I remember back in 1999, waiting in line for hours with my friends from high school to see the Star Wars premiere at midnight. Over twelve years later, Episode I gets a 3-D re-release in theaters, and I had to check it out.
The 3-D stuff was pretty subtle, to the point of being pretty much worthless. Since the film wasn't originally shot in 3-D, it had to be converted, and thankfully, they didn't overdo it to make it in-your-face, like some movies do. But at the same time, it kills the whole purpose of seeing a 3-D movie in the first place if there's nothing jumping out at you.
The movie itself is nearly identical to the original - I noticed a few differences, like an extra unnecessary line of dialogue, and a Three Stooges tribute before the pod race (and coincidentally, the new Three Stooges trailer was on before the feature - and looks pretty decent). There were some extras in the background of various scenes that I didn't recognize, but I don't know if they were new or not.
I remembered about halfway in how terrible this movie was - I hadn't seen it in several years. I had somehow put Jar Jar out of my mind - he couldn't really be THAT annoying, could he? (Yes). And still to this day, I can only understand about 60% of what he says - the percentage is even worse for that Boss Nass guy. Anakin was incredibly annoying, and the accidental blowing up of the ship and accidental shooting of the droids just made me cringe again.
While I was watching, I thought of a few things that would have made the movie a little less bad. If Anakin had been just a bit older - maybe 13 or 14, he would have been less annoying. The love story would have been more believable - a 9 year old falling in love really doesn't work. And he could have been a slightly rebellious teen instead of an innocent little boy. The "he's too old to train as a Jedi" line would have made a little more sense as well.
Another thing I thought about was something in the pod race. At the end of the race, it would have been a great scene if Anakin, in desperation, intentionally damaged Sebulba's pod, causing a fatal crash. It could have been very subtle, so that nobody would have blamed him, not even the audience at first. Everyone watching the movie knew what he was going to turn into eventually, so a character trait that showed just a hint of darkness would have worked well. But of course, since this movie was marketed toward kids, they'd never have allowed this.
I'm sure I could think of a few other things that could have improved the movie, but I'll leave that to the experts - Plinkett's review summed up the craptasticness nicely.
Sorry, Micro$oft, you let me down again. I installed Internet Exploder 9 shortly after it was made available, because it's supposed to be the most modern browser there is, supposed to be faster than Chrome and Firefox, and supposed to be up to speed on all of the latest standards.
I knew from the start that it wouldn't be, but I expected it to be better than what I'm seeing. Still, I gave it the chance, and it proved that it's still just a little behind.
My experience is on my home PC, which is a desktop Dell PowerEdge SC440 with a Pentium D 2.8GHz, 4GB RAM (although Windows only sees 3GB), with a NVIDIA GeForce 6200A 256MB PCI video card. It's not the most powerful or modern machine, but it does pretty well. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate x86.
Installation was kind of interesting. It didn't require a full reboot, which was surprising, but did require that I specifically close nearly all of my open programs, including Windows Explorer, in order to install. Why it needed access to the files used by TweetDeck, Trillian, KeePass, Thunderbird, or Toad, I don't know, but turning off my anti-virus and especially not turning it back on when completed seems a little sketchy to me.
Immediately the first thing I noticed was that it's just not quite as "peppy" as Chrome or Firefox. Scrolling up and down a page using my mouse wheel is how I spend a significant amount of time on the web. In Chrome or Firefox, it's very smooth and consistent. In IE9, it's just a little jumpy. We're talking milliseconds here, but it's enough for me to notice.
Watching Flash videos on YouTube is clearly worse in IE9. Simply moving my mouse around the page, hovering over links, or hovering over the video causes the video to be choppy, even stop completely. This doesn't happen in Firefox - the videos are smooth and consistent.
Javascript is definitely improved from previous versions, but it is not faster than Chrome in the apps I tried. A good test is dragging and dropping on the Netflix queue page. IE8 and previous were basically unusable on this page, because it just took so long for the browser to understand what you were doing, while Chrome worked reasonably well. IE9 handles this page about as well as Chrome does. However, there are scenarios that just aren't up to speed yet. Using jQueryUI for custom animations works perfectly in Chrome, but on my machine, it's still a little choppy and not a smooth animation - it's performing about the same as Firefox 3.6. The example I'm using is my own homepage, jtenos.com, where I have links that pop up a jQueryUI dialog box.
There's still no "Paste and Go" option when pasting text into the URL bar. Chrome and Opera have this feature (Firefox, still waiting...). When I right-click in the URL bar when I have text in my clipboard, 99.99% of the time I'm going to want to navigate to what I'm about to paste in, so that should be a no brainer.
One of the major HTML5 testing sites, html5test.com, gives IE9 a worse score (130) than Firefox 3.6 (155) and significantly worse than Chrome 10 (288). One of the big IE9 selling points was that it was HTML5-ready, but that was apparently all fluff. There are all kinds of conspiracy theories on why some tests crowned IE king, while others show it failing miserably. Unfortunately, as a developer, I'm not using the new fancy HTML5 stuff myself yet, so I can't really make an unbiased judgment on this. I guess we'll find out soon how the various browsers handle the new and upcoming standards.
Oh, and one more thing - it's not available for Windows XP, so the millions of us who are still using XP (we're still on XP at work) will not benefit from IE9. I guess that makes Firefox 4 that much more appealing.
It's not all bad. Here's what I liked:
The color-coded tabs seemed a little silly at first, but I think it's a decent idea, that at worst, doesn't hurt anything. It gives related windows the same color, so if you have two original tabs, and click various links from each of the originals, you'll have two sets of colored tabs and can see which one came from where. I don't think anyone asked for this feature, and it was completely unnecessary, but it's not bad.
