If you know a certain show always runs over, you can set it up to start early and stop late. It's quite simple.

That's true. But one of my very few areas of dissatisfaction with the TiVo is that there is no provision for having programs start late or stop early.

Why would anybody want to do that, I hear you cry?

Because in my neck of the woods, the local television stations are so incredibly unprofessional (I don't have satellite or cable) that it is absolutely the norm for them to be running five to nine minutes late by the time 10 pm rolls around. So if there is a program I want to record on a different channel after Buffy, and I know that Buffy will be running about 6 minutes late, I can't set up a season pass to just start that program six minutes after it's nominal start time.

I would much rather miss the first six minutes of a program than the last six minutes, especially when chances are that the "first six minutes" of the program will really be the last six minutes of the preceding one on that channel.

This seems like it would be an easy enhancement for the TiVo software writers to do, they just probably never thought of it.

tanstaafl.