To everyone in the HARO Family – journalists, sources, advertisers, and friends, thank you for your trust in me, as I wind up in your in box three times every day. I continue to be humbled. Thank you, thank you, thank you. From Meagan, Michael, Karma, NASA, and myself, may 2009 be your best year yet, and may HARO, in some small way, continue to be a part of that.

Quick update to my post of yesterday – TiVo called me last night, noting that they saw my blog post and wanted some more information. When I repeated my story, Paul, the customer service person on the executive team, told me that while they do encourage their customer service reps to stick to a script and be vigilant in how and when they offer refunds, they also encourage them to use common sense, and that the customer service rep should have simply looked at my account, seen how many DVRs I own, how long I’ve been customer, and granted me an exception. He said he’d talk to the customer service rep and explain the difference to her, and would obviously [...]

Here’s my TiVo story – can’t fit it in a Tweet. Been a TiVo customer since 2003. Lifetime Subs on all three accounts. A year ago, I switched to an HD TiVo in the living room, since they were having a promo – they’d give me a year free before I had to buy another lifetime sub. (Remember, “lifetime” in TiVo’s world equals life of the box, not of you.) So I said fine, and at the end of the year, just bill me again for a lifetime sub. ($299.) Guy said it would, and made a note in my account. Today I’m checking my AmEx, and notice two charges of like, $14.03, or some annoyingly small amount from TiVo. [...]

Thanks to @brianshaler for dragging his video equipment over to my office and doing a live cast of the giveaway! You should follow him – he’s cool. :) Powered by BitGravity LiveBroadcast™ var flashvars = {}; flashvars.File = “http://bglive-a.bitgravity.com/bitgravity/brianshaler/testing”; flashvars.Mode = “live”; flashvars.ScrubMode = “normal”; flashvars.StreamGuard = “false”; flashvars.AutoPlay = “true”; flashvars.DefaultRatio = “1.777778″; flashvars.ForceRatio = “false”; flashvars.VideoFit = “automatic”; flashvars.BufferTime = “1″; flashvars.AutoBitrate = “disabled”; flashvars.MaxFallBack = “5″; var params = {}; params.base = “http://bitcast-a.bitgravity.com/player/”; params.allowFullScreen = “true”; params.salign = “lt”; params.scale = “noscale” params.wmode = “transparent”; var attributes = {}; attributes.id = “bitgravity_player_5″; swfobject.embedSWF(lateststable, “bg_player_location”, “597″, “355″, “9.0.0″, “http://bitcast-a.bitgravity.com/player/expressInstall.swf”, flashvars, params, attributes);

Updated: 16:25 12/26 A little history… I’m on Twitter as @skydiver.The morning of December 24th, I figured I could kill two birds with one stone. I figured I could clean out my office, and by doing so, give away via Twitter all the “SWAG” that I’d collected over the year from loyal HARO members, advertisers, and the like. Seemed like a good idea. So the night before, I posted this to Twitter. Within 30 minutes, I had over 400 new followers. Apparently, everyone retweeted, and people who’d never heard of me or HARO started following me in droves. “Cool!” I thought. The next morning, I started giving away some stuff. Some soaps from SkinFree, a surge protector from TrippLite, even [...]