Middle-clicking the last open tab closes the browser completely. I've liked this feature about Chrome, and I'm glad IE has implemented it.
Overall application speed is significantly better than before - it opens and closes as fast as Chrome now, and when you consider how integrated IE has been in the operating system for the past 10 years or so, you really start to wonder what took so long.
Hardware acceleration is noticeable. IE9 does outperform Chrome and Firefox in some graphics-intensive tests. Whether those tests are legitimate or optimized for IE is debatable, but in any case, it proves that Microsoft does care about performance.
IE9 is nowhere near good enough to pull me away from Firefox and Chrome, but it's definitely a major step in the right direction. Personally, I'd rather see Microsoft abandon what it's not good at (browsers, source control, etc.) and let the industry specialists take over, leaving Microsoft to do what it does best (operating system, development tools, etc.). But that's never going to happen, so instead, I'll settle for them following accepted standards and providing a web experience that's satisfactory for casual surfers, serious web users, designers, and developers. If IE9 is a step in that direction, then I'll take it.
"it's not available for Windows XP, so the millions of us who are still using XP (we're still on XP at work)" .. oh dear! You poor bastard, still using XP! o.O I remember when in 1999 people were insane to still be using Windows 95 ..
Date: 2011-03-23 07:04:01
Name:
Joe Enos
It really doesn't bother me. XP is a good operating system, and aside from a few minor things (like the Start Menu searching or Ctrl-Shift-N), it does everything I need of it.
Date: 2011-03-23 10:23:00
Name:
Jason H (via Facebook)
Are you surprised? I'm not.
Date: 2011-03-23 12:40:06
Name:
Joe Enos
I was expecting it to be better - I didn't think it would be great, but I figured it would be better than it was.
Date: 2011-03-23 21:36:00
Name:
Jason H (via Facebook)
I'vee grown to lower my expectations with Microsoft so if it turns out well you can be pleasantly surprised. For example Vista, what I expected. Windows 7, pleasantly surprised.
This place is a meat lover's paradise. I don't think I've ever eaten so much meat in my entire life.
But before the meat service begins, you start your meal over at the gourmet salad bar, which was not why I was there. After picking up a couple olives and leaves of lettuce, and a slice or two of onion, I felt good about having a nice balanced meal.
Back at the table, it's time for the real food to begin. The servers come by immediately, bringing a dozen different kinds of meat, filling up your plate as many times as you can handle. Lots of beef, like top and bottom sirloin, filet mignon, ribs, and ribeye, plus lamb chops, leg of lamb, pork ribs, parmesan-encrusted pork loin, chicken with or without being wrapped in bacon (like I'd eat chicken that's not wrapped in bacon), and sausage. Every meat was delicious, tender and juicy, full of amazing Brazilian flavors.
Also included with the meal were various side dishes, like a pretty good cheese bread, mashed potatoes, and carmelized bananas - but I was here to eat meat, so I didn't have a lot of those.
In the end, I don't know how much I ate - I'd guess each portion to be around 2-3 ounces, and I probably had at least 20 portions (everything at least once, several things twice), so probably around 3 pounds of meat. With all the different flavors constantly coming, it always seemed fresh and new.
At $62 (including soft drink, tax, and tip), it's a little more than I typically spend on a meal, but well worth it. This is definitely a place I'll be back to, maybe a few times a year. It will take that long to recover from my meat-induced coma anyway.
This year's vacation led me to San Diego, CA, for Comic-Con International 2010, the biggest geek-fest in the universe. After watching the highlights last year, it looked like it would be pretty fun, so I decided to give it a try. I bought the tickets and booked the tickets back in October, and even that was late enough that I missed out on Wednesday "preview night".
Here's a breakdown of the weekend - way more information than you care about or ever wanted to know...
Day 0: Wednesday
I took the day off of work on Wednesday to prepare. My plan was to go to sleep early on Tuesday night, wake up early, sleep 5 or 6 hours on Wednesday afternoon, then leave the house around 11pm to get to San Diego with plenty of time to spare on Thursday morning. Unfortunately, my stupid brain doesn't let me sleep on my schedule, so I ended up sleeping only about 2 hours on Wednesday evening.
Day 1: Thursday
I made the drive on schedule, and got to San Diego around 7am, after a couple of quick stops on the way (IHOP for a 3am breakfast, and a casino to stretch my legs and throw away 25 bucks). Knowing that parking at the convention center is not a good idea, I parked at the trolley station and took the train downtown. Unfortunately, an employee at the station misinformed me about the special "red-line" schedule, so I ended up waiting about 30 minutes longer than I needed before finding out that the red-line didn't come this early, so I'd have to take two trains. Of course, the wait at the next station was another 20 minutes or so, so I ended up getting to the convention center a little before 8.
Once there, I saw the line to get in - pretty long, but bearable. It wrapped around the back of the building, so I followed it back there. From there, it ducked around a corner, no big deal. But then it kept going and going and going - this had to be the longest line I've ever seen. The longest Disneyland lines were nothing compared to this line. But after about a half mile of walking just to get to the back, and another half mile to get back, I was finally in. Pre-registration/badge pickup moved surprisingly well considering the number of people there.
First stop, another line. The three USA shows (Burn Notice, White Collar, and Psych) were scheduled back-to-back-to-back in Ballroom 20, starting at 1pm. At 8:30, I saw the line was already growing, so I got in place. Three and a half hours in line in the hallway, alternating between standing and sitting in an uncomfortable position on the floor, while I was sleep-deprived, kind of sucked. For about an hour, there was a fairly steady stream of costumed attendees walking by, which was fun to watch. As big a TV nerd as I consider myself, I really had nothing in common with the people around me, so I didn't have much conversation, just a book to read (Dave Barry's History of the Millenium).
