The simple made difficult.....

6:31 am - Friday - May 5th - LPG&RVR - 39° F, 88% humidity, wind 7 mph out of the west.....heavy cloud cover with rain today, and a forecast high of 49° F.  On this date in 2018 TLE and I were staying at the Elks Lodge in Lockport, NY, just across the street from the Erie Canal....we walked into town along the canal to find a place to have a late lunch, and found it......↴

We awoke Thursday to a smattering of rain, heavy cloud cover, and bitter cold conditions, none of which were conducive to outdoor activity.  According to the weather report there would be more rain later in the day, and the contents of our black tank really needed to be disgorged before that rain came.  Nothing too much more unpleasant than dumping your black tank in the rain, except maybe in the snow.  The sun came out briefly around 10:30 am, so I seized upon the moment, and did the deed.  Within minutes after I finished the sun disappeared once again, and the wind picked up....time to be inside the warm, cozy confines of the Newell Salon!

I had barely sat down when the UPS driver pulled up to deliver a package containing a new DirecTV universal remote.  The one which came with our 'new' DVR back in October of 2019 was worn out, and many of the number buttons no longer worked.  I got the OEM replacement off Amazon (in fact I got 2 for the price of 1) for about $25.  The remote I prefer offers two options to communicate with the TV (TCL 32" flat screen in this case)......IR (infrared), or RF (radio frequency).  I prefer the RF as I can use it while outside watching our outdoor TV (also TCL) to change the channel.  Since no line of sight is required, the radio frequency option enables one to change the channel from quite a distance away, and even through the aluminum siding of the Newell.

At any rate, the new remote would not initially communicate with our DVR, which puzzled me, but then I remembered I had programmed the DVR for the RF option, and the new remote comes in the IR mode, so I had to use the old remote to reprogram the DVR to recognize the IR signal, then I was able to use the new remote to access the onscreen DVR menu to change both the DVR and new remote to RF mode.  Once that was done I set about to setup the new remote to control the TV (volume, mute, etc.).....after taking a picture of the manufacturer's label.....

....to extract the Model number....32s301...I ran into a roadblock.  

The DirecTV DVR did not list our model #, and could not find a code in its system for our TCL TV.  Finally I called DirecTV to get help from them, but after 30 minutes we were still unsuccessful, so the guy I was dealing with said he would escalate my problem up the chain of command to see if there was another solution, and then call me back with 1-2 hours.  As I hung up the phone I was pretty sure I would never hear back from him, and it turned out I never did.....lol!

After an hour, or so I began to work on a solution again, by myself.  I went on the internet to look up the various 5 digit codes for TLC Roku TV's and found there were only TWO.  I copied them down, then went back into the DVR menu to manually enter the code, and what do you know?  The first code I entered worked!  Unfortunately, the 3 hours I spent on this seemingly simple 5 minute task are gone forever, but I do have a remote that works for both the DVR and TCL TV, so I do have that going for me....lol.

The rest of the afternoon is kind of a blur, but around 4 pm TLE and I drove our golf cart over to the Clubhouse for our annual, beginning of the season staff meeting.  There are only 8 of us, and I am always amazed at how much the 8 of us get done each week.  We were back home before 5 pm.  I love, brief, to the point office meetings!

Thanks for stopping by!