Finally, the latest sign that computers now rule our lives, via the Wall Street Journal:
"Basil Iwanyk is not a neo-Nazi. Lukas Karlsson isn't a shadowy stalker. David S. Cohen is not Korean.
"But all of them live with a machine that seems intent on giving them such labels. It's their TiVo, the digital videorecorder that records some programs it just assumes its owner will like, based on shows the viewer has chosen to record. A phone call the machine makes to TiVo, Inc., in San Jose, Calif., once a day provides key information. As these men learned, when TiVo thinks it has you pegged, there's just one way to change its 'mind': outfox it.
"Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described 'straightest guy on earth,' he tried to tame TiVo's gay fixation by recording war movies and other 'guy stuff.'
"'The problem was, I overcompensated,' he says. 'It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich.'"
Our machine, if we had one, might have trouble with a news junkie who likes "Sex and the City."
