I expected many more, but only had fifteen e-mails in my Inbox at work from the past week. I actually thought I would have had as many as fifty. Never mind, I suppose I should be grateful. To be honest, I doubt my presence in the office was actually missed. It was not like that back in the good old days on the helpdesk. I think it is the two week stage, when people will have expected to get a response or action to some work that things can get a little crazy. Heroes returned to television screens on Monday this week. However there was one problem, those television screens were across the pond in the wonderful US of A. They are not due to be screened on the BBC (which actually bought rights to season two before season one) until next year. However, I had my friend Pav, a hardcore fan and we had both a will and a way. We were discussing in detail how to get hold of that all important first episode. Pav recommended, I download uTorrent a few weeks back. It is much less resource intensive as Azureus. Rather than worry about my situation, we had to make sure Breezy could get hold of the file first. He had a master plan, plus a contingency. He was going to use a colleagues personal laptop at work, logged onto the ADSL line to download the torrent from EZ TV Torrents. However, there was a problem, he could not monitor the download, so he messaged his Dad on MSN at home to also download the torrent. It took a few hours but it downloaded fine. When I got home, yesterday evening, I was going to download using the same torrent. I started the download and got as far as 400mb but by then, we had come up with a much better plan. A plan, MacGuyver would have been proud of. Pav created a ftp server which I could log in to, thanks to Serv-U FTP software. I logged in and for the first time, it worked first time. Pav copied the divx AVI file across but it was going to take a while. I couldn’t afford to rinse my two gig bandwidth limit with Sky, so opted to download the file from work in the morning. When I got into work just after 8am, I tried FileZilla, the FTP client installed on my laptop. (I use FlashFXP at home and it is the easily the best FTP client I have ever used and trust me, I’ve been through my fair share!) It didn’t work. I was gutted. However, I remember my colleague Peter teaching me how to use the built in command line ftp program that comes free with Windows XP. To my joy, I logged in and accessed the directory. I quit and decided to create a batch file to copy the file. This way I could run the file every Tuesday morning, to download the week’s episode. Fantastic. At 8.22am, I ran my batch file, then let the DOS window hide behind the rest of my screens, as I got on with proper work.

I kept Pav posted with my progress. He had checked his home PC was all ready in the morning before he left for work. Around 9.30am, the transfer rate started to crawl. Pav’s Dad had started downloaded a few things and I calculated by timing the increase in the file size to between 6kb/s and 4kb/s. Eventually when Mr. K completed the download, going back to basic web surfing, the rate jumped back up to over 80kb/s. The downloaded completed at 11.54am. As the screen below details, the whole download took 11595.42 Seconds which equates to 3.22095 Hours.

My work laptop did not have the DivX codec, so I downloaded from the official site, just to make sure the video worked. I did not want to get disappointed by the time I got home. It is now 8:22pm, exactly twelve hours since I started downloading the file this morning. I think I will go and watch Hiro. Excuse me for the next fifty minutes, if you will.