Season Three

The extended weekends at the apartment allowed Anita and I to indulge on the things we liked to do together - watching movies. On one of the trips to Plaza Damas, we managed to pick up the third season of Downton Abbey, and devices a marathon for the two of us. We went through four episodes last night, and the rest - another four this afternoon after my ward rounds.

Due to that, we had to delay our trip back to Gombak, and went for a late lunch cum tea as well on the way home.

The third season was less gloomy than the war-tinged second season. The was no lack of drama of course. There was enough twists and turn to get the plot moving, new characters being introduced as well as a few departing. The ending was a good one though, providing some closure to a few of the questions left hanging. Shame that Lady Mary's wedding to Matthew was not shown in great splendour.

The narrative was sharp, and the comments from the Dowager Countess was as cutting as ever. Great screenplay with great direction and acting. Shirley MacLaine character only showed up in a couple of episodes though, leaving us wanting for more.

Next stop, the Christmas Special 2012. Not available yet for download on the UK iTunes Store as yet.

The Dodgy DVDs

I tweeted this afternoon that I was heading to Sungai Wang to get some ‘dodgy’ DVDs. The impression that I created to everybody was I was looking for porn! Far from it, especially there were torrents for those. I was looking for movies and TV series actually. Which bring me to the reason why I did that.

I wish that I was able to download these series legally in Malaysia. Unfortunately, there are a couple of snags to that, and I do not mean the problem with censorship. Yorais have to earn his living for that obviously, so I will just let him worry about that. The couples of problem I meant was the fact that legal outlets such as iTunes, Netflix and Hulu will never see the light of day in Malaysia. If you were resourceful, and many of us in Malaysia were, we can use a US credit card and have an IP proxy, and iTunes will be in your lap. Unfortunately, the second issue was more complicated. We have yet to have extensive really high quality fast broadband available. Without such service, these streaming and downloading services would be meaningless. Time Broadband sounded promising with the fibreoptics connections it offer - purported to carry data at up to 50 Mb/s. YES 4G was still not extensive, and once it has reached a bigger coverage area, the speed might start to suffer as well. Unifi seemed promising, but judging fromTM’s past performance with Streamyx, I would want to watch the space first before believing it to be the best thing since sliced bread as the service claimed to be.

Heavy traffic leading to Sungai Wang todayTreat for the boysIn the meantime, I could still download and stream some torrents down on my 1 Mb/s P1 Wimax connection. It had its moment, but lately, with the increased coverage in Lembah Kelang, the speed suffered as well. Alternatively, would be a quick trip to Sungai Wang to visit my friendly pirated DVD vendor to get my fix. Don’t get me wrong, the operating system and softwares in my computer were all original, even the games. Why did I buy them at such price? Because they were available to be bought. The vendor was kind today, and I managed to get hold of the latest seasons of Madmen, Entourage and Fringe! Puan Anita got her wish as well - Glee and Tru Blood.