Saturday, August 19, 2006

Information Overload – PVR, iTunes, RSS ...

People used to say that they set their video so that it would watch television for them while they were out—releasing them from the bondage of having to sit through hours and hours of television.

The age of the PVR continues this paradigm, but with unfortunate extensions. It was quite easy to ignore an entire tape of recorded shows. (In fact I’ve about six video tapes from four years ago that have never been watched. Some day when I’m brave I may throw them out.)

But the index of named shows on my Tivo scream out for my attention, reminded me of the trash (and goodies) that I’ve missed.

The last episode of the second season of Desperate Housewives was about to automatically drop of the end of the 40 hours of material that our Tivo stores. Looks like a few prior episodes disappeared into the bit bucket while I wasn’t paying attention, as the story has moved on considerably from my last memory of Susan Mayer’s house burning down in a revenge attack.

It’s probably the mark of good drama—even as dodgy as Desperate Housewives—that it still holds together and makes sense as a standalone episode. So many loose ends tied up, and yet so many new frayed strands added to the story arc.

Now to catch up Lost … I haven’t made much progress since the last time I posted back at the end of June.

And iTunes seems to be downloading interesting podcasts faster than I can wade through them (even with fairly harsh pruning). Thanks goodness I haven’t got a decent RSS reader sorted out yet!

Time to deal with the information overload in my life.

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