a string of garbled musings.
Posted by antisocialhero on 16 September 2007
This is a post filled with random thoughts. They are random because I deem them to be.
* For the last several years, I have been using Pacific Internet to do my daily wheelings-and-dealings on cyberspace. It has served me quite well. Sure, they have been occasions where I’ve lost my cool over erratic connection behaviour and slow speeds… but for the most part, Pacific Internet has served me well. And for the low price of 56 bucks a month. That’s right, flat fucking fee for a broadband service. Recently, though, there have been problems. Even with the upgrading of the router for the home network, there hasn’t been much difference in connection speed. The network disconnections have been toned down, but still occur too frequently. So, my Dad decided to invest in a new router to go with a free one-year trial with Starhub MaxOnline. The plan promised a faster speed for everything: surfing, gaming and downloading. Unfortunately, it seems that Starhub has only just implemented one of the dumbest fucking things I have ever come across. They have put a cap on how fast a user can load international websites. I don’t want to go into much detail because this whole issue pisses me off so much, but this explains why my downloads have been so much slower with Starhub MaxOnline. And it’s not as stable as Pacific Internet. With PI, the problem with the unbalanced behaviour *could* be either their servers or my router. But with Starhub MaxOnline, it’s clearly THEIR problem that the loading of websites can be so agonisingly slow at times and the downloading speeds are atrocious. However, my Dad fancies Starhub MaxOnline because his work emails come in so much faster than when he uses Pacific Internet. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I have to find a way to convince my Dad to ditch Starhub. Bunch of fucking pricks.
* At last, the fall season for American programming is amongst us. Some of my favourite shows are finally back after the summer break, and a whole slew of new shows are going to premiere soon. Personally, some of the new offerings sound like shit. But there are a select few that do seem promising. I will certainly take advantage of the fact that I have two laptops, this computer and two external hard-drives (more on this later) to help me with the storage. And once I start drawing a reasonable monthly salary, I can begin to buy the DVD collections of my favourite shows (more on this also upcoming). I am personally excited that PRISON BREAK, for example, is returning tomorrow. American time, that is. But whatever. I’m less than thrilled that I have to wait until next February for LOST — my current all-time favourite show — to grace the screens, though. I’m sure than the wait will be totally worth it, after what a smashing third season the show had. Whoo!
* This past weekend, I completely abandoned all notions of being productive and just enjoyed slacking to the maximum. Not too long ago, my Dad went on a business trip to Vietnam and brought back a bunch of shows and movies on DVD. One of them being the first six and a half seasons of THE SOPRANOS. So, with bags of time finally on my hands, I finally decided to tackle watching THE SOPRANOS. Man, such awesomeness. One of the great dramas of our current generation. I sometimes wish I was born in a different time and a different place, just so that I could be part of the mob life. Ah well. One of the other things I had to do this weekend was finally get around to getting my 250GB external hard drive fixed. It suddenly stopped operating a few months ago (and I only bought it last fucking September). A lot of my shows and my entire music library is on that hard drive. So, I contacted this recovery service to help me out. It’s going to cost me four hundred smackeroos for them to retrieve all my data, however. Steep, yes. I’m just glad that the data CAN be recovered. And in time for the new television season, too. Sweet.
* With all the different ways to acquire movies and television shows, one would think that someone like me wouldn’t purchase legitimate DVDs of my favourite movies and shows, right? Wrong. I’m a materialistic person in one sense, and I think having the actual legit DVDs/VCDs of these movies and shows — while bleeding expensive — are nice to have. It’s the sense of ownership that makes you feel good about having a DVD collection. Money’s obviously an issue, but my train of thought is if you can afford to buy a couple of DVDs every now and then… you should do it. Not for contributing to the economy, but to empower yourself. I can’t really explain why it feels good to have these legit copies of movies and shows. It just does.
Okay, good. Got all that off my chest. Now, hopefully, I can get some fucking sleep.