After another hour of waiting inside the auditorium, the panels began. I was in about the 8th row, so decent seats in a room of more than 4,000. The Burn Notice panel came first, and was pretty entertaining. Bruce Campbell was very funny, and the rest of the panel provided some fun and interesting answers to the prepared and audience questions. There was even an announcement of an upcoming Burn Notice prequel movie centering on Campbell's character. There was also a video describing how to do spy stuff to pitch your ideas to a Comic-Con executive, done in the style of the show. White Collar was next, a fun show starting its second season. The main cast was all there, including my favorite actress, Tiffani Thiessen, who of course looked great. The panel started with a funny video showing the planning of a caper to steal the new Tron footage, and moved on to some fun Q&A. Psych, probably the funniest show on TV right now, also had a very entertaining panel, including some singing and dancing.
The panels were fun, but honestly there wasn't much there that I would have gotten from watching the clips that will inevitably be on YouTube shortly if they're not already there. With such a large audience, there wasn't much of a chance to interact with the panelists. Also, both of the cameras I brought weren't able to take decent pictures of the panel - all of them had a horrible glare that made it impossible to see anything.
On the way back to the hotel at around 6:00, I realized the only thing I'd eaten since about 3am was a couple Oatmeal Creme Pies that I packed, so I decided to stop for dinner. I took the advice of a co-worker and stopped at Phil's BBQ, which also had great reviews on Yelp. The place has a line that wraps around the building, but since I was just going to eat at the bar, I could skip the 30 minute line and walk right in. The dinner menu is pretty much just beef ribs, pork ribs, and chicken - kind of limited for a BBQ place, but I tried the beef ribs and chicken combination, with fries. The dish came out, with tons of food. There were three giant beef ribs with lots of meat, and probably at least a half pound of chicken, along with a ton of fries. The sauce was excellent, thick and just a little spicy. Both the beef and chicken were great, and the fries were pretty good as well. Definitely the kind of place I'd frequent if I lived nearby.
Day 2: Friday
After 36 straight hours with only about 2 hours of sleep, my brain needed to be recharged. I decided to sleep in and skip day 2, which included Stargate: Universe, The Big Bang Theory, Bones, and The Joss Whedon Experience. I heard the Big Bang Theory panel was great, but somehow I doubt it was worth another day of 6 hours standing in line. So I played hooky instead.
With all day to kill, my first stop was lunch. I was in the mood for Philly cheesesteaks, so after a quick Yelp search, I ended up at Gaglione Brothers Famous Steaks & Subs for a Cheez Whiz steak sandwich with onions, with garlic fries. The sandwich was pretty good, but not as good as Corleone's back home. The garlic fries were a little weird, not something I'd have again.
I spent most of the day just kind of checking out the city. I checked out a few beaches and played some pool, and then it was time for dinner. I felt like Italian, and found one that looked kind of appealing, Paesano. I had the minestrone soup followed by baked lasagne and garlic bread. I really wasn't impressed.
Day 3: Saturday
Today was the Chuck panel, my favorite show on TV right now, and really the whole reason for attending the convention. The panel started late, and being scheduled for only 45 minutes, it ran pretty short. However, we did get a video and performance from Jeffster, and some insight into next season. Linda Hamilton will be making some appearances as Chuck's mother, and there will be several other guest stars as always, like the Old Spice guy. Unfortunately, with the time constraints, there was no time for audience Q&A, leaving the crowd a little disappointed.
I wanted to see one more panel later in the afternoon, so I stuck around and toughed out the next several panels. Family Guy was first - I'm not a fan of the show, but Seth MacFarlane is a funny guy, so the panel was bearable. The Cleveland Show was next, and that was horrible. Don't know how this show is on the air. Somehow Futurama is back on, and that panel was next - this show gave it a good effort when it started, but never really was funny, but it has a new home on Comedy Central, so Groening and crew were out there talking about it. The Simpsons was next, wrapping up the block of panels I didn't want to watch. Every time I watch the show anymore, I'm lucky to find one funny thing in the whole episode. It's another one of those shows that was great for awhile, but should have been ended about 5 or 6 years ago. But there was one funny moment in the panel; while answering a silly question about a Simpsons spinoff, someone brought up the fact that Seth MacFarlane has three shows, to which producer Matt Selman responded "Seth MacFarlane has one show three times", getting mixed reactions from the crowd.
The other panel I wanted to see was V, the remake of the old sci-fi miniseries, which will be entering its second season soon. The show is good, but the panel really didn't accomplish anything. The moron who was moderating it kept asking the actors questions about how the show is unfolding, and pretty much every answer was "Umm...well...I hope that...". The types of questions he was asking should have been directed at the show's creators and writers, and the actors should have been asked questions that they could actually answer.
After the panels, I was thinking about food, and I can't come all the way to Southern California without stopping at Shakey's. They currently have a special for a $9.99 large with BBQ sauce, bacon, ham, pineapples, and jalapeno sausage. It wasn't bad, but next time I'll stick with normal pepperoni pizza.
Day 4: Sunday:
There was nothing of interest in the Comic-Con schedule, so I took another day to relax. I figured I'd take this opportunity to find a day spa to get a fancy massage (and I mean a real massage, not a "massage"). I found one that looked promising, but never was able to contact them. The next place I found with good reviews was Suki Day Spa. Unfortunately, I didn't pay attention to the location - it was downtown, just a couple blocks from the convention center, which meant parking was impossible. I ended up parking about a mile away in some hotel garage's "guest only" parking, and luckily the car was there when I got back. I went with the 4-handed massage, something I've never tried before. Totally worth it - a little expensive, but having two parts worked on at the same time is a different experience, very relaxing.
