failed to realize is the entertainment glut that is created by saving so many favorite programs.        “I love my TiVo and get separation anxiety when I spend too much time away from it,” said Cori Martinelli, an economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in San Francisco.        She catches herself worrying, “Gosh, did (the show) record OK? Is something being deleted before I can watch it?”        The TiVo digital video recorder, a videocassette recorder-sized black box that attaches to the back of a TV, functions like a computer hard drive, storing programs the user has scheduled to record. It allows users to fast forward past commercials, and pause and rewind shows as they are broadcast.        The hard drive comes in 40-hour or 80-hour versions. The larger size stores about 80 hours of recordings on the lowest quality picture setting, 50 hours on the medium quality setting and 25 hours on the highest quality setting — roughly the equivalent of 16 to 53 90-minute movies.        Fanatical TiVo users complain that their TiVo quickly fills up with shows they can’t bear to delete, from self-improving educational fare like “NOW with Bill Moyers” and “Chimps: So Like Us,” to less cerebral programs such as “Sex and the City.”        Like an ever-growing stack of magazines on a coffee table, the TiVo glut promises many enjoyable hours of entertainment. But the sheer amount is also overwhelming.        Many TiVo users say they bought the device thinking it would allow them to take greater control of their TV watching. Instead, they find themselves burdened with another obligation in their already filled day.          ‘I get to the point now where I skip going to the gym so I can keep up with watching “Dawson’s Creek” reruns.’ — KEVIN COTO TiVo user                Kevin Coto, a financial systems consultant in New York City, can relate.        “I get to the point now where I skip going to the gym so I can keep up with watching “Dawson’s Creek” reruns,” which are broadcast for two hours each day, he said. “I look forward to when they end so I won’t be stressed.”         ‘TIVO MISER’        For something designed to solve a simple problem — making recording TV shows easy and reliable — TiVo has created whole new categories of need.        For example, sometimes the show recorded is different from what was supposed to be recorded, usually due to local network scheduling changes or the occasional baseball play-off that preempts regularly scheduled programming.        Only TiVo fans know the radical disappointment of settling in to watch a recording of, say, a biography of actor Johnny Depp, and discovering that TiVo has captured a kitchen knife infomercial instead.        TiVo obsession can reach the point where viewers routinely turn the device on just to do maintenance tasks, such as saving shows due to expire that haven’t been viewed or deleting duplicate shows recorded just in case the original was not recorded.                  Bedard rates himself a “TiVo miser” because he records programs selectively and is quick to delete them so he has plenty of room on his hard drive for new recordings.        “I always want to make sure I have the maximum amount of hard drive space in there so if I ever have to go four days without watching I’ll have enough room” to store them, he said.        Bedard said he also frequently worries about missing “that last blurb” on his favorite sitcom because some shows run over time. TiVo users can set the device to record programs one to five minutes longer than their scheduled finish time.        There are companies that offer disk drive upgrades for people who want even more room for recordings, and a few customers have more than one TiVo in their homes, said Brodie Keast, senior vice president and general manager of TiVo Service.        Despite the tension TiVo can cause, customers say they can’t imagine life without it.        “I thought the whole thing had gotten erased one time and I completely freaked out,” said Coto of the thought of losing all the shows he has saved on his TiVo.        “I was going to be in mourning for the programs I lost. But also, if the box was broken I would have to go out and buy a new one right away,” he said. “I can’t see myself going a week without it.”                © 2003 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.         5:39:40 PM

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Online Role Play Simulation Design - 2. This is the second of a series of posts on creating online role play simulation. The first post on how we normally run an online role play simulation is here. In this post, I shall describe how to create an engaging and effective online role play simulation. Role play simulation is similar to Problem-Based Learning (PBL) with some similarities and differences. In role play, we create an By noemail@noemail.org (Albert Ip). [Random Walk in E-Learning] 10:43:44 AM

Associative thinking through blogging. In almost all cases, structured learning activities work better than unstructured. Giving students a goal, an expected use, or a desired outcome frames what the student is to do and why it is beneficial. A studenta£á?s personal blog/journal probably would not meet the learning goals established by a thorough educator. and continue to suggest: ...the type of guidance that Charlie sets; i.e.: use By noemail@noemail.org (Albert Ip). [Random Walk in E-Learning] 10:42:23 AM

OneLook Reverse Dictionary. OneLook's reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. The other services from the website includes: Define words: Type a word into the search box on the front page to retrieve a list of dictionary web sites that define that word. Be By noemail@noemail.org (Albert Ip). [Random Walk in E-Learning] 10:34:18 AM