TiVo just bought another six months in the Bay Area as once again Comcast couldn’t get its act together for a planned Q1 rollout of its new DVR service. Comcast now plans a ‘late summer’ (read Q4) rollout. With the Bay Area hosting one of the most tech-literate populations in the U.S., it is maddening when Comcast repeatedly decides to screw their customers with delayed and ‘limited’ rollouts. It is almost as if they want people to switch to Satellite. Satellite services in the Bay Area already sport a full-complement of HD stations (Comcast lacks CBS) as well as DVR/PVR devices.

Luckily TiVo has extended their $50 rebate program through January 2004. So those 40GB and 80GB units at CostCo may be the closest that Comcast customers will come to DVR/PVR service this year.

When and if Comcast ever gets its act together, the DVR unit will be Motorola’s DCT6208. It will be able to record standard as well as HDTV cable signals, though only 8-10 hours of HDTV recording. The DCT6208 features a full array of I/O ports like Ethernet, S-Video, YpbPr, USB, firewire and DVI, but expect Comcast to cripple all of them except YpbPr, even the now standard HDTV DVI port, just to make things more infuriating. Expect the DVR service to cost an additional $10/month with no cost associated with the Motorola box. Compared to buying a TiVo and then spending $12.95/month for program schedules, expect Comcast and Cable TV DVRs (which don’t use TiVo technology) to eventually wipe out TiVo regardless of how slowly and poorly the cable companies manage their DVR rollout.

Yes, XML is the big addition to Office 2003, but until everyone else starts using it, it’s really only good for inter-office materials. But for me, there are two big improvements in Outlook 2003 that make the purchase worthwhile. The first is the new movable reading pane. I kind of like it over on the right. The second is that the export function no longer barfs with my three IMAP accounts. I regularly export a mailbox with new bounces for a newsletter I manage, and through Outlook XP, the export function would hang as it inventoried and did who knows what else to all my IMAP folders. In Outlook 2003, it doesn’t try, which is the behavior I want.