I’m sorry. I know I’ve let you down, I’ve let the team down, and most importantly, I’ve let myself down. I instead went to see West Side Story on the big screen, which is truly the ultimate “High School Musical,” at least for me because I was in it in high school. Also, it makes me ashamed on behalf of High School Musical.

Considering I didn’t watch any TV last night, this might have been the perfect opportunity for me to tell my How I Met Kyle Chandler story, but then I realized there really wasn’t ever going to be a perfect opportunity for that story, as it’s not as exciting as the title might suggest, and the title’s not even all that exciting, so I might as well just tell the story quickly otherwise it’ll haunt me for weeks. Kyle Chandler, by the way, is the actor who just got blown to bits as Bomb Squad Guy on Grey’s Anatomy and recently starred as a doodlehead actor in King Kong.

I need to start moving on with my life, so all you need to know is that I was an extra and a stand-in one day in high school for the show Early Edition. You can see me in several shots in the episode, wearing a hideous green corduroy oversized jacket and no bangs, both of which were huge mistakes. I met Kyle Chandler, I shook his pinky (he was carrying a pile of books at the time), and I was on network TV. And I almost, until Monday, completely forgot about it.

Early Edition was the show where he magically gets the newspaper a day early, and then has to stop horrible things from happening. It’s okay, I didn’t watch it either. Which may be why I forgot all about my pinky-shake with greatness.

Luckily, I am saved from recounting any other repressed TV memories as tonight we have a new episode of Project Runway to have heart palpitations over. It’s sort of a no-brainer that it’s Kara’s turn to auf Wiedersehen, but perhaps they’re just setting us up for a ridiculous upset. Tension! Excitement!

Television is a “push” medium, meaning the content is sent to you automatically. Before the TiFaux, you had to be there at the right time to receive it, or else learn how to program your VCR and buy a bunch of $3 VHS tapes. The simple idea behind the TiVo/TiFaux revolution is that maybe you like to watch the shows you like, not the shows that are on when you sit down to watch TV. They call it timeshifting, we call it love.

I got my TiFaux about a year ago and never looked back. Every time I wanted to watch TV I could sit down and a TV show I LIKED WAS ALWAYS ON! It was as if I had become a network programmer and replaced all the garbage with The Daily Show and 4 episodes of the Simpsons every day. The lousy bastards who were still technically in charge of programming could even shuffle the schedule to make it harder to find that struggling comedy I liked so damn much and the TiFaux would adjust like nothing had changed. Sometimes I didn’t even know it had happened. Obviously I started watching more TV than I had before, but I didn’t feel guilty about it, because I wasn’t watching reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond, I was watching really great television.

But now I don’t have a TiFaux. I’m in Germany, and I get two English language stations, neither of which would be TiFauxed even if I had one. What I have is the Internet, and it’s forced me to re-evaluate my viewing habits.

As we learned from the debacle of that Wired “Push” article (it’s officially their worst article ever) the Internet did not become a “push” medium. It remains a “pull” medium. If I want to get something from the Internet I have to do it myself. Yeah, it’s a lot easier to get TV using Bittorrent than it was a few years ago when you had nightmare P2P software like Limewire and Kazaa. But I still have to actively seek out the episodes I want to watch. I have to remember that 24 is on Monday nights which means I can download it in Germany on Tuesday morning. I have to remember that The Daily Show is on 4 days a week and it’s always available for downloading whenever I want. But I forget. There’s nothing pushing the shows at me. And I need that. Otherwise I stop watching TV. If it weren’t for this blog I might even forget to download The Office, which is the best comedy on TV right now. And I’ve stopped watching The Colbert Report (a show I truly love) completely.

There is hope though. There is a form of RSS that encloses Bittorrents instead of the traditional MP3s or videos (known neologistically as torrentcasting) which I am enthusiastic about. That means you would subscribe to an RSS feed using a Bittorrent client that supports it and the torrents will be sent to you automatically, just like a TiFaux, but with lower quality. Right now I’ve been unable to find any RSS feeds that suit my needs, but I suspect it will happen very soon.

As always, you shouldn’t do illegal things on the Internet. Watching television without the commercials is like taking food out of Maggie Stewart’s mouth.

UPDATE: It turns out I was thinking of this the wrong way. I was expecting to find a site that hand-selected the best Daily Show torrents and put them in an RSS feed. It turns out most of the big Bittorrent sites already have RSS feeds and it’s my job to set up filters to find the shows I want. This method allows for a lot more customization, but it’s hard to get the filters right. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.