People who help get me out of my comfort zone. It’s definitely good for experiencing growth as an individual when I do something that makes me step out of my comfort zone.

NBC and Hulu (and maybe other places) for putting episodes of Breakthrough with Tony Robbins online. This is such an inspiring show and a shame that it was pulled off the air after just two episodes. I’m glad that I’ll be able to watch the remaining episodes.

Today’s webinar with Sue, Steve, and John Assaraf. John really gets me excited and interested in learning more about how the human brain works. He’s an excellent teacher and explains things in a way that makes complete sense.

The Challenge TV recordings – I completely missed today’s show, so it’s awesome to be able to watch what I missed.

Deadlines – as a person with a degree in computer programming, I’ve noticed that a lot of indie programmers don’t like to give deadlines or release dates and will usually tell you the next release is when it’s out. But I think setting deadlines is really important because it forces you to at least get something done. Even if the thing you’re working on ends up being subpar, at least you’ve got a stepping stone to make it better. I need to set more deadlines for myself.

I’ll write about five things I’m grateful for and will try to do this every night, trying not to repeat anything I’ve previously said (and, yes, if you’ve been watching the Mind Movies 2.0 prelaunch videos, I got this idea from video 1… I think it was video 1). I have a lot of things that I’m able to write about for now and really want to be able to keep this as an ongoing daily habit. If I miss a day, I’ll do catch-up like I did with the prosperity game, covering multiple days in one.

I’ll start it off with these five:

The first thing I’m grateful for is that I have been blessed with some amazing teachers throughout my life (from preschool through college and even all of the people whose information products that I’ve learned from) who really love what they do and made learning fun for me.

Number two is my incredible ability at remembering things. Some people might say I have a photographic memory. I wouldn’t exactly call it that, but it’s definitely really good. I love the way random things will trigger my memory.

The third thing is that Cox helped get my internet connection stable again. My cable modem has been working for 9 straight days and counting now. Thank you, Cox tech!

Fourth is Hulu. Yes, Hulu, the website for providing me with a lot of entertainment – TV shows, movies, anime, etc.

Saving the best for last, my bestest friend (if you’re reading this, yes, that’s you, Koko ^^). For as long as I’ve known her, which actually isn’t long compared to how long I’ve known my other friends, she’s always been there for me and I’ll always be there for her. I’m gonna do everything I possibly can to meet her in person (yes, we haven’t met in person, but I trust her a lot) so I can give her the hug I’ve been wanting to give her. I really want to make this happen sooner rather than later.

Until next time, thanks for everything I’ve written about so far that really make my life truly awesome.

I kept the hard drive anyway since I planned on getting an external enclosure for it, but then I realized I could revive my ReplayTV in a different way, sort of by playing musical chairs with a few hard drives. I have a 120 GB Maxtor hard drive in my modded Xbox. I know for sure that Maxtors work in my Replay, so I figured I might as well stick the 250 GB drive into the Xbox (which is way more space than I need for it, but oh well) and then take the 120 GB drive and stick it into the Replay.

I’d rather have the 250 GB drive in the Replay to record more hours, but unfortunately, I can’t do that. At least having 120 gigs would be a nice upgrade from 80 gigs.

While I know the process for upgrading a ReplayTV hard drive, it’s been a long time since I modded my Xbox to put XBMC on it, so I don’t remember how to upgrade an Xbox drive. Gotta do some reading up on that first before I jump right into it since I’m not even sure if my BIOS will support a drive bigger than 120 GB… might need to upgrade my BIOS first. And I need to make sure I have enough space on my PC to temporarily back up the files on my Xbox.

All this Xbox stuff just to save my Replay. LOL. I haven’t really touched my Xbox since I got the 360. Instead of using XBMC now, I just use TVersity on the 360. I tried out MediaMall’s PlayOn to watch videos from hulu and other places, but that didn’t work out so well since it kept giving me some sort of connection errors and wouldn’t play anything once it did connect.

Anyway, time to go rescue my Replay!

Time to do an upgrade again, but I forgot the procedure on how to do it since it’s been so long since the last upgrade, so I’ll need to look up that info. It also might be a good idea to clean up any dust that might have built up inside while I have it opened up.

I found a sweet deal on a hard drive yesterday. Target had a Western Digital Caviar EIDE 250 GB hard drive for 75% off, so it was marked down from $99.99 to $24.98. I was so stoked since I didn’t want to spend more than 50 bucks on a new hard drive, so that was an excellent find! After this upgrade, my ReplayTV will be able to record up to 250 hours of TV on normal quality. I can save a lot more episodes of shows that way.

This’ll be fun for me though. I haven’t taken anything apart in a while, so it’s nice to finally have another opportunity to do so.

I forgot to include this before, but for some older shows there’s AOL’s In2TV: http://television.aol.com/in2tv

If you want to watch even more older shows than what AOL offers, now there’s another service in beta. It’s called hulu. You can check it out at http://www.hulu.com. If you want in on the beta, you can join through here or here. Invitations are limited, so be quick!

Not only does hulu have a lot of older shows, but they’ve also got movies and current shows that are still on the air. The quality is similar to all of those other sites I posted before. And like those other sites, there are commercials too.

I hope one of these sites that offer streaming TV shows will put up episodes of Out of This World and Three. I’ve been wanting to watch episodes of both of those shows lately, especially Three. For more info about Three, visit this site – I think that’s the only fan site in existence about that show.

They started to let us into the Ballroom at around 9 AM because they had to get people seated before The Bionic Woman panel started at 10. I got decent seats. Not too far and had a good view of the stage (still not close enough to get good shots with my camera, but that’s okay).

Anyway, they showed the pilot of The Bionic Woman which will premiere on NBC on Wednesday, September 26th at 9 PM. Actually, the pilot they showed won’t be the same one that’s on NBC because they recast at least one of the characters. I thought it was a good pilot. I’ll probably watch it when it comes on because I’ll need something to watch on Wednesday nights since Lost won’t be on until next year.

After the pilot, they had some Q & A with the actors, writers, and producers of the show. It really seems like it’s going to be a good show. David Eick said that it’s one of those shows where even if you come in during the middle of the season, each episode would have it’s own story, so anyone can just come in and watch and enjoy the show. But people who have watched it from the beginning will of course get more out of it than people who come in and watch it every once in a while.

The next panel was TV Guide’s Hot List. I really don’t know if by “Hot List” they just meant shows that were hot or actors/actresses were hot. But I think they meant shows. Michelle Ryan and David Eick were part of this panel too… and they also discussed with Tim Kring, Heroes creator, the possibility of a crossover. David Eick joked around with Michelle Ryan that they should do it since Heroes was already popular and it could only be good for their show. Hehe. Of course it would have to be a crossover that made sense and not just a crossover for the sake of being a crossover.

Other people on the panel were some actors/producers from Jericho, The 4400, and Kyle XY. I was happy that I got to see Matt Dallas because I wanted to go to the Kyle XY panel too, but had to miss it because it was on the same time as the Heroes panel. This little kid had this cute question to Matt about how they make it look like he has no belly button. Then Matt Dallas stood up and was going to lift up his shirt to show it, but he didn’t and said maybe if you go to the Kyle XY panel he would.

Masi Oka was hilarious on the TV Guide panel. Every time Tim Kring would say something, Masi would act it out with hand gestures and facial expressions. Made for an interesting Q & A session.

Then came the moment everybody was waiting for. The Heroes panel with Jeph Loeb, Jack Coleman, Zachary Quinto, Ali Larter, Hayden Panettiere, Tim Kring, Tim Sale, Dania Ramirez, Masi Oka, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Noah Gray-Cabey, Milo Ventimiglia, Adrian Pasdar, Greg Grunberg, and James Kyson Lee. It was just amazing to see so many cast members able to attend the panel.

If you want to watch the panel, they have it up on NBC’s website: Heroes Comic-Con 2007 panel. Danny Bonaduce is the person who is asking the last question in part 4 of the videos. Unfortunately, online they won’t show you the preview that was shown at Comic-Con, you had to be there to see it. Even though I was there and I saw it, I would love to see it again because it was just so much stuff so fast that I already forgot most of it.

I decided to stay in Ballroom 20 for the Futurama panel. I didn’t want to leave my seat, but there was a Battlestar Galactica panel right before Futurama, so I had to sit through that too. I’ve never seen that show at all, so I thought I’d be bored during this panel since I would have no clue what they’re talking about. But one of their surprise guests really put a huge smile on my face and really made my day. Lucy Lawless will be returning to the show as D’Anna for 2-3 (maybe 4) episodes. I guess that’s good news for you BSG fans out there… or not, I don’t really know what her character is like on the show.

But it was just so awesome for me to see Lucy there because I’m a really big fan of hers. I was going to go back to Comic-Con on Sunday morning just to see her in the Super Natural Women panel, but since she was in the BSG panel, I didn’t have to go on Sunday anymore and spend another 8 bucks on parking. So that was really cool for me and I was really glad I stuck around for the BSG panel.

The Futurama panel was incredibly funny especially when everyone on stage started speaking in character. I loved the little Comic Book reading they did. It’s too bad I ended up having to change my battery and then later switch out my tape during it. I wish I would’ve gotten the whole thing on tape, but oh well, what are you gonna do? In my case, I should get a better battery and maybe a new camcorder that records to a hard drive or memory stick.

Overall, Saturday was just a lot of fun. I got to see everyone that I wanted to see. It was my best day at Comic-Con ever.

Anyway, I like the new mtv.com better than the old one because the old one was ALL Flash navigation. Sometimes it would take a while (more than 20 seconds on the internet is “a while”) to load and then it would automatically play some video that I had no interest in at all. Then sometimes when I’d hover my mouse to select something, it wouldn’t register, so I’d have to move my cursor somewhere in the proximity of the thing I wanted to click on just to click on it… but sometimes I’d still end up clicking the wrong thing.

Their new site uses a CSS navigation menu, so it loads more quickly than the Flash version. I think this new site will save them a lot of bandwidth in the long run. It’s probably already saved them a few gigs worth already.

Kudos to whoever designed their new site!

The Road Rulers on the RV have had a few pit stops during this season where they compete against the top vote getters of the Pit Crew. If the pit crew wins, they get the $10,000 that would’ve been added to the Road Rulers handsome reward.

I think for the finale, it’ll probably be a final pit stop challenge. Where the Road Rulers and the Pit Crew will compete for all of the money that the Road Rulers have banked. It only makes sense that they’d do something like that with the way this season has been going. So even people that have lost their spot on the RV still have a chance to win the money in the end.

That’s just my prediction. We’ll see what really happens at the end of the season (whenever that is).

Back when they first introduced Paulo and Nikki, I read somewhere on the internet that they might be working with the Others. So that’s what I thought tonight’s episode would be about… their connection with the Others. It turns out, it was completely different than what I was expecting.

I knew Nikki was in some sort of movie or TV show during the beginning… it just seemed very TV show-ish the way those scenes were shown, especially with the corny dialogue.

I really liked this episode, the flashbacks were well done, as usual. And it was cool to see all of the dead characters again.

What a shock to learn that P&N were the first to discover the plane and the Pearl. I think they really tied it in well with past events showing the real reason why Paulo used the toilet when they explored the Pearl with Locke. And it’s also somewhat of an allusion to Charlie going to the bathroom for his stash back in season 1.

So, Paulo picked up a walkie talkie… I really hope they don’t try to radio for help again – that’s so season 1. At least now they’ll be able to eavesdrop on the others. I wonder if Paulo heard the whole conversation when Jack was trying to help Sawyer and Kate escape from the Others.

If there were spiders all over the place where Nikki paralyzed Paulo (and got paralyzed herself), wouldn’t it have been possible for anybody else to get bitten when they found Paulo? Or maybe even way before then too. I’m just surprised that people on the island haven’t been bitten at all until now. I’m more surprised that Dr. Arzt was able to collect himself a female medusa spider without being bitten himself since there should’ve been a ton of male spiders around when he got it.

Preview for next week’s episode:

I hope there’s more to it than just those two.

Next week’s episode looks great-o!! (I’ve been watching too much anime )

Of course, you can never really tell from previews how good the episode will really be. We’ll just have to wait and see.