This season has continued to heat up, and we’re getting closer to understanding the source of the Heroes’ powers. In this most recent episode, Arthur has muddle up Hiro’s brain, and the result is that he continues to regress into thinking he’s a child. Ando and him teleport away from Arthur, however, and back to Japan. After some interesting coddling, he gets Hiro to use his powers again, and they see that an eclipse is coming, an obviously important development given the next episode titles.

Arthur explains to Sylar that their powers are the same, and that if Sylar can access his “empathy,” then he’ll be able to steal powers like Peter does rather than you know..ripping peoples’ heads open. To get him to do that, he puts Sylar back together with Elle, who isn’t all that happy with Sylar and lights him up like a Christmas tree. After some back and forth banter, this encounter allows Sylar to absorb her power without stealing it from her. Clever.

Knox and Flint are hot on the trail of Peter and who up to nab him but Claire manages to run a distraction before escaping into the sewers. Peter explains to Claire that at some point in the future she kills him. She again tries to save Peter only to find that Knox and Flint are in fact there for her, and they’d have gotten her too if Peter hadn’t come to save the day.

Matt and Daphne head to Primatech, and Matt uses his powers to check out what Angela has gone through. Daphne asks Arthur to leave Matt out of the equation, but then Arthur threatens he. Matt then uses his powers to free Angela, but at the same time envisions Daphne betraying him. Daphne, of course, feels pretty guilty about that prospect and convinces him to take her into the dream state with him. Apparently, love does in fact conquer mental influence and barriers.

Mohinder continues to look into the prospect of giving people abilities, and realizes there’s a human catalyst involved in the process. Nathan goes with Tracy to confront his dad. Arthur tries to convince Nathan to join him, and Nathan, now confused, sends Tracy to Washington to see Angela. Instead, however, Tracy goes to see Arthur and offers to turn Nathan over to the dark side. It ends at Promatech, where Angela tells people in attendance about the human catalyst.

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Once upon a time, most of us watched music videos on television. The channels that built themselves on the medium quickly abandoned actual music as their bread and butter, relying more on the quick and easy cultural elements of the time. Pretty soon, the music video was flagging in strength. Enter the internet. Nowadays, you can find almost anything you want to hear, and depending on what that is, there are a few sites you might want to find. 

Myplay.com is ostensibly a social network developed by Sony BMG in order to push it’s product.  A nice feature of this site is that you don’t have to log in to watch the videos. The videos are embeddable, the interface is easy to use, and there are a significant number of artists to choose from. My two biggest problems with the site are that each video is prefaced by a commercial, and if you don’t like any of the artists (I don’t) there’s nothing here for you. 

Vidzone.tv  is an essay in form trumping function. It’s very pretty website. It’s also very annoying to navigate, and has a really limited supply of videos. It has the nice feature of allowing you to send the video to your mobile device, and truly, once the video is playing, if you like the artist, there’s some nice information about the artist and the related videos are pretty nice, you’d never know they were there if you weren’t curious. 

AOLmusic is quite the opposite of vidzone. It’s not pretty, and it doesn’t care about your phone, but the UI is nice, and with almost eighteen thousand videos, it’s likely to have something you’ll enjoy. It’s very social, with ratings, comments, browsable playlists and with the ability to embed the videos wherever you’d like, it encompasses almost all the features a user could want. 

YouTube cannot be overlooked in this post. I have somewhat niche musical tastes, and I can find almost anything I’m looking for on YouTube. One of my favorites, Leonard Cohen, a guy who will not be found on any of these other sites, has over five thousand posts. You can’t beat these guys for content, and it’s likely they’ll put a few of the previous sites completely out of business eventually. But my favorite, if only for nostalgic purposes is…

MTVmusic.com. I can honestly say that any site that is not user submitted that has the video for Window Licker by Aphex Twin is going to make me very very happy. They’ve finally gone back to their roots. The result is pretty impressive. I stumped them a few times, but I found videos by artists I never knew had videos, and if you like music videos, that will make you happy too.

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I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve never been a big fan of awkward humor. Movies like Superbad and American Pie had their own hysterical parts, but the horribly awkward, watching a train-wreck like feeling that I get hasn’t been my style of entertainment. In that vein, I never really got into Big Bang Theory because it’s a show..about nerds..acting awkward. That’s all well and good and I’ve heard good things about it but had decided early on it wasn’t for me. I’ve picked up the show in it’s second season, however, and it feels noticeably improved.

