Can I just time-shift myself?

[c9]

I'm guilted into an employer's-time entry by primary_suspect. Therefore, a rant on television.

Note: I know the answer is get a DVR. So please use your commenting privileges for saying something else.

Last night Prison Break came back. Well actually, it came back a week ago, but I missed it. But I remembered last night. But the details in that show and the fun is seeing the whole season, so instead of watching, I downloaded the episode I missed from last week. Of course now tonight I'll need to download last night's episode.

Sunday night was West Wing. I didn't watch it because I was watching last week's episode. I had missed last week's episode, so I had to download it, but then I forgot to watch it, so I had to watch the old West Wing while the new West Wing was actually on TV. Then I downloaded the new one yesterday. I think. I better check tonight.

Yesterday I was working in our Toronto office, so I took the 100-minute train in. I quickly burned a CD of stuff to watch, thinking I could watch TV on the way to work. Unfortunately, I wasn't paying close enough attention, and I burned two episodes of Arrested Development instead of one West Wing and one Arrested Development.

I downloaded all the episodes of Arrested Development because there are some I haven't seen, and that show also is best served in order and complete.

Tonight I have rehearsal, Thursday I have rehearsal, Saturday I have the Halfway-There-Cast-Party, Sunday I have rehearsal, and by next week I may be further behind on watching new and cancelled TV shows.

I would write an update about work, but it's remarkably similar. Just replace "West Wing" with "Microsoft," and "Arrested Development" with "professional development planning" and you're almost there. :)

Comments

[rebelprince26.livejournal.com]

actually, the answer is not to get a PVR (hey, Canada!), but to not be addicted to television watching. what's going to happen if you miss an episode? is the world going to explode?

i'm not a big fan of television. so if i miss an episode of one of the two shows that i actually watch, i'm gonna be ok. :)

[c9.livejournal.com]

Oh, I am *definitely* not an addicted to television person. The full list of shows I am willing to sit and watch is pretty short, and the list of shows I would schedule around is umm... 0 shows long.

I don't mind missing episodes, but serial drama (Prison Break) or extremely detailed comedy (AD) is just more fun if I know what's going on.

[primary-suspect.livejournal.com]

Do you normally just download the episodes as a video file and watch it on your PC/laptop or do you make VCD/DVDs out of them?

[c9.livejournal.com]

Just watch them on the PC. We have a futon in the room with the desktop, so we can just curl up on it and watch fullscreen.

I sometimes think about making DVDs or whatever, but the effort involved in learning how and actually doing it is pretty high compared to the likelihood of me watching most of them ever again.

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

Yeah, building DVDs is a pain. It actually took less time for me to put together a media PC and put MythTV on it than it did to figure out how to write video DVDs that work on a DVD player under Linux :-)

[heartovmidnight.livejournal.com]

Something else!!!

Hehhehe.

[primary-suspect.livejournal.com]

That is why the next DVD player I get will support DIVX. Many of the torrents are encoded with DIVX anyways so you just throw the files on a CD or DVD as a regular data disc and pop it in your DVD player. It will find an play the files. Very simple, good quality, small file sizes compared to MPEG2.

[simplisticton.livejournal.com]

Wasteful in DVDs though, especially if its not something you'd normally archive. I'm happier with my media PC solution. I don't think we've used the DVD player or VCR in six months.

[primary-suspect.livejournal.com]

That is why they invented re-writable discs... ;-) So you just re-use the same one when you are done watching the shows.