I watch a lot of television shows, 24 to be exact. This is a huge number and it is very hard to decide which order to download and watch. The downloading generally isn’t a problem as long as I have access to premium services but having half a dozen or more shows on queue is pretty daunting. This isn’t such a problem to be honest, because just like everyone else, I have my favorites, which take priority over anything else. I am going to tell you my five favorite shows that I currently watch, in no particular order.

Heroes -This is a show about ordinary people with extraordinary abilities. Oddly enough, this is their slogan. Heroes is a show you have to give a chance. It does start off slow but heats up and gets really good near the end of a volume. Volume One was great but it was a little slow. I though it was amazing though and it turned me into a fanboy of the series. Volume Two wasn’t as good in my opinion but still great. I cannot wait for Volume Three because I know it is going to be mindblowing! You have to check out this show!

Chuck - This show has just been picked up in the fall season and has had a successful first half. I’m going to skip the unusual explanation of the storyline because that is what Wikipedia is for. Other than the “geek culture” stuff they try and put in and the unusual storyline, there is one thing that keeps me coming back for more, Yvonne Strahovski. She is smoking hot in her uniform!

Prison Break -This one managed to squeeze its way into my top five. This television show blew me away with the first season but is steadily declining.To be honest, I think they should quit while they are ahead. The thing I loved about this show was the secrets and puzzles that we witnessed in the show. There is a lot of things hidden and the ingenious way they get from inside to outside the prison was amazing. Too bad its not the same as it was then.

Dexter -This is a new show that has come to my attention this year. All I can say is that I wish I found this gem earlier. It really is a amazing show, one of the best I’ve seen, and it didn’t dull in the second season. I did have a small issue with the final episode of season 2 but overall the show is great and I managed to overlook it. If there is any show I would recommend to anyone at this stage, it would be this one hands down. If you haven’t seen it already definitively get the first season.The most intriguing thing about this show is that it is from the point of view of a serial killer. It is a very unique view, one which is not shown on many other shows.

Monk - Finally, a last minute decision, was this show. I remember seeing this show when I was 12 and I though it was amazing. The thing that makes it that was is the brilliant acting my Tony Shalhoub. The humour is how a person with OCD deals with issues and chalenges with life.This is very amusing for any normal person watching. It really hard to describe this show but it is an intersting watch.

There are quite a few great shows that didn’t make the list. I will whip up an honorable mentions list to include those shows because they are worth it. I can’t put every show I watch on my top five list an it is unfortunate so many got cut. You may disagree with these shows and you are entitles to your own opinion. It would be a boring place if everyone loves the same things. If you haven’t checked out any, or all of these shows, definitely do that as soon as possible, they are well worth the chance. Who knows, you might love them just as much as me.

I watch a lot of TV shows. Some TV shows are good, other are average, some are utter crap, but I’m not going to discuss the quality of television that is currently airing, that is for another post. I don’t watch my TV shows the way that typical people do. You would expect typical people to watch television shows, well on a television. Don’t sound obserd, does it? Well I am not like these people, I am not a typical person, for many reasons, but in particular for the way I obtain my television shows and watch them.

I don’t know whether or not it is true to assume, that more people are not watching television on their television. With computers being able to play video and being great to use as media centers, some people watch video content on there. Also with the huge growth of portable media players, there is another place that people are watching video content. People are watching video, not just on their television, but on other devices. I myself watch most, if not all, of my video content on my computer. But why do I watch it there? Why do I watch my TV shows on my computer, rather than on my television?

There are many reasons behind this. I do not live in America, the place where “all” television comes from. I do not get to see Heroes, Prison Break, or even Lost, when it gets released over there. No, if I want to see it on my television, I have to wait half a year to a year. But the thing is, I can access this stuff freely on the internet. It is so simple for me to just click a few buttons here and there and in no time, I have this television show, hot off the press, on my hard drive ready for me to watch.

Its not only the waiting times, it is also the quality. Over in America, they have had High Definition channels for quite some time now. Over here, nope, no HD channels till next year! So this pretty much means, by the time it does get over here, we get it in average standard definition. Back a couple of years ago, that would have been nothing we could do about it, but things have change, because there is something we can do about it. We can get these shows, in high resolution, 720p, off the internet. They may not want us to but we can do it! I don’t have to put up with second best because I can get better.

There are many other advantages that come with downloading your television shows. One of them is freedom. You aren’t being told when to watch it and where. You can watch it at anytime, as long as you have it with you. You can also watch it anywhere, your computer, your iPod, even your TV. You’ve had your HD television for a while now and you are watching standard definition on it? Well why don’t you play those 720p TV shows on it. Finally, something else you have to take advantage of the full capacity of your television.

There are many ways of obtaining these shows, some legal, and some questionable. If it is available in your country, or you have a way of accessing a store that has TV Show downloads, you can get the shows that way. The problem is, they generally either have ads, are overpriced, and if you save them to your hard drive, the most likely have some for of Digital Rights Management. Another way of obtaining them it through bittorrent, or any other p2p program, or other file sharing sites. This way you can always guarantee free, ad-less, DRM free, high quality video. This is alway the best video and far surpasses any other methods of obtaining television shows.

It is a game of cat and mouse. Networks want you to pay for their shows but they give us a crap deal. We can get it for free, and much better doing other means. If they want me to watch television shows on my television, I should get them the same time as the rest of the world, and in the same quality. I understand that there are issues and it is not necessarily the networks fault that they cannot provide this, but the least they could do is give it to me online to download, legally and without overpricing it and giving me worse quality than I can get illegally. If you wanna beat it, you have to do just as good, if not one up from what is already available to me. I am going to get my television shows in a way convenient to me by all means necessary.

I watch a few television shows a week, twenty two be be precise. Product placement has been apparent in a few of these shows that I have been watching. One show has their sponsors product plastered all over the show where as the others jsut have everyones favourite new phone on the block.

One bad show at the product placement is Heroes. I love Heroes but the advertising of the Nissan was extremely obvious and made me cringe at the fact they let that scene air. They said the brand and the model of the car, and the thing is, they are the company that sponsors Heroes. The second time they shows the car was less obvious but they still made sure the Nissan logo was on the screen long enough to subliminally take it in.

I am also seeing a quite a bit of Apples bundle of joy make its way into television shows, especially the CSI’s. Whenever I see the iPhone, I laugh that they have had to put it into tv, and also that the person using it looks like a total tool. The thing doesn’t look that nice when you see people use it as a phone. It looks like they holding a thin block of cheese to their face. Its quite unappealing. Its nice that in one of the shows where you saw the actually screen of the phone it didn’t even have Apple firmware, it was some random one they whipped up for the program.

I don’t really care about about product placement as long as they don’t make it too obvious. If it is just there and they don’t mention the product by name or make the product the subject of the shot, I’m generally fine with that. I also think its funny that even television producers have to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. I don’t think it would have killed them to leave if for at least half a year or so

And this is the first week of term four over. I though I wouldn’t be able to fit everything into my week but somehow I managed, even with the many obsticles. I have two more tv shows to watch and one more podcast to listen to for the week that that all my media consumed, for this week at least. Having no laptop and having a lot of other events, such at my other commitments as well as my grandmothers 80th birthday,  have been some distractions of the week and I will easily fit everything into a regular week. Because of the week, the posts here have been a bit weak. I promise a couple of post with more in them next week.

Onto another subject, I want to remind you all that this is a personal blog. No news here, just me and my life. If you are not interested in this, please do yourself a favor and unsubscribe from the feed. It sounds odd that someone is asking for people to subscribe, normally people are harping on for people to subscribe and such. To be honest, I don’t care about how many people read this, how many people subscribe here or how many people comment here. If you want to, you are most welcome. I don’t need people to criticize my posts , especially about spelling and grammar. If it bothers you that much, refer to what I said a few sentences back, I don’t need you commenting on grammar errors. If you don’t want to get over it and really must say something that is irrelevant to the topic of the post, email me.

With that out of my system, I will continue to do what I normally do. I hope to get my laptop back before Heroes, Prison Break and Chuck on Tuesday. I hate watching these widescreen shows on a standard monitor. Its amazing how much I miss my laptop. You don’t really realize how useful something, or someone is and how much they mean to you until you do not have them. This is how I feel about my laptop and I hope that she never has to part from me ever again. I miss you lappy!

It had been 11 months since I bought my last external hard drive. All the drives in my house were close to maxing out. Between the 3 hard drives, the external, the one in the desktop and the one in the laptop, there was 30gb of free space combined. Some people would think that is a lot of space, others would say that it is time for a new drive. I knew it was definitely time for a new drive.

The past week, I have downloaded heaps of TV shows due to the releases of the new seasons. I ended up downloading about 25 different shows this week. If each episode is 350mb, thats about 9gb for the week. I would definitely be needing another drive if I planned on downloading full season of each of these shows.

This morning, we were going to the local computer shop to pick up a monitor for the old computer. The previous one had died (and smelt bad too I may add.) We got a nice 19″ LCD monitor, a major upgrade from the 5 year old 15″ CRT display. While picking up that, I grabbed an external drive off the shelf, a Western Digital My Book 500gb. This hard drive will be plenty of room for the next 11 months, hopefully. I currently have plans on getting another drive of double capacity in 11 months time just to start a nice trend.

I copied all the TV shows, movies, and PSP games from my old drive to the new one, leaving only documents and video podcasts to take up space on the old external drive. I really like this external drive too, it is much better than any other one I have seen and tried. It looks very nice and words nice too. The best feature of the drive is that there are no buttons, no switches, it turns it self of with the computer or if you safely remove the drive. This means that I don’t have to worry about powering the drive and such. This would be perfect as a second storage drive for a desktop computer as it would power up and down with the computer without the user having to do anything.

The total of all drives at home now reach 1000gb, which sounds like a lot of storage but really it isn’t. I could easily use it in a short period of time. I am extremely happy with my purchase and would definitely recommend a Western Digital My Book to anyone looking for an external drive. Now I just need to download more TV shows to store on it and need more time to watch everything. Then in a year or so, its time for a terabyte drive for me!

Today was the day I had been counting down to for a few months now. I had a countdown gadget on my sidebar to assist with the counting down the this date. Finally it was here, Volume Two of Heroes, my favourite TV Show ever.

After watching a few of the previews released, I became worried that everything was going to be different from season one. Yes, things were different from season one, including the introduction of many new characters, new heroes. They didn’t really answer the main questions we were left with in season one except for one, are the Petrelli brothers alive. They also managed to add many new questions to the list.

Overall, I really enjoyed this episode of Heroes. I am not going to spoil it for you but if you haven’t already seen it, definitely go and download and watch the episode. If you haven’t seen the first season, you are an idiot, and you should probably go get the DVD set (or download them all for free.) This is going to be another awesome season of Heroes coming up!

Today, season 3 of Prison Break returned. This is the first of many fall shows returning in the next 2 or so weeks. This season of Prison Break doesn’t seem as interesting, or as good as the following season but lets give it a chance. Many new characters were introduced in this episode which leaves me with some questions as well as a little confusion. I am getting the sense that in this season, we will finally see the bigger picture of what is going on. Hopefully they don’t drag this show out for a fourth season because then they are just dragging the horse for a bit too long.