I loved the Best Buy salesman's response when I told him I was looking for a High-Def Tivo. He had the sort of "ooo, suh-wheet" kind of response that made me feel really good about it.

So the kid gets the standard-def Tivo and I ebay the Samsung high-def receiver. (If anyone on the BBS wants to make me an offer for the Samsung unit, it's the SIR-TS160, you'll save me the hassle of photographing it and writing up an ebay description.)

Anyhoo, DirecTV's system was down at the late-night time I called to activate the thing, so I couldn't tune satellite stations. I'll get that working in the morning. But for now, I was able to tune terrestrial highdef from my local area and the thing worked great. It even takes the same IR codes that the SD DirecTivo took so I didn't need to bust out the JP1 cable for my 15-1994. Oh, and the secret handshake for turning on the 30-second-skip feature works the same as it always did.

It's funny, I think the 30-second skip might very well have been the selling point that tipped the SWMBO scales in favor of getting this thing. I wanted it as an early Christmas present to ourselves that simultaneously gave my daughter her birthday present (she'd specifically asked for a Tivo for her room). But SWMBO was giving me the raised eyebrow for a while. At one point during the conversation, I'd mentioned that it would give us the ability to skip commercials during high-def viewings of "The West Wing", specifically citing that we could skip: "It's more of a... Sea Foam." Anyone who sat through last week's West Wing without commercial-skipping will recognize that phrase... it got repeated every single commercial break during the entire show.

So far, only a couple of things are disappointing about this unit:

1. It doesn't seem to be giving me terrestrial analog stations like the samsung unit did. It only seems to be listing the terrestrial digital local stations. Anyone know whether this thing is supposed to tune analog TV stations? I thought it had four tuners in it, two of which were for receving terrestrial stations.

2. The Tivo guide and menus are as slow as ever. I expected this because I was told it would be the case. But I got spoiled by the lightning-fast guide and menus on the Samsung unit. I'll be sad to see that go.

But on the good side... I CAN TIVO HIGH DEF NOW! WOOOOOOOOO!