You notice your cable box turned itself off last night, and when you power it up and notice the on screen menu is slightly different, so you spend the next ten minutes going over every single menu to see what is new.

And yes - I did that this morning. As far as I can see, all that changes was:

• Confirmations for deletes. Ugh. I call this the idiot option. I hit delete because I want to delete.
• On your list of recorded items, items you haven't watched yet are bold. Just like my email client. Now that I like.
• Tips. So normally the first thing I do with an application that has tips at startup is to disable it - but I'm really curious to see what kind of tips my cable box would have.
• Last but not least, there is some new menu item for Notifications. I'm not sure what they will be, but I'm sure they will be interesting and informative. Ahem.

Oh - I forgot to mention. There is one feature I'd kill for. My very first Digital Cable box in California had a wonderful feature. You could remove channels. Not only would the channel go away if you were moving up and down the selections, it went away from the guide. I was able to get my guide down to a very short list of channels I cared about. No BET. No CMT. No Senata channel. I have yet to see this feature again. Sure you can skip channels, but it only works if you are moving up and down. Who does that now?