The new frontier of technology

A week and a half ago, Stacie showed me the pilot episode of Heroes. Since then I have been a woman possessed - I simply must watch every episode that has aired, then glue myself to the couch every Monday night until May and watch every episode that will be aired in the future.

So I'm doing it the sucker's way - by downloading the first eight or so episodes through iTunes at two bucks per 45-minute episode. I figure the cost-per-minute is expensive compared to, say, oxygen, but a bargain compared to playing the ponies. Plus, I want to try that thing where I display my computer screen on my TV. It's so very 21st century.

So I went out to the Apple store and picked up the cord thingy for video, headed over to Radio Shack and bought the other cord thingy for audio (and endured attempts to sell me the expensive, gold-plated Monster Cable version of my cord thingy, plus a cameraphone - as in, no joke, "While you're in here picking up your $8 cable, do you need a cameraphone?"), and went home to test it.

It. Is. Awesome. The audio is great (not that it's hard to beat the audio from an iBook) and the video cable works perfectly. I can't wait to try it out on an HDTV.

So then I get on the iTunes music store to buy my shows. I've never actually downloaded a TV show before (haven't tried a downloading program since Gnutella, which never worked on my iMac in college), but it's the iTunes store, so of course it is simplicity itself. I click "Buy Episode" ...

... and the download time pops up: 5 hours.

Five hours?!?! Seriously? I haven't had to wait five hours for something to download since I was scouring AOL for Sailor Moon AVIs over 28K dialup in high school. Is this what it normally takes to get 45 minutes of video that still looks good on a 27-inch screen, or does my connection just suck?

So I've been buying the episodes two at a time, right before work or sleep. When I get home tonight, barring some sort of connection failure (which happened yesterday), I'll have them all save the one from this week, which is currently streaming for free on the NBC website. Then the agony inherent in being a slave to a TV show can truly begin.