Dinner was at Hunter Steakhouse. I started with a caesar salad and a chunk of a pretty good oat bread and sweet butter. The main course was a filet mignon served medium rare, small but very flavorful and perfectly cooked. Sides were excellent au gratin potatoes and ordinary onion rings. For dessert, a good sized turtle cheesecake. Overall, an excellent meal.
General Notes:
This was the first time I've done serious driving in San Diego, and it's as bad or worse than Los Angeles. There are lanes merging with no notice, through lanes turning into turn lanes forcing you to change lanes to go straight, ambiguous stop signs, interstate freeways dropping to one lane (not construction, just the way it's built), freeway entrances inside neighborhoods, random onramp locations, endless business districts, unmarked freeway exits, unmarked intersections, 45-degree drops, and the same old California drivers.
My cats were happy to see me when I got home - they've been extra friendly since I've been home. I've never left them alone for more than about 2 days before, so I was worried that they'd be mad at me, or that they would have torn up the house while I was gone. But aside from a few things knocked over, the house was fine, nothing broken or damaged.
Comic-Con really isn't for me. Sitting on the floor or standing for 5 or 6 hours at a time just to be in the same room as my favorite TV actors isn't worth it to me. I'm not interested in the other pieces: comics, video games, or buying crap, and I really don't get a thrill from seeing a big movie star from across the room. It was fun seeing a bunch of people in costume, and the panels were generally entertaining, but not enough to get me back next year.
Also, I didn't get any good pictures, but the ones I have are here: http://jturl.us/comicconpix - just some costume pictures. I didn't get any clear pictures of any panels or celebs.
Thankfully, there were only 22 half-hour episodes to this horrible series. There's debate over whether this series is part of the official Star Trek canon, but I think it's safe to say that regardless of its official standing, the series is complete crap. Its purpose was noble - bringing the original cast back after the original show was cancelled, to produce a continuation of the story and provide a series with things that could not be explored in live-action due to budget restrictions. So in theory, they could do more imaginitive visuals for less money. Instead, what we got was animation nowhere near the quality of Yogi Bear - at least in Hannah Barbara stuff, people showed some facial expressions and occasionally moved. In TAS, you get very boring animation, ridiculous animal people, and awful humor. There were also the same stupid purple dragon things in about 8 different episodes, always with the same animation and horrible sound effects. This was also true of many of the shots - the bridge and transporter room reused the same frames over and over and over again, even with different people were there. One example was when Scotty was beaming someone up, they switched to a close-up of the transporter controls, where you could see Kyle's moustache while he was operating the controls, then a wide shot again with Scotty, then back to the close-up with Kyle's moustache. It's like they didn't bother even watching the final product before releasing it.
For the first few episodes, it hurt my brain to listen to their science-fiction dialogue. In TOS, and to a lesser extent the newer series, the techno-babble can be either unscientific or nonsensical, but in this one, it was truly ridiculous. They didn't even try to get anything right. After I realized that it wasn't getting any better, I shut that part of my brain off to finish watching the rest of the episodes.
Many of these episodes were continuations of original series episdoes (More Tribbles, More Trouble, Mudd's Passion, Once Upon A Planet (Continuation of Shore Leave)). But the second episode, Yesteryear, bothered me because it directly spat in the face of one of the all-time great original series episodes, The City on the Edge of Forever. In Yesteryear, they return to this planet and use the guardian to study the past (with predictable results - someone screws something up). But the original episode's entire point was to show how dangerous and painful it can be to screw with the past. And while some other unrelated episodes may involve time travel and ignore this idea, this episode obviously was thinking of the original one, and it's completely out of character for Kirk to want to go back again.
There are plenty more examples of why this was terrible, but it would take all day to list them.
Phase II
Star Trek: Phase II started out as Star Trek: New Voyages, and continues on the 5-year mission where the original series left off (possibly ignoring the animated series altogether). It's technically fan-fiction, but it seems to be more accepted and popular than most fanfic franchises out there. To date, there have been six episodes, including the unofficial pilot and the 2-part "Blood and Fire" separately. They have several more episodes in progress, and seem to be releasing about one episode per year.
With a very limited budget, volunteer cast and crew, and no opportunity to make a profit (as per CBS rules), you can't expect much out of the series. The actors playing the main characters are all awful, and some have been re-cast more than once (Spock is on his third actor). Andy Bray as Chekov is probably the best of the bunch, but Chekov's character has never really been deep, so once you have the accent down, you're 75% there. James Cawley as Kirk is probably the worst - he seems to have no clue how to play the role, but his job as producer apparently gives him the ability to cast whoever he wants, and who wouldn't want to be Captain Kirk?
The series has been visited by a few real Trek actors, with Walter Koenig and George Takei playing older versions of their characters (Chekov when he had a rapid-aging disease and Sulu after a temporal problem left him stranded on a planet for 30 years) in back-to-back episodes. Denise Crosby had a role as an ancestor (probably great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother) of Tasha Yar from TNG.
The special effects were as bad as expected in the first few episodes, but dramatically improved by the 4th episode - still not as good as the TNG era, but significantly better than the original effects from TOS.
The stories are generally pretty bad, but much better than the animated series. However, they made the exact same mistake as TAS, once again going back to the City on the Edge of Forever planet. There was also one episode where something completely unexplainable happens to a main character (I'll skip the spoilers), something that is a blatant violation of the timeline, and is completely ignored in later episodes. Since there isn't much publicity for this series, it's hard to find official word on why they did it, but from what I've read, the show creators really didn't seem to have a problem with it, even though everyone else does.
Next
Next up for me is Enterprise. I watched about 30-35 episodes when it originally aired, and didn't care much for it. However, as a Star Trek fan, I can't just not watch a series just because I don't like it. With nearly all of my shows on break for the summer, I should have plenty of time to get through the series over the next few months.
The phrase "jumping the shark" has been thrown around constantly this year by TV reviewers, bloggers, and commenters, mostly referring to how many of these shows have had two main characters hook up, which is one of the favorite "jump the shark" categories. Some of them may be true, some may be artificial ratings boosters, but they all seemed to work well for the shows this year.
***SPOILERS AHEAD***
House, M.D. This season's finale ended with House and Cuddy (a.k.a. Huddy) finally getting together. This has been building for years, ever since it was revealed that these two had a past. House's mental and emotional problems aren't going to make things easy for them, and I don't see it lasting beyond the first few episodes next season.
The Big Bang Theory The season started on an unexpected note, when Penny kissed Leonard after being gone for a few months. This was something you figured was coming, since Leonard's feelings were well known since the pilot episode, but it still made for a good comedic moment. Of course, the two of them were so different that it just couldn't work, and the relationship ended hilariously, as Wil Wheaton broke them up late in the season so he could win a bowling match and a bet against Sheldon. I'd expect them to remain friends but not try getting back together again, unless they really plan to jump the shark in the future.
How I Met Your Mother The series started with Robin and Ted hooking up, but since you knew she wasn't "the mother", it couldn't last. This season, Robin and Barney got together, giving Barney the opportunity to actually mature as a human being in a relationship, but after they went down in flames, Barney was back to his old self, returning to his greatness.
Bones In a flashback episode, it was revealed that Bones and Booth almost coupled up when they first met, but ended up avoiding it. Back to the present, Booth wanted to give it a shot again, but was rejected, leaving the two of them slightly more awkward than before when left alone. This is one where I think they will try it again, since Brennan is slowly growing as an emotional person, and she'll eventually be ready for a real relationship, maybe in time for sweeps week next season.
Community There was weird sexual tension between Jeff and Britta from the beginning - the two of them were originally supposed to be the focal point of the show, until it turned out that the other characters, especially Abed and Troy, were funnier, at which point they stole the show. Jeff and Britta had a brief encounter during a game of paintball, but left it at that. In the season finale, Jeff was torn between Britta, who actually still had feelings for him, and a minor character that he had a brief relationship with earlier, but ended up choosing neither, opting instead for Annie, a girl barely half his age. This was a weird twist, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out next year.
24 Jack's been in failed relationships before. In the first season, he was going through a rough patch with his wife, but by the end of the day, they were back together again, with a new baby on the way. Unfortunately, his wife was murdered at the end of the day, which was one of the first of many terrible things that keep happening to him. He finds happiness again in season 4 with Audrey Raines, but that too ends tragically as she's involved in some of the events of the sixth season, and is shaken up to the point where she no longer can bear to be with him. In the 8th and final season, Jack tries one more time, this time seemingly out of the game and together with FBI agent Renee Walker. To add to his pain, she is shot by a sniper, leading Jack on a rampage, taking down everyone involved, and anyone in his way. There are supposed to be plans for at least a couple movies based on the 24 series with Jack coming back, but with all the tragedy he's suffered, I doubt he'll ever be able to love again.
Chuck Chuck and Sarah (sometimes referred to as Charah) got together this season, something you knew was coming eventually. This dynamic has worked very well this year, bringing up all kinds of possibilities, including the two of them trying to run away together, before realizing that they really still wanted to be spies. Chuck's character is significantly different from what it was when the show began - he's more confident and he's an actual spy (although still a little clumsy), but the show is still funny and entertaining, and his relationship with Sarah will likely last throughout the remainder of the series.
Psych Shawn and Juliet have been awkward around each other for most of the series, and the two obviously have chemistry together. It's been a fun secondary plot throughout the series to have them always tiptoe around each other, but last season's finale with Shawn and his girlfriend Abigail breaking up leads me to believe that the two of them will hook up early in this upcoming season. However, the overall feeling of the show tends toward not letting them stay together - I forsee a breakup by around midseason, but of course they'll still be friends and work together.
Hell's Kitchen Ramsay has been in love with his own ego since his first appearance on television. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Date: 2010-06-08 21:30:40
Name:
Melissa E (via Facebook)
I like your thoughts on Chuck. It'll be cool to see the relationship grow and mature, since we've already experienced Chuck growing and maturing. I'm not sure I agree about Psych though. I see the writers taking longer to hook the two of them up, maybe not even until the second half of their final season, whenever that might be. Maybe they'll have a "practice fling" of sorts, but nothing serious will happen for a while, IMO.
Date: 2010-06-08 21:49:49
Name:
Melissa E (via Facebook)
Ok, on further reflection, I do recall Steve (or was it Saladin...) talking about them playing around with all the ways NOT to get them together, and how even that has a limit. Hmm...that could be problematic. I don't think I can handle a Shules breakup!
Date: 2010-06-08 21:58:12
Name:
Joe Enos
Well, however it plays out, I'm sure it will be fun and entertaining. The best part will probably be Lassie - I doubt he'll approve of his partner and Shawn together.
Date: 2010-06-08 22:43:20
Name:
Melissa E (via Facebook)
Absolutely. I trust our writers to do it right, however it works. I can definitely see Lassie doing the "hurt her and you die" talk with Shawn ;)
After 12 years on Tuesday nights, ABC for some reason decided to put the Lost series finale on a Sunday night. I personally never watched the show - I rented the first disc of the first season on DVD, and made it through the pilot, and it really wasn't my thing. But that won't stop me from posting my review of the finale.
*** SPOILER ALERT ***
I really like how they handled the smoke monster. Turns out the smoke was just the remnants of a bonfire on the opposite side of the island, where a bunch of hippies lived and burned tires for fun. That just goes to prove that when you're trapped on an island after a plane crash, you should really explore the entire island. Of course, I don't know what's scarier - living on a haunted deserted island, or hippies.
The first twelve times Gilligan accidentally destroyed the professor's coconut radio, I probably would have forgiven him. But after thirteen times, I'd start to sense a pattern.
Turns out the alternate timeline is actually the alternate timeline from J.J. Abrams's Star Trek movie. If Lost had lasted another 250 seasons, we'd have gotten to see Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the crew working to rescue these guys off the island.
It's finally revealed that the plane crash was actually just a metaphor for wearing uncomfortable shoes - I never would have seen that one coming.
For the last few months, I've been watching the original Star Trek series from start to finish. I had seen the entire series before, except for two episodes which I somehow missed until now (The Lights of Zetar and Requiem for Methuselah). I've seen the entire DS9 and TNG series several times, and recently watched the full Voyager series for the first time (after seeing maybe a third of those episodes before).
I watched the remastered series, with added special effects, enhanced artistic design, and some changed sound effects. Although some of the changes were improvements, in my opinion, the majority of the changes were for the worse. The ship was totally redone with CGI, and appears more cartoonish than real - the model that they used originally may not have been perfect, but the 40-year old visual effects were significantly better than the crappy effort they put into remastering the ship. Other effects, such as planets and other space phenomena were more colorful and detailed, mostly improvements, but sometimes gone too far.
Before:
After:
One of the changes that I especially didn't care for was the opening credits - they re-recorded the theme song. Here are the before-and-after videos - you'll notice that the soprano that was blended nicely in the original song was brought to the focus of the new song, really getting in your face and singing loudly and obnoxiously:
After watching the series start to finish, instead of random episodes every once in a while, it's much clearer to me why the show was cancelled. The third season of the show was absolutely awful. Not that the first two were great, but they were at least kind of fun to watch, and there were plenty of fairly good episodes sprinkled throughout those years. There were only a handful of episodes in season 3 that were watchable, and only two or three that I'd actually even consider to be ok. This was the season that started with Spock's Brain, and featured episodes like Is There in Truth No Beauty?, where a "Medusan" is so ugly that looking at it will drive you insane, and The Savage Curtain, where a giant turd forces Abraham Lincoln and Kirk to fight against Genghis Khan and Kahless. Then there's the episode where white actors with black paint on their faces played the roles of Klingons - the plot was kind of dumb too, but the makeup really stood out as ridiculous. And let's not even bring up Hippie Trek (Herbert! Herbert!).
Some notes on the series in general: First, although Star Trek was supposed to be a game-changer in the roles of individual equality, including gender equality, the show was still incredibly sexist. Women were treated as frail and fragile creatures, full of emotion and needing rescuing from danger at any given moment. They were objectified in many episodes, acting as workers on pleasure planets, items being sold, and damsels in distress. And that's not even mentioning the ridiculous costumes that they wore, including the dozens of female aliens that appeared throughout the series wearing washcloths (not that I'm complaining about that, just pointing it out).
After about the first season, I started noticing themes repeating over and over again. I went back and starting counting how many times a particular concept was used, and kept following that list throughout the rest of the series as I watched. Here is the tally - this may be a little off, since I didn't start from the beginning, and back-populated based off of memory. These categories are not all-inclusive, so many episodes fall into more than one.
Keep in mind that there were only 80 episodes total (including The Cage and including The Menagerie Parts 1 and 2 separately).
Episodes where Kirk (or some kind of duplicate) was deemed unfit for command: 9
Episodes where someone pushed a button on their wrist, belt, or other device, that controlled their enemies: 6
Episodes with time travel: 5
Episodes where they travel to/through the galactic barrier or leave the galaxy: 4
Episodes with androids: 4
Episodes where the crew has some kind of deadly virus or disease: 5
Episodes where a planet is exactly like Earth in some manner, or is specifically mentioned to be Earth-like: 11
Episodes with a court-martial: 5
Episodes with a paradise planet: 5
Episodes with weird evil kids: 4
Episodes where a main character "dies", but magically returns later on: 6
Episodes with a duplicate, clone, or imposter: 6
Episodes where characters are forced to fight by some third party, who sits back and watches: 9
And here's the big one:
Episodes with different beings or ships that had super or extraordinary powers, far superior to that of the Enterprise and crew: 30
30 out of 80 episodes where they're fighting a new super being is just ridiculous. Obviously, those types of episodes need to exist, but when there are this many, it just gets stupid. TNG had several episodes like this, but nowhere near this high of a percentage. DS9's entire mythology was based on a couple of far superior races of beings, but they stayed constant, and there were only a handful of episodes with new super enemies brought in.
Next on my Star Trek: The Animated Series, of which I haven't seen any episodes. This one has to be good, right?
