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GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist?

— Aaron Sorkin, as Jed Bartlet 

I love this.  Why can’t life be more like “The West Wing”?

oh, how bereft I feel: we have finally completed viewing the entire seven seasons of “the west wing”.  a project idly started on anniversary weekend (end of jan) which has encompassed over six months, and if my maths is right, approximately 100 hours.

the final episodes we watched this week were nearly heartbreaking as we could see the stories being wrapped up, and for about the millionth time we sighed “if only the white house and the administration could be really like that”.

i wish it was still going on - in the same way i wish they were still making “the sopranos” - because the storylines were awesome, the characters rounded and the politics resonated only too well with real events and situations.

if you haven’t seen it, start at the beginning and set aside approximately 100 hours.  next up for us - “commander in chief” and the movie “the american president” i think, although we might slot “outrageous fortune” in the middle as it’s in season 4 and we haven’t watched one minute of it yet.

I’m not a huge TV watcher but now we have MySky which suddenly removes a lot of things that I don’t like about television. Not to mention, Sky means that there is a lot more variety for what we can watch.

MySky is New Zealand’s answer to Tivo - you can record television, mark shows you watch regularly to “series link” so you don’t have to remember to set them to record all the time, fast forward & live pause television. You buy the machine (basically a hard drive) for $500 & then the ongoing costs are just your regular Sky subscription costs.

However, there are a couple of downers about MySky which stop it in my opinion from being an Ultimate Gadget:

• you can’t just set something to record from an ad you’re watching (assuming you even watch ads with this thing) - you have to make your way through the menus to the channel you want & then find the day/time & record.
• you can’t set things to record remotely if you’ve forgotten - a web interface would go a long way
• the error reporting is really crap - the system crashes but still seems like it’s working. The thing is though that when it does that, you lose most of your shows planned to record, but you may not realise unless you’ve checked the list.

So really, MySky is another gadget that should really have beta on it - I am sure they’re planning to upgrade the software so it’s not so buggy (well, you’d hope) but who knows if I’ll ever get my web interface or anything else. A girl can dream though!