You’ve heard ‘em all say, “Never give up!” (though the next line, “unless you are looking down the barrel of their gun,” is usually omitted.) Well, we took that to the extreme today.
As you may not know, we aren’t huge Reality TV watchers, but if there is one reality show we do watch, it’s the original reality show, Survivor. We’ve only missed 2½ episodes since it began. Anyway, after the latest season ended, we heard that Mark Burnett (the producer of Survivor) was making a show that you probably haven’t heard about: Pirate Master. We decided to give the program a shot, only to find that it was a cannon with a short fuse. However, we had already seen a few episodes of it so we couldn’t stop. (Why? Even though it stunk, we had to know how it ended!)
About halfway through the series, CBS canceled Pirate Master due to low ratings. However, they continued to release a new episode online for suckers like us who had to see all 14 episodes. So every week for the past four weeks, we’ve been watching the show that way, through the computer.
. (When it’s online, the show is split up into 4 parts separated by an ad). So that’s what we’ve been doing once a week. for the past 4 weeks.
This week, an awful problem started as we were watching the latest episode. Every minute (or less), the video would have to buffer (i.e., download) which took ten seconds. Just when you got back into it, a-buffering it went! We found that if we paused it, we could get the buffer to fill up and then have it play uninterrupted. This worked well until there was about five minutes left in the show, when the buffering started again. Luke paused it but inadvertently started the whole thing over again. Augh! (Or should I say, “ARRRRRR!!!!”) Getting back to where we were would take ten minutes because we’d have to sit through the ads, which you can’t skip over!
However, I decided to try. It took some time but I got back to where we left off. I had accidentally went a little too far though, so I moved the slider and that screwed it up and made it start over! Luke said we could just look on Wikipedia to see who got “cut adrift” (voted off) but that didn’t seem to fit the spirit. Luke went and looked it up anyway — though he managed to not spoil it for me as I threatened to look and see how the final Harry Potter ended. Mama went to take a bath and Papa went to get some food and Luke went to do something else so it was up to me to queue it up.
It took 40 minutes and I had accidentally started it over several times but each time it restarted, it just made it all the more important that we see the end. I finally decided that once I got to the last part, I wouldn’t use the slider to queue it up to the exact minute (which is what screwed it up). So, once the last part came, I just let it play and six minutes later, we (except Luke) gathered around and saw the end.
Ah . . . It was worth it!
well if Luke doesn’t want to know Darth Vader is Harry’s father, then I won’t tell him.
I know all about the NBC buffer thing. I used to watch NBC’s Black Donnellys (which was canned) and watched so of them on web and like you inadvertently high the wrong thing and started all over from the start and then try to skip ahead over shoot where I wanted to stop.
ya just can’t win.