While I wouldn't claim to be a techno cowboy, I do claim membership in the 21st century. I have three computers, digital camera, flatbed scanner, GPS chart plotter, and a monthly payment to Comcast roughly equivalent to the federal deficit.

But attempting to master my new DVD recorder has reduced me to sniveling despair.

I do my best to keep up in the squirrel wheel of planned obsolescence. VCR tape out, DVD disks in? You betcha. Of course for a while you couldn't record television programs on DVD disks, meaning you needed both a VCR recorder and a DVD player, to keep up with the Joneses, or at least Blockbuster.

But then along came DVD recorders, allowing you to record a TV program on a DVD disk. Nifty! When the price fell to $200 for the Panasonic machine Consumer Reports promised was easiest to operate, I bit. What CR didn't mention was that saying Panasonic is easier than Sony is like saying Attila was nicer than Hitler. Abandon all hope, ye who would record.

My latest gadget looked slick enough, but the box's instructions for hooking it up to my cable box was a complex chart of splitters, triple-wires, and other gewgaws that required a trip to Radio Shack. I began snaking wires behind the bookcase.

Make that three trips to Radio Shack — I was wrongly sold a satellite instead of cable splitter, wrong length of cabling, etc. Like a plumbing project, no? At last, electronic fulfillment! I turned it on ... and now, neither the cable box nor the new recorder worked.

I called Comcast. "The setup you're describing, sir, won't work with our cable box."

I called Panasonic. One hour wait time (memo to self: never get electronics at Christmas) and cheery admission that the boxed installation instructions are wrong. "Sir, you should have checked our Web site."

Turns out that none of Radio Shack's gewgaws, or my three trips, were necessary, had I the good sense to ignore the recorder's instructions and try hooking it up like my old VCR. This is why men don't ask directions.

I did learn to my horror that my television has three video "modes" (why?), one of which works when the recorder is on and another of which is necessary to see the picture when the recorder is off. The recorder, alas, goes off automatically.

That means when I turn the TV on, I may or may not have a picture until I fish out its remote and change from one video mode to another. (With my cable-box remote, I now need three remote controls for one TV.) Similarly, I may or may not see the recorder on-screen menus, depending on which mode I last managed to actually view TV on.

After four days of experimentation, I once again, sometimes, had a television picture, having worked my way back to 1975 technology or so.

We won't mention the two power outages since Christmas, and the blinking midnight clock of doom.

Actually recording a program was more of a challenge. The instruction manual is 48 big-pages long, including six pages of troubleshooting tips clearly designed by CIA torture experts to break down al-Qaida detainees. Going page by page, I spent an hour trying to program in something called VCR Plus guide channel settings, only to discover I don't have them and everything I'd done was a complete waste of time.

It also turns out that unlike VCR tapes, there is more than one kind of DVD disk: DVD-RAM, DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW, at least. I have no idea what the differences are. There are 25 other kinds of disks — 25! — listed in the manual that cannot be played. Panasonic has a two-page chart outlining choices that is about as comprehensible as the FEMA field guide to Hurricane Katrina.

Moreover, some disks will work only if they've been formatted, like an old computer disk, while others don't need formatting. The recorder's "err" message of futility tells you which is which.

If you want to record a new program over an old one — a simple process with a VCR tape — you need an RW kind of DVD disk, but before you can rewrite it you must format it again, essentially erasing it before you can re-record. Old technology's one step has become new technology's two.

No, three steps! The DVDs will work in other machines only if they've been "finalized," another process at the end of recording that one must hunt down in the instructions.

Being a member of the 21st century, I bravely did exactly that ... and finalized my TV. My recorder locked up in the blue screen of death, and I couldn't shut it off, eject the disk, or watch the recording.

Call to Panasonic: Turns out that DVD disks made outside of the U.S., Japan or Mexico often fail at finalizing, prompting the lockup, which can be cured only by holding down the recorder's dual buttons of mystery, too secret for me ever to reveal.

"But my disks say Fuji. Isn't that Japan?"

"You have to check the small print."

Made in Taiwan! I look at my Costco value packs. They all say Taiwan.

"You should buy Panasonic disks," he says, "except they're really hard to find."

Now the industry wants to introduce two competing new DVD formats, Blu-Ray and HD, that are incompatible as VHS and Beta were, and have the marketplace decide.

Yeah, right.

There is certain serenity in defeat. I know I will never understand what all my remote-control buttons are for. I know that machine features like "time slip," "flexible recording" and "chapter operations" are for minds greater than mine. I know engineers are laughing that I even tried.

But by gum, my new recorder does one thing very well. It keeps dust off the cable box below it.

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