I miss the good old days that you turn on the TV and you watch TV. The design of remote control or TV system or all the connections between them is way too complicated. And Comcast can be the best/worst example.
The remote control is a nightmare; it includes all the poor design that we teach in the textbooks. I bought a used Hitachi HDTV from my friend Gary and I was really excited about replacing my 11” RCA lol. Anyways, after I programmed the remote control, I pressed “All On” button was ready to enjoy the on demand series; hmmm all I got was black screen. Alright, then, debugging: channel 3, check; NTSC, check; scanning channels maybe? DTV maybe? Channel 14 then? I spent 2 hours calling Gary and other friends, and Googling, no solutions. The 11” RCA worked so the cable worked fine. “Not again” I thought, cuz 2 days ago I’d already spent 1 hour figuring out the channel 3 stuff after I accidently switched it to some other channels. I almost returned the TV back to Gary, and then I noticed the TV box was…errrr… not what it’s supposed to be. So I pressed “cable”, then “power”, and viola, it gave me all the on demand series again. Yay!!!
What happened is the remote control has no “error preventable” function. Preventing errors is a basic design principle of products, for example you cannot plug in your USB stick into the HDMI spot cuz they have different shapes; this prevents you from charging your iPod 12 hours for getting nothing. When I hit “All On” I thought I turned on everything, but actually I didn’t. I turned the TV on but turned the TV box OFF at the same time. It happened because when I switched the cable cord from my RCA to the new TV, the power of the TV box was still on. And it’s hard to tell the difference of on and off status from the machine display. OMG and this took 2 hours away from my life??? I really don’t like this. Maybe you IT guys or boys or mechanics can figure this out easily, but NOT ME.
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