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need to have the bugs worked out before I want to get behind ‘em. I would n’t be nearly as an early-adopter of the new gee-whizzes as I am if it weren’t for Mimi. As long as they keep making what Garth Ennis calls the “wee notebook” and something to write in them with, I won’t be getting a Palm Pilot, for example.

But the missus really wanted the TiVo, so there you go.

So, she brings it home, and spends an afternoon setting it up. "Hah," I think, "it takes three hours to set up? What a piece of crap." Until she explains it's getting info downloaded from the TiVo mothership, or some thing, and that the two or three hours set up only has to be done once, and it's basically a computer, and that's how long it took to set up the G4, so I should just shut up. So I put on some tea, smugly, thinking that she was wasting her time with this thing that, even if I had heard some glazed-eyed techies talking about it in worshipful tones, could not possibly be as cool as they said it was. So we read the documentation on their website, and I had to admit that the set-up interface was very approachable, and I found myself going from "get that away from me" to “cautiously optimistic” about it. Then, we set it up to record The West Wing , and Will and Grace (I lust after Debra Messing and will watch any stupid thing she's in), and Farscape and That 70s Show and Dennis Miller Live. And it started recording Prey for me, because it stars Debra Messing. And The Invisible Man because it thinks I should watch it. Oh, I love my TiVo. Love it love it love it. I actually spend less time watch ing TV, instead of more, because it's only stuff I want to watch, ready for me whenever I damn well feel like watching it. It is a little black box of heaven made just for me. TiVo; oh, I love you. Which it gets, every episode, with me not telling it again.

The next thing, seemingly unrelated, is the whole deal with Napster, of which I’m sure you’re well aware.

Napster, you’ll recall, is an application that allows users to trade music files over the Internet. The two sides of the question seem to be the “Information should be free” folks, and the “This is obviously copyright infringement if not outright theft” people.

As a guy who produces copyrighted entertainment for an audience, it ought

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