Because we have a commcast DVR box here instead of a real Tivo or my mythtv system setup I have been increasingly frustrated by watching TV. The problem is twofold, the first part is the commercials and the second is scheduling. Back in the day the great thing about having a Tivo was that it had a button on the remote that would skip forward 30 seconds, commercials were basically all in 30 second multiples so we could finally just blow past them. Now with a commcast DVR box there is no skip button, they have fast forward and rewind but that is missing the whole point of having a nonlinear storage system. That is unless you happen to be a sales executive for a company that makes money selling commercials, so you are stuck watching the commercial anyways to make sure you don’t zip past the show coming back on. The other part of the problem is being there when the show is on to watch it, another thing that the DVR is supposed to solve. Unfortunatlly in continuing with screwing up their implementation of a DVR commcast seems to never record what I want it to. It had been weeks since it actually saved an episode< of Heroes or recorded a new episode of the simpsons or southpark before I decided that there had to be a better way.
Watching all the shows I liked on my computer was the better way. It was just sort of a pain though because I would have to go seek out an episode then after waiting for the download I could watch it. Fortunately there is TED. The torrent episode downloaded will keep track of what episode you are on and will search the major torrent sites for new episodes coming out and will automatically download new episodes for you.