My TiVo died about three months ago. In the previous months it had “glitched out” a couple times–ceasing to work for no apparent reason. In those cases, power-cycling (turning off and on) the unit got things going again. But this last time, the TiVo box would try to boot, crash, reboot again, crash again, and so on, ad infinitum. The likely culprit is that one the hard drives has died, but in three months I’ve been too busy with other matters to fix it, or even diagnose the problem. What’s more, after three months of not watching television, I came to realize that for the most part, I didn’t really miss it.

Coupled with the fact that cable service was costing me an outrageous $76 a month, and TiVo another $13 a month, I finally decided to drop it all—no more cable, no more TiVo.

So far I’m quite happy with my decision. The $89 a month I’m saving will easily pay for a full set of tires for my Evo (which I’ll need, given how fast they wear—especially with autocross) in less than a year. In hindsight it boggles my mind why I ever agreed to pay so much for television.

Later this year, if the price of receivers comes down a bit further, I may opt to go for over-the-air digital HDTV (high-definition television); a few friends of mine have this and have generally had positive experiences with the number of channels available and the quality of the signal.