Mostly Harmless

Looking at the calendar I see I’ve had a Newsfeeds.com"Premium Plus"account for about 5 days now AND I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW MUCH THEY SUCK!

With the"plus"account I have access to 18 of their news servers — and I need just about every damn one of them. (Actually, I’m only using 7 of them, but it feels like more.)

Where to begin… (1) the retention is good but the completion sucks; (2) if I happen to find all the parts on a particular server (good luck there) there will be at least a couple of CRC errors in downloading (almost always); (3) since their web interface is crap, relative to EasyNews, I can’t combine pre-uudecoded files into a single zip file and download that, so I have to download 20-25% more to get the same amount of data; (4) because of (#3) it’s pretty easy to hit the 500 meg per server limit, especially with all the re-downloading of parts you thought you had (see #2).

Now, the special multimedia server has a 750 meg/day limit. I’ve never hit that limit because the server is so damn slow and overloaded that sometimes the file transfer will just plain stop mid-file and hang there… so I have to keep checking on it just to make sure it’s still going. Hence it is the server of last resort.

For a company claiming that they have great servers, tremendous bandwidth and lots of incoming newsfeeds they have a huge amount of variation in the completeness of files across the servers. So here’s the typical downloading session: (A) try the AT&T news server, note that there are typically no new files; (B) spend a few hours bouncing between Newsfeeds’ servers getting as many parts of the file as possible, (C) go to EasyNews and get the remaining parts.

In this way I can nurse my remaining 1 gig at EasyNews for another couple of weeks.

I hear you asking"Is that worth all the bother?"The answer is, no, not really, but I’m already paid up for the month and I keep hoping that they’ll get better… there is some mention of a CRC problem they’re trying to track down, and download speed has been good the last two nights, but I still spent hours downloading (and re-downloading) files I could have queued up in about 5 minutes at EasyNews.

After all of this grief I have 14.9 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (site), including the unaired pilot. Burning VCDs, SVCDs and the RAR parts I’ve used about 36 CDs in the last 3 weeks… but I still have 70+ blanks at the ready.

Seventy CDs won’t last long though, the Repostathon has 56 more episodes scheduled from now til the end of February, not counting new episodes.

So, I am currently 95.1 episodes away from a complete set… yow! I’d buy these on DVD if I could, we are currently in Season 6 and Season 1 won’t be released til January 15th. Does that mean I wait til 2007/2008 to buy _this_ season, or do I download episodes the same night they air. Hmmmm.

(Yeah, I videotape the new ones, but an SVCD with no commercials made from a digital satellite source that I can play in my DVD player is a bit nicer, especially since I have no cable TV at the moment.)