Hi Occam,
There's an excellent alternative web guide by StephaneM that you can use to either send notifications of shows that might be of interest, or just set to record (though I haven't tried this yet). It's essential for those of us who live outside the US and use tvxml feeds for our recording info. I believe that recent versions can be also be used in with Snapstream programming data. Definitely worth checking out. More info can be found
here.
Here's a pic of the filter creation screen:
file://www.daleks-of-god.net/btv/editfilter.jpg
Mick.