With that said, there’s still an awful lot of geek jokes, and it feels like it’s a bit one sided as to how often we’re laughing at the characters rather than with them, but so far I’ve been pretty happy with it. The characters are much better developed, with Penny in particular seeming like a much more likeable character now that she’s more one of the group of friends than a romantic interest.

Additionally they’ve added in Leslie Winkle, a returning nerd Sara Gilbert as a recurring character. The interactions between her and Sheldon are admittedly great fun, and I hope that we see plenty of animosity come to the table as the show goes on through. If you’re curious, there’s plenty of places to catch the show online. The shows main portal site does have some recent episodes available along with some highlights from episodes past. Hulu comes up short here, with about 96 clips available from the show but no dull episodes at all, which is a little disappointing. If you need to catch up on the series, I was successful in grabbing most of the season 1 episodes from Project Free TV. As long as they continue to keep the show’s awkwardness to a moderate level, I’ll continue to be a loyal fan!

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There will undoubtedly be weekends where you’d like to forgo your usual going out and socializing and just want to stay in and relax (especially now that the economy is getting tight and staying at home is free!). With that in mind, it may help to take a look at what the Friday line up looks like and potential shows you might enjoy along the way. If ratings are any indication of quality…that means the Ghost Whisperer is your best bet…although I don’t agree with that assessment!

The show, which involves Jennifer Love Hewitt being a telepath of sorts who can communicate with the dead and help them move on to the next life, afterlife, or what have you, has seen a steady increase over the last few episodes, and it’s peaked this week topping out at number one. That could very well be due to the fact that NCIS was running a rerun. In total Ghost Whisperer brought in about 11.67 million viewers, pretty impressive for what’s usually considered a not-so-great time slot. Other popular shows around 8:00pm included Are you Smarter Than a 5th Grader, Deal or No Deal, and Supernanny. With a lineup like that I actually almost consider Ghost Whisperer the best option..

Heading into the later hours, the Price is Right recently did a special episode saluting our troops, pulling in a respectable 7.31 million viewers. Runners up for the 9:00 timeslot were Don’t Forget the Lyrics on Fox and…more Supernanny! Around 10:00, Numb3rs pulled in the top slot with 9.27 viewers. I never followed the show myself, but my fiance does have a copy of the first season on dvd lying around. My brother recently picked it up and swears by it, so if you’re curious you might want to catch up on Hulu for the latest episodes. I can see why Lipstick Jungle was canceled, considering it came up in last place for the 10:00pm slot.

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Here are a couple of my favorite MP4 converters. All of these will work for both Mac and PC,  so you have no excuses. They’ll do everything you need and more. The best is….

VLC media player is a fantastic desktop application that wears many hats (DVD Ripper, Media Player, file converter) and wears them well. Using the Streaming/Export wizard found in the file menu, you can convert audio and video into your format of choice without too much difficulty. I wouldn’t say it’s especially easy to do, but if you can open the file in the media player (not difficult) you can convert it to just about any format, by following the prompts. If you don’t know much about video, don’t be intimidated by all the options, if you haven’t heard of it, you don’t need it. It will give you a tidy drop down with a list of those formats and you can simply select MP4 and you’re in business. I use this program all the time. That is, when I’m not using….

Handbrake is what I’ve always used when the torrent I download isn’t in a comfortable MP4 format. If you’ve got the file readily available, just open it in the browser and set your codec in the drop down. The default setting is MP4 so it’s not that hard. One of the nice things about Handbrake is how easy it is to get exactly the level of quality and size you’re looking for. Again, it’s got quite a bit for the pro, but this shouldn’t be cause for concern, if you don’t want to get into the nitty gritty, you don’t have to. If you do, and don’t know how to, Handbrake has a fairly sizable forum community here. If you have a question, they probably answered it in one of the over two thousand threads. It’s not a media player, so it doesn’t get top billing, but it’s a great program, and I highly recommend it.

If you happen to be at a friends house, and either they have a conversion program you’re not familiar with, or he doesn’t have one at all, you might want to go visit the guys at mediaconverter.org. Here you can upload a file from your hard drive and convert it to any one of a huge number of codecs. It’s easy to use, and it’s free. It has almost none of the bells and whistles of a desktop app, but it will serve in a pinch. The main drawback is that it will only do 100mb or less, and only ten conversions per day in the free version.

Finally, I’d like to have a moment of silence for isquint. It was my first media converter, and sadly it has gone away. It was so easy to use, and so quick. Nostalgia.

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