I like to use this blog to occassionally rip into companies that are doing bad, stupid, unnecessary and/or impolite things. It's hardly surprising that there's so much blog negativity but it's interesting. Why is that?

Maybe it's because we expect companies to behave. When they do not behave, it's interesting. When they do behave, it's not -- right? I guess. If you looked at the sum total of the blogosphere, you might assume that all companies are pretty much screwing the pooch in the 22nd century.

The truth is that people just have more fun bitching about things they can't control (in this case, large corporations). It's like one-way online therapy. You get it all out in the open and you feel better. I'm all for blog bitch sessions (though I rarely read them). But blog readers should at least be aware of the skew and why it exists.

How about a positive review?

I have Rogers digital cable and a personal video recorder (PVR), specifically the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300. A PVR is a digital VCR with a hard drive in it -- TiVo is a very popular brand of PVR in the US.

Last week my PVR started skipping every five seconds or so. This affects even live TV because the PVR records whatever program you are currently watching (so you can replay live TV). It started very suddenly and got very annoying, so I called Rogers support.

They put me through the regular "restart the PVR" spiel I had done a half dozen times already just to sanity check me, I explained the PVR was skipping and they told me I could exchange it at a local Rogers Video store.

I did the exchange this morning with absolutely no fuss, got it hooked back up and re-authorized and I'm cooking with gas again. All told, it was very quick. It would have been even quicker if it didn't happen over a weekend that I was away.

Well done Rogers Cable, I'm one happy customer. If you could just cut your prices in half I'd be even happier.