Every day my job requires me to think about how my company's products are marketed, not just what software we build and how we build it, but how the solutions will be positioned in the market and what messages will be created to make them desirable to potential buyers. You might think this would lead me to question the marketing of products that I buy as a consumer. You would have been led astray if you believed this.

Take, for instance, the most recent electronic addition to the household: the Comcast DVR. I have lusted after Tivo for a couple of years, but waited until Comcast had one that was integrated with their digital cable system. As soon as I was notified that DVRs were available in my area, I researched them and signed up to have one installed. This is where marketing and reality begin to diverge.

The Comcast web site links directly to the Motorola web site for the DVR box/boxes (this distinction between singular and plural will be important) they market. The Motorola site lists two boxes - a single tuner box and a dual tuner one. The dual tuner box allegedly allows you to watch one program while you record another, different program *at the same time*. When I called Comcast to set up the appointment to have the DVR installed, I specifically asked the customer service rep which box they install. She informed me, in a very authoritative tone, that they had used the single tuner boxes during the trial period while they were test marketing the DVR, but that now they exclusively installed the dual tuner version. Simple-mindedly, I believed her. Little did I know that she was just a tool of Comcast's vast marketing army.

We had the DVR installed a couple of weeks ago and noticed several "features" immediately:
1. Changing channels involves a multi-second lag. This may not sound like much, but when you're used to transitioning from one channel to another with no delay, this is disconcerting.
2. The DVR, because it contains a hard drive, makes a constant spinning noise. Not really unpleasant, but marginally distracting. The cats do, however, seem to find it soothing and spend a lot of time sleeping directly on top of it.
3. There is no apparent way to display the channel guide for channels other than the one you're watching in the small bottom-of-the-screen window, unless you go to the full-blown channel guide that takes over the entire screen. Because the installer did not have a manual for the DVR (other than a grubby, single page that looked as if it had been faxed and copied many times), there is no way to look this up.
4. And finally, the one feature that I had been assured was present, that made me move beyond my decade-old VCR, the ability to record and watch different shows at the same time DID NOT WORK! The message came on the screen that in order to change channels while recording, the recording would stop. What the fuck?! Did the customer service rep just make up that story, or had she been brainwashed to believe it?

I've sent two emails to Comcast, but have not heard a peep in return. I did look into Tivo and discovered that, unless you have two Tivo boxes or two cable boxes or maybe you need two of each, you cannot do this with Tivo either. There is a lengthy explanation on one of the Tivo message boards about this, in which the author of the post explains that in two years of using Tivo he has never found this necessary because the channels he watches (PBS and premium movie channels exclusively) always repeat the shows he wants to see and it will only be a problem for the trailer trash out there who watch excessive amounts of commercial TV (I may have embellished that last part a little).

So Comcast will be getting a call tomorrow to come get their DVR and not to bother me again until they can guarantee the "watch and record different shows at the same time" feature is actually built into the DVR. Unless they want to give it to me for free, that is.

Books: Therapy by Jonathan Kellerman. Competent police procedural, but nothing especially memorable. Relatively complex plot. Is it just me, or is anyone else bothered by the "perfect girlfriend" syndrome that afflicts cops/psychologists/private investigators in books like this? These are the women who are gorgeous, have IQs of at least 160, are at the tops of their profession, and never eat more than a single lettuce leaf (which they chew very slowly). Maybe just one flaw could be introduced? A little phobia or compulsion or fetish even?

Ten Big Ones by Janet Evanovich. I only read her novels because they're set in Trenton, where I was born and where various members of my family spent many years. Mindless entertainment. To be fair, Stephanie the bounty hunter has two semi-perfect boyfriends: Morelli, the Italian cop who is safe, steady and (mostly) sane, and Ranger, the melt-in-your-mouth bad boy. They do, however, each have flaws - Morelli has a temper and a strong chauvanistic slant and Ranger operates a hair outside the law most of the time. And they both eat more than lettuce.

I Am A Pencil by Sam Swope. I just started this, thinking that I should add a little non-fiction to my steady diet of calorically empty novels. It's the story of a writer of children's books who works with a class of elementary school children for 3 years as their writer-in-residence. (I did try to read Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of Reality, but the writing style simply didn't allow me to wrap my mind around the concepts he was attempting to explain.)