One of the beauties of having a TiVo digital video recorder capable of saving more than 100 hours of video is setting it up to record all sorts of movies, and not feeling any serious demand to watch them right away. In addition to our myriad of season passes which catch us up on new episodes, we often give the TiVo an assignment to record movies at all hours - and it dutifully does so without complaint.

Our series one TiVo has been quietly taking down our orders for the better part of four years. In its library, it is holding on to an August 15th, 2003 showing of The English Patient, which I swear I'll finally see someday. It has a July 2005 Oakland A's baseball game, where the ANtics comics were featured. I play that gem every once in a while, when guests come to the house. And today, we unearthed the film Cold Mountain, which had been in deep storage since September of 2005 itself. For more than a year, it had occupied sectors on TiVo's hard drive, and patiently waited for us to watch it. For some reason, we never found time for Cold Mountain in 2006. Yet, today we did, and the picture was as clear as if we had recorded it this morning.

Barring video on demand, where we could, on impulse, order up any feature we wanted, our practice of storing up films on TiVo is the most-flexible way to ensure we always have entertainment on hand - and we aren't forced to take up physical space with new DVD cases or VHS tapes to do it. Too often we take technology's advances for granted. I for one hope I never stop being impressed.

One of the reasons I believe companies like Microsoft, AT&T and Time Warner have been relegated to lesser roles on the Internet, while more nimble companies like Google, YouTube, Apple and Six Apart have led the way, is because they are fighting the battles of yesterday, guaranteeing them a lifetime of looking to steal market share away from an established leader, and never quite catching up.

If you look at Microsoft today, they are still trying to get their hands around a serious Web portal and search engine. Meanwhile Google is increasing share. Microsoft is looking to promote its Live.com blogs network, yet MySpace, Six Apart, WordPress and Google's Blogger platform reign in leadership positions. Microsoft launched Zune to go after Apple's iPod, and it doesn't look like it's gaining any market traction.

But this, really, truly, honestly, wasn't aimed to slam Microsoft too much.

Industry pundit Robert Cringely notes that Google is snapping up scads of dark fibre and is establishing massive data centers around the country, anticipating a time when the demand for rich media will outstrip the available bandwidth to the home. When the collective masses may respond with a shrieking cyber bloodbath, Google is seen as having the only real alternative. Whether his guess is 100% accurate or not, it is another proofpoint showing that when the big companies zig, Google is zagging, using the collective brainpower from its hundreds of Ph.D's to lead the way in innovation.

As I commented to Don Dodge on his excellent blog around "The Next Big Thing", we used to blanche when downloading a 4 megabyte Netscape 1.0 browser download. Now we're all too eager to take on 1.3 gigabytes of leaked 24 episodes.

While today we may be on the cutting edge, it won't be too long before the masses are given the tools to similarly demand gigabytes and gigabytes of data to the home almost instantaneously. When that massive demand for services comes, some companies will be ready, and some won't. My bet is that Google and Apple will be there.

Listening to ''01_nu_train'', by Underworld(Play Count: 5)

For me, one of the undervalued timesavers which I use all day, every day, is Safari's ability to navigate pages simply by hitting Command and a number, to move from sites in my Bookmarks Bar. If you use the Bookmarks Bar to contain your most frequently-accessed sites, in addition to folders, hitting Command-1 will select the leftmost site, Command-2 will hit the second in line, and so on. Now, instead of moving the mouse and clicking on the shortcut, or entering the URL, you can rapidly move through your daily Web surfing.

That's the idea behind my most recent contribution to The Apple Blog, titled Safari Shortcuts a Big Timesaver. Per agreement with them, I will not be cross-posting the piece, but instead, have provided a link. Enjoy.

Living in the Silicon Valley definitely has its down sides. While housing prices are out of this world, and traffic or parking issues can definitely get in the way of a good trip or add frustration to an otherwise positive experience, I still feel a rush when I drive past the headquarters of a company I know, see a gaggle of engineers wearing their company badges, or a license plate frame on the car in front of me that tries to extoll the virtues of Google, Linux, or the latest hardware vendor or .com.

In college, before I got the mobility to drive over the Bay Bridge and down the San Francisco Peninsula, Silicon Valley seemed just out of reach, but I would glom on to anything I could find, whether it was news reports from the San Francisco Chronicle, or Web sites that spilled the details on Yahoo! and Netscape, SGI or Lycos. I would visit the Berkeley Public Library to read biographies on Oracle's Larry Ellison and Microsoft's Bill Gates, and on Sunday afternoons would catch the Silicon Valley News on one of the independent cable channels. I was an outsider yearning to be on the inside.

Then, as my senior year started, I made the leap. I got an entry-level job at a Web-focused startup in Burlingame, and they were generous enough to give me a $2,000 signing bonus to help buy my first car. After taxes, I didn't have all that much, but we got a 1991 Ford Escort GT for $2950, and was finally available to move where I wanted, when I wanted. On my commute to the office, I passed through San Francisco and gawked at the tech-focused billboards, some which bore ticker symbols, in a vain attempt to convince commuters to purchase their stock. On the worst days, I marveled at how sometimes the traffic would stall so badly that those in the cars next to me would be reading the newspaper against their steering wheels, or even shaving with an electric razor. Yuck.

But the real excitement came when I passed beyond San Francisco and got to the Peninsula. Passing Burlingame and on to Redwood Shores and Belmont, the Oracle building complex rose like a phoenix from the Valley floor. The sparkling blue towers were breath-taking - not just because of their beauty, but that they represented the gateway to the Silicon Valley, and a serious challenge to Bill Gates and Microsoft. As I drove further south, I saw signs for Sun Microsystems, National Semiconductor, and scads of smaller tech companies - all of whom said they were hiring, and most of whom said they were pre-IPO. When I drove into Mountain View, all I wanted to see was Netscape headquarters. In Cupertino, it was Apple. Redwood City featured the massive Excite @ Home. Even Milpitas had Cisco. When I went to a movie theater, instead of ads for Wrangler Jeans and Chevy trucks, we saw employment ads from Nortel Networks and startups looking to change the world.

Years later, much has changed. The first dot com crash came and went. Companies disappeared. The traffic problems largely went away, only to flare up now and again, as many hoping to cash in on the gold rush got tired and went back home. Companies merged. Some actually managed to grow and enter the public markets. People I knew at one company moved on to another. And another. And another. Some gave up and tried to be consultants. But the aura of the Silicon Valley, the challenge of out-working anybody else in the world, and delivering technology innovations that change the way people live and do business, didn't go away. Devices got smaller. Devices got less expensive and did more. Web speeds got faster. The engineers and I all continued to gain weight. Time kept ticking.

While I've grown more accustomed to being surrounded by Cisco buildings, and don't follow in awe when I learn that somebody works at Apple, or Yahoo! or Google, the allure Silicon Valley once had for me is still there. Where many geographies have tried to duplicate its unique success, they haven't crossed over. While the technologies and the leaders have changed from year to year, and we've seen bits move from kilo to mega, giga, tera and beyond, I will still drive the extra mile or so to catch a glimpse of Yahoo! headquarters or peek at the vibrant colors of eBay. I'll still look at the parking lots of tech companies and see if the high BMW to Honda ratio indicates that they are doing well. The Valley doesn't just inspire because of its history, it inspires because of its future.