Less than twelve hours till I will be back at school for the final term this year. This is the term that counts, study study study study! It is the build up towards the exams in 6 weeks. These exams will help determine the rest of our lives, fail you’re screwed, pass, you have the opportunity to move on and do better things. This year, I don’t want to screw this up like last year (not that I screwed up as such, I just could have put in a bit more effort to get the grades I should be aiming for.)

The absence of posts the past week have been for various reasons. First was when I realized I only had 5 days left of my break, I though I better use them productively and not leave things left undone when I start back. The second reason is because a mean person (yes, you know who you are) said that no one reads this so there is no point of me doing it. If you agree with this and you don’t read my blog and you think I should stop, feel free to comment I really wanted to continue my posting streak since last month I posted everyday for that month. This month I initially had a partner but he failed miserably on the first day which later caused me to become lazy and decide not to continue. Dam you Peppery!

The first week on my holiday consisted of surfing the internet, talking on IRC and watching the premieres of the fall shows. My intentions were to say a little bit about the shows I watched in a post but I got lazy and the shows banked up. It is really hard to watch 23 TV shows a week on top of all the video podcasts and audio podcasts aswell. That is basically what I have been doing the past five days, minimizing the queue of stuff to watch before I get back to school where they will most likely start to queue up due to the lack of time. I hope I can still say a quick few words on the TV series I have watched the premieres on but I will either procrastinate further, up to the point where it won’t be done, or I will end up writing it at school, which I doubt greatly.

Anyway, that basically sums up my two weeks break. I wish I had one more week, just one more week. I think that next week and the following weeks, right up until exams, my mind is going to implode under all the things I have to do. So much pressure to watch and do so many things, oh and also study on top of that. I guess I will just take it easy and see how it goes. On another note, don’t expect a blog post again! Leave yum9me ALONE! He’s not well right now. You’re lucky he even wrote for you bastards! Hehe

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!

As I said two weeks ago, I pre-ordered my iPod. I did so a few days after the announcement of the new models. On that same day, there were pictures of people in the US with their new iPods. I knew I was going to have to wait a few days for them to get to my country.

Well now it has been exactly two weeks since I have pre-ordered it. Today I went to Dick Smith’s to see if my iPod was there yet since the expected date at the time was the 20th of September. That is a long time to wait for a product that is out everywhere but here. The status on the iPods is that there has been a delay in shipping. This now means I have to wait longer.

This could result in me getting it next month, possibly exactly 30 days after its release date. This would be okay if it was launched like the iPhone and I wasn’t expecting it but I think they someone should be putting a little bit more effort into getting these things to us here in little old New Zealand. Our neighbours in Aussie have probably had them for two weeks now.

But this is not new! We are always the last people to get products (with the exception of third world countries,) no matter what it is. Okay, that is easy to understand. It it can be a lot of work getting a piece of hardware released worldwide in a short time period. It is also just as hard to get software, such as video games released simultaneously worldwide with the PAL and NTSC and languages ect. ect. I have just counter-argued a point I was trying to get across.

Lets move onto to one last thing then, television shows. Why is it so hard for them to be released at the same time as New Zealand (and possibly Australia.) I can watch the show a few minutes after it has finished airing in the US so why do I have to wait a month, half a year, a whole year in some cases before I can watch a show broadcasted on TV in my country?

No wonder people pirate television shows, its because you make us wait so bloody long. Also you try and target piracy by using tactics like offering some shows cheap or making it easy to pay for stuff, but the big problem is, all this stuff is only available in the US. Why can;t you give anything to us international viewers.

It sucks that the world revolves around the US. Maybe I should just move there so I can get in with all the action and getting things on time and as soon as they come out. New Zealand is a great place but it is behind in a lot of things, some of that is our fault but sometimes some things are just out of our hands. It’s not our fault we have a tiny population and we are insignificant to the rest of the world.

Today was the last day of term 3. Now I have 2 weeks holiday to waste on the computer and internet. I can use this time to watch some video that I have put aside because of my busy schedule. It will be good to check more shows off my list, but at the same time, more are going to be added because of the fall shows coming out. Eventually, when school is back, the videos will be coming out faster than I can watch them, which is going to be troublesome.

Next term will be finishing off the school year and revising on everything covered this year as we prepare for NCEA external exams in November. Time I should probably studying will probably used watching TV shows since I will struggle to fit them into my schedule otherwise. At least after all the hard work (if I do it) will pay off and them I will get a well deserved 2 months off.

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.

Now it is time for two of my favourite TV shows (I have a lot of favourite shows) to go into Hiatus for the Summer. Monk and Psych aired their 9th episode of the season yesterday and are now having a break and returning back in the middle of January 2008.

Monk was unusual and wasn’t as good as it normally was. It was very random and confusing and didn’t have the same “interesting” case(s) that it normally did. Still worth watching but it didn’t meet up to its normal standard. What Monk lacked, Psych had. It was a great episode, the best out of all the episodes that have aired to date in my opinion. The last scene was something that had been building up in the series for a long time now. It was somewhat expected but the creators put a spin on it and made it interesting by making something that was nothing happen, which we pretty funny and well done.

Well now these series are having a break, it will free up 1 and 1/2 hours a week. It can make room in my schedule for the other shows that are returning in the next few weeks. I could also save another hour by only watching Diggnation once a week but is that really necessary?