The New Fall 2009 Season to Begin Soon!
v-cast
Luckily, I was able to attend Comic-con this year, so while I was unable to attend most of the pilot screenings, I was able to catch the entire ‘V’ pilot, as well as glimpses of the new shows “Vampire Diaries”, “Eastwick” and “Flash Forward”. At the end of last year’s season, both season premieres of “Caprica” and “Glee” were shown.
I do feel that it’s a mistake that networks do not have any leaked pilots this year. Having seen the entire pilot of “V, I’ve been telling everyone that they need to see it. However, not knowing much about other shows, I haven’t really told anyone that they needed to try and watch anything else, which I have done every year. However, I have read and heard from various sources about which shows are worthy to watch.
For a fairly complete season premiere calendar:
TV Squad’s complete schedule or Clique Clack’s schedule (You can even add it into your Google Calendar!)
NEW SHOWS … that I am looking forward to this season:
V, a re-boot on ABC – I’m a sucker for alien invasions, and judging by the pilot, looks to be well done and very entertaining.
Community, NBC – I have heard nothing but good things about this show, and with Chevy Chase leading the pack, it certainly sounds promising.
Durham County, ION – This show, imported from Canada which in addition to being a hit and having won many awards in Canada, has Hugh Dillon (Flashpoint) being the leading actor in the series playing a cop who is involved in trying to solve several murders in the small town of Durham County.
Flash Forward, ABC – The premise sounds interesting, but I’ve heard fairly mixed reviews about this show. I’m a huge fan of John Cho (Harold and Kumar) and unfortunately I’ve heard that he’s pretty stiff in delivery, which is disappointing, but I’m still looking forward to the show and will give it a chance.
RETURNING SHOWS … that I am looking forward to:
Medium, CBS – Note the new network on CBS. I was disappointed to hear at the end of last season that Medium was being cancelled by NBC, then overjoyed that CBS had picked it up. However, the show will be put on Fridays.
Amazing Race, CBS – Until I had watched this show, I was never into reality shows. I found them destructive and a really rather sad show displaying the sorry state of humans. To a certain extent, there is still some bickering involved, but I enjoy watching the teammates attempt challenges while travelling all around the world, experiencing different cultures. At the same time, I also like to wonder in the back of my mind, how I would fair doing the challenges and putting up with the language barrier.
Criminal Minds, CBS – I think by now, people should be able to determine that I’m a bit of a CBS fan. I’m a big fan of crime, and since CBS is the big crime network station, often I am glued to the station. The season finale was a cliff hanger, and though I’m sure they’re not going to kill off any characters, I’m still curious as how the story is going to progress.
Fringe, FOX – Last season’s finale blew me away. All the actors, even Joshua Jackson (of Dawson’s Creek fame) has thoroughly impressed me. My only disappointment is that Mark Valley was not able to stay, even though he has his own show now. I cannot wait to see how they deliver this season.
This is just a quick round-up of a few of the shows I plan to watch or am excited to return this Fall. I tend to follow TV news via Zap2It, one of my favorite sources for television news.
The Adventures of the “Personal Computer”
About a year ago, my speakers started doing something strange. They started crackling. It was a great annoyance to me, as I watch a lot of video and listen to a lot of music on my PC, so most of the time it was difficult to hear. I had thought at the time that it was my speakers that had gone bad. But then, the crackling subsided due to what it seemed like to me at least at the time, cold weather. Not sure how that worked, but I was happy with the temporary quiet that my speakers served me, only to find that as the season changed back into summer, the problem returned. However, this time I determined it was not my speakers, it was my soundcard. (I had attached a pair of headphones into the soundcard’s headphone jack and lo and behold, crackling!)
That told me that I needed to get a new sound card, but I was not happy with this prospect either ( though much cheaper, given that I have a nice 5.1 setup). The computer that I have is a Dell 8400 P4 3.2GHz. It has served me well for almost 5 years, and I had loved it for most of those years, but it seemed to get slower and slower to me in the past six months, even after a reformat. Problem is, I use many applications all at once – Photoshop, Lightroom, 20 browser tabs open, sometimes multiple browsers (Firefox, Chrome, and Opera), in addition to watching a movie in the background. It got to be all too much for my poor computer. Plus, .mkv video files have started being so popular that I found that I couldn’t watch those files without turning off every single application.
With my growing frustration, I started researching what kind of computer I wanted. I knew that in the past five years, dual core and quad core processors started being popular, but that was about it. I felt pretty much in the dark, given how quickly technology moves. I started off looking at Dell computers, since my past two or three computers have all been Dell. They’ve treated me very well. One thing that was mandatory though for me, was a requirement of being expandable and supporting four hard drives. No can do. I was not willing to turn to Hewlett Packard, or other companies, so I decided to build my own computer.
Besides having built a couple PCs back at my first job, my experience in building a computer was next to nothing. However, I knew that I wanted a fast processor that would last me many years, a case that was expandable, and a new hard drive. I do know that if I can do it, anyone can, as long as you research.
Once I had gotten all my parts, it took me a good couple of evenings + half a day during the weekend to put my computer together. Here in Southern California, we were going through a heat wave, and with the lack of air conditioning, I was sweating all the while figuring out which cable needed to go where on my motherboard, so my head was half functioning.
Once all my core components were put together, I plugged in the power cable into the power supply, flipped the power switch on the back of the power supply, and voila! Nothing.
Yes, nothing. At this point, I started to panic. What possibly could go wrong? Nothing was lighting up. Was my power supply bad? All these thoughts started running through my head. I called my boyfriend, the expert PC builder. “Is your power switch on?” “Of course it’s on! I turned it on and nothing happened.” “Is your other power switch in front of the computer on?” “…………….Oh, huh, let me get back to you on that, I’ll call you back later!”
Yes, I forgot that all computers had a power switch on the front of the computer to turn it on, as you know, computers are not usually on 24 hours a day, with no other method of turning off the computer except turning the power switch off from the power supply. So, once I turned the power switch on, my computer whirred happily and I saw my motherboard start-up screen display. All was well with the world.
The moral of the story: Even self proclaimed nerds have moments of idiocy.
Since then, I’ve had a few bumps here and there, with a high pitched noise being emited with the motherboard, with Windows acting up (due to some application I had installed), which was fixed with a quick re-install, and an issue with one of my old hard drives.
Have any of you done similar “smack-your-head-duh” moment before? I’d love to hear your stories!
Note: It may be a challenge for someone who is not computer literate, but I will hopefully, in laymen terms, describe how one goes about building a computer in a future post.