Alice was made in a very similar fashion to the one they did a few years ago, Tin Man, which was the Sci-Fi Channel's reimagining of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Both mini-series were very popular, and I believe they were the two top-watched Sci-Fi/Syfy mini-series in the channel's history. The two original stories were similar to begin with, but Alice appears to intentionally mirror Tin Man in story, theme, tone, and style. For example, in Tin Man, the tin man character was just a person, with the nickname "tin man" because of his metal police badge - same here, with characters like the caterpillar and white rabbit being ordinary people with "code names". Both take place in the alternate reality long after the "original" story, with Alice and Dorothy both being drawn in to deal with events following their same-named predecessors long ago.
There were several recognizable faces, including several sci-fi actors, like Colm Meaney (O'Brien from TNG and DS9) as the King of Hearts, Teryl Rothery (Fraiser from SG-1) as Alice's mother, Alessandro Juliani (Gaeta from BSG) as the 9 of Clubs, and Matt Frewer (crazy time-traveler guy from that one episode of TNG) as the White Knight, aka Don Quixote. Kathy Bates (crazy stalker from Misery) played the Queen of Hearts, and there were several other faces I've seen before in various shows and movies through the years. The lead, Caterina Scorsone, hasn't been in anything popular before, but she did a reasonably good job as Alice.
I haven't read the original book, seen the Disney movie, the numerous other movies or musicals, nor the newest Tim Burton remake, so I don't know all the links to the original story, or how much they followed or butchered story items. But overall, I would say that by itself, this was somewhat entertaining, if a little long and drawn out - the 3-hour length is an unfortunate necessity for mini-series, but it probably would have been better as two hours. In my opinion, it's not as good as Tin Man, but better than some of the crap that's been released lately.
I'm always looking for good barbecue in Phoenix, and I tonight I came across Grady's BBQ while searching through Yelp. The reviews were all positive, and the location wasn't far from me, so I decided to give it a try. I'm glad I did, because this was the best barbecue brisket I've had in a long time.
The place is a little hole in the wall on 19th Avenue and Cactus, in a little strip mall that you wouldn't notice unless you were looking for it. Inside, there were only two small card tables with folding chairs and a hand-written menu with pictures on the wall. This is definitely a good sign - if a place this small, in this location, stays in business, it must be good.
I typically try the brisket at barbecue restaurants, so I went with the brisket sandwich and fries. There are three flavors of sauce (mild, hot, and super hot) - I decided to go with the hot. When the food came out, I was anxious to try it, mouth watering from the pictures on the wall.
The bun was a standard hamburger bun, and the fries were good but nothing special. The meat, however, was excellent. The brisket was incredibly tender, definitely cooked for a very long time. There was just the right amount of fat, just enough to give it flavor without being invasive. A little bit of the meat was slightly crispy, which blended in very well with the overall tenderness. And the sauce was outstanding - thick and sweet, with just a little kick to it. I'd be interested in trying the super hot next time I'm in.
Including drink and tax, the total came to $9.67, and I dropped a couple bucks in the tip cup. It's a little more than the $5 El Paso BBQ lunch special I used to get all the time, but still well within reason. It's only slightly out of my way home from work, so I'll definitely be back many times.
Tonight I tried the new Domino's Pizza that they've been advertising like crazy, described as "a completely new pizza reinvented from the crust up". They have changed everything from the crust to the cheese to the sauce, supposedly all for the better.
The advertising makes a big deal about the cheese, that it's "100% real mozzarella", which makes me wonder what it was before - they don't really say, but apparently it used to be some artificial crap. The new cheese, flavored with a little provolone, seems to work pretty well - I don't notice a huge difference with the new cheese - it's still nowhere near as good as Papa Murphy's, but it does seem to be a bit of an improvement over the old one.
The next big change was the sauce. Domino's describes the new sauce as sweeter and bolder, with new herbs, a little red pepper, and apparently some kind of sugar that provides the new sweetness. The sauce is definitely different - the sweetness reminds me a little of the Pizza Hut Pizza Mia, which is their sweeter alternative to their standard pizza. There's a tiny hint of the red pepper, definitely not overpowering, and just enough to give a little more flavor. I'd say the new Domino's sauce is good, but again it's not the freshest, and not as good as Papa Murphy's.
Probably the most noticeable change is with the original hand-tossed crust. From what I can tell, the thin and thick crusts have not changed, only the original. They seem to have been inspired by Hungry Howie's Pizza, a place famous for lots of flavored crusts. Unfortunately, Domino's didn't add multiple good crust options - they picked one flavor and went with it, and went with it, and went with it, then added more, then took it a step further, and after it was all over, doubled how much stuff they dumped onto the crust. It's definitely too much, and while it's not a bad flavor, I don't think it will work as a standard crust even if they did tone it down a little. I understand that they didn't want a boring, generic crust, but I don't think they have it right yet.
Date: 2010-01-06 09:33:39
Name:
Mat C (via Facebook)
When it gets there, check out Naked Pizza
Date: 2010-01-06 09:34:06
Name:
Joe Enos
I don't know - that looks pretty healthy...It's hard to imagine healthy pizza actually tasting good.
Date: 2010-01-06 14:51:22
Name:
Michael O (via Facebook)
I remember the all you can eat Shakey's experience as if it were yesterday.
Date: 2010-01-06 14:52:21
Name:
Joe Enos
Shakey's is one of the main reasons I go to California every few years.
Date: 2010-01-06 14:52:39
Name:
Michael O (via Facebook)
They had them in Milwaukee too, when I was a kid. I'm not sure if they are still there.
Date: 2010-01-07 16:17:28
Name:
Michael O (via Facebook)
The irony is that unbeknownst to me, my wife ordered Dominos last night. Both of us hate Dominos and were impressed with the ads.
Verdict: the sauce did have a better flavor, definitely daring use of peppers for a mainstream joint. The crust was as awful as ever. There is an excellent local pizza place, Angelo & Vito's across the street, and I don't see us switching.
Date: 2010-01-07 16:29:03
Name:
Joe Enos
I agree that the local places can have the best stuff. Here in the Phoenix area, we've got a couple of really good local chains that I go to now and then, Oregano's and Spinato's. Both are probably better than any of the national chains (except maybe Papa Murphy's, but that's a different type of place), and there are several others that get a lot of attention that I haven't tried yet.
This afternoon I watched Avatar in IMAX 3-D. Incredibly impressive work, definitely worth all the hype it's been given for its visual effects.
I'm not sure how much of this was the movie and how much was the IMAX 3-D tech, but like I've read several places, you really can get lost in the action, as if you're really there flying through the forest. There is a lot of movement, not shaky-camera stuff, but still probably enough to make some people a little motionsick. As long as you can handle it, however, if you allow yourself to believe what you're seeing, you'll be amazed at the sensation.
The technology is still not quite perfect - both the 3-D and the CGI are not 100% yet, but they are definitely better than anything I've seen up until now. I don't know all the technical details, but the movie was shot at the standard 24 frames per second, which, combined with the strobing effects of the 3-D, makes movement a little weird at times. From what I've read, they're working on improving this technology, and hopefully for the sequel (of course there will be a sequel), they'll bump it up to 48 or 60 frames per second.
The movie itself was decent - I guess it borrows a lot of story from other movies, and doesn't really provide anything unexpected or brilliant. But Avatar is not about the plot or characters, but rather the effects. With a stunning set of visuals, and a story that does manage to stay reasonably interesting, they've definitely got a winner here.
Frankly the plot was incredibly superficial. The demonization of corportions and the military was almost as transparent as it's canonization of the Native Americans...err...Na'vi.
The acting was as average and unremarkable as you can get. No actor failed to perform, but no one was impressive in any scene. Also, I distinctly remember once scene where Jake Sully forgot to speak with an American accent (the actor is Australian, I think). How does that make through editing of a nine-figure budget?
Still, I feel the ticket price was a bargain for the viewing. I don't require perfection to feel it worth my time and money to go the the movies. I require something spectacular that only a big screen can transmit. On this, Avatar delivered.
For the last few months, I've been using ReSharper 4.5 for Visual Studio 2008. Prior to that, I was using version 3 for Visual Studio 2005. Version 4.5 introduces some new features, and improved performance over 3.0. Below are my reactions to the new version, and ReSharper in general - many of these were probably new in 4.0, but since I just from 3.0 to 4.5 directly, I'm not going to try to figure out what was in 4.0 and what's only in 4.5:
ReSharper ReSharper is a plug-in to Visual Studio that provides code analysis, cleanup, refactoring, templates, and IDE helpers in order to provide a better overall coding experience. It's an excellent addition to Visual Studio, and one that I have found to be extremely useful in day-to-day development. Alternatives such as CodeRush exist, but I haven't had any experience with them, so I can't really comment on how well ReSharper compares to them.
New in 4.5 I believe ReSharper 3.0 was limited to C# 2.0, so the new language features in C# 3.0 and 3.5 are all new in ReSharper 4. C# 3.0 and 3.5 introduced quite a few new coding techniques, designed to improve developer productivity and make code cleaner and more powerful, all while still using the 2.0 CLR. ReSharper helps you to take advantage of many of these new features. This is very nice when you have a 2.0 application and upgrade to 3.5. There are a lot of new features, but some of the ones I find most useful are:
Lambda expressions: ReSharper can replace old style anonymous methods with lambda expressions, so code like: myList.Find(delegate(Foo foo) { return (foo.Id < 10); }) can be replaced by: myList.Find(foo => foo < 10) ReSharper suggests this change for you, and automatically refactors it if you accept the suggestion. Of course, like all suggestions/warnings, you can disable this if you like the old-fashioned style.
Auto-Properties Auto-Properties are one of the best things to come out of C# 3.0. They allow standard properties to be be defined without defining the underlying fields that hold the data. This makes coding easier, debugging faster, and makes it just nicer to look at. ReSharper can automatically detect old-fashioned properties and fields that can be converted to auto-properties, and make the change for you, turning: private int _id; public int Id { get { return _id; } set { _id = value; } } into: public int Id { get; set; } It also can find scenarios where you can convert, but it would change the meaning. It will do this for you if you ask, but it won't recommend it, so you don't accidentally change the meaning of your code. Scenarios like: private readonly int _id; public int Id { get { return _id; } } can be modified to an auto-property with a private setter, but it would slightly change the meaning.
Object Initializers C# introduced a feature called object initializers (also collection initializers), that allows you to initialize an object and set public property values, all in the same statement, borrowing some of the concepts from VB's With statement. This helps in two ways, first by keeping such initializations clear to avoid confusion in reading and writing, and second by allowing you to use a new one-time-use object as a parameter without declaring it as a separate variable and set the values one at a time. ReSharper can recognize when you have a new variable immediately followed by assignments to public properties, and replace the code with an object initializer (same for collections, but I don't see that as often in code): Foo foo = new Foo(); foo.Id = 1; foo.Name = "John Doe"; can be automatically converted to: Foo foo = new Foo { Id = 1, Name = "John Doe" };
Naming Conventions Other than the new language features, ReSharper also now can analyze your variable naming convention, and warn you when you've named variables inconsistently. For example, my convention is to name fields with a leading underscore and lowerCamelCase; properties, methods, events, types, and enum values as UpperCamelCase; local variables and parameters as lowerCamelCase; and constants and static readonