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.

Music, it is powerful. Everyone listens to music, everyone connects to music. Music is a very effective tool that the media use to hook us. It recently struck me and got me thinking about this that a familiar tune or song can trigger something in the brain to make us think about something else.

One thing is a theme song of a television series. Yesterday, a song that is the theme of a television show my family watch, except me, was on television and it instantly grabbed their attention. They though there was something on television about the show but really it was just a song being used over the top of something else. I found it strange that something as simple as a familiar piece of music can grab someone like that.

After thinking about it, it clicked that I myself do something similar. Whenever I hear a song that has been on one of Apple’s iPod advertisements, I instantly think about the iPod. This is similar for other products but Apple really has me. This is the whole point, they want their product stuck in your head and by using popular, catch music to a greatly done advertisement, they have you hooked.

This also applies of my favourite television show, Heroes. They played a song on the advertisement with a song I hear regularly on the radio and whenever it plays, I always think about Heroes. I don’t care about the song, I don’t listen to the song, but the song triggers my thought, which happen to be my favourite show, Heroes.

Music is a very powerful tool, especially in the media and marketing of products. It can trigger a thought or a memory of something we have seen. Used in a smart way, can really sell a product, whether it be an iPod, a movie, or a television show. This is the media.

Procrastination. Noun. Defined in the Wiktionary as, the act of postponing, delaying or putting off, especially out of habitual carelessness or laziness. This word is a pretty good word to pin to me. I don’t like doing work. I like being on my computer. If I can avoid doing something I will. If I can be on my computer instead of doing something else, I will also. The only time I will actually do something that I want to avoid is if I get rewarded.

One thing that I have been putting of is studying for exams. I hate exams. I hate studying. I’ve actually never studied in my life before because I always put it off. This year is the same, three subjects, I need to study or else I will fail. Even if I do study, I will definitely fail at least 5 papers. I have put off studying every year that I still have to learn the ability of study. Everyone else is studying and mastered it years ago, but not poor old procrastinating me. I’m going to suffer for my laziness

Another thing I have been putting off is this blog. One reason is because blogging means I have to think which means I have to use my brain. I don’t want to have to think about things, I want to rest my brain ofter a long hard day of lazy. You may have noticed that I dropped the posts from daily to every second day. This was because of two reasons. One, I was too lazy to write every day and decided I would much rather skip it every second day and have ten minutes longer to watch a TV show. The other reason is that it is really hard to think of something to blog about. I can’t believe this blog is still going to be quite honest. I would have expected it to die a long long time ago. If this blog survives with regular updating after the new year, I think I deserve a medal.

Speaking of TV shows, I do not know why I download 23 or so TV shows a week. If I was limited to how much I could download, I could easily round it up into the half a dozen or so shows I must have, but because I have an unlimited amount of usage, I end up downloading a big amount of content each week. Why do I do this? For entertainment? To give me something? To make my boring life go faster? Or is it to give me reasons to avoid the stuff I don’t want to do, in this case, homework, study, dealing with issues and my family. Honestly, half of the shows I download I could do without, there is a lot of crap on TV.

This problem I have with putting things off is not going to go away. Its been with me for too long to just disappear. It is in my nature to be lazy and put things off. Procrastination is going to lead me to fail, but hopefully when that time comes, I can put off my failure by doing something else.

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!

We my week back hasn’t been so good. Laptop died as I have already mentioned enough this week, I am stuck to using a annoying desktop computer that is crap and just doesn’t feel personal enough to be my PC. School is really boring and I would rather be at home doing nothing. I managed to watch about half a dozen of my favorite TV shows because this computer can’t play video well. I have a dozen more TV shows that I have downloaded that I need to watch in the weekend. I will have to find time to fit in in because there is a lot going in this weekend. I got my school report and it was extremely average. So my week hasn’t been that great. I can’t believe I am going to click on the publish button, I should just click the red ‘X’.

As I ranted about two days ago, my wireless in my notebook isn’t working.  yesterday I rang Compaq and they told me to do useless crap that I had already tried. I told them I had done it but they insisted that I tried it again. Anyway, without luck, I was told that I would have to restore my system. I backed up my files and waited for the call center to open up the next day.

They walked me through restoring it with their recovery software and I had no luck with that. The software stalled at the par where it re-installs the operating system. I tried restoring from the recovery disc but no luck, same error.  Now I had no way of restoring my computer. The hard drive had been reformatted so there was nothing on the disc. I then had to drop my laptop at the HP certified repair center for them to put Windows Vista back on it and test the wireless adapter and replace if need be.

I have no laptop now and I won’t be getting it back for at up to seven days. That is a long time to wait for her I miss her already. Now I am resorted to a slow, crappy Windows XP desktop. I hate this machine! It will do though, better this than nothing at all. I’m going to have to convert my TV Shows to watch on my PSP because this stupid computer doesn’t play well with Divx. Poor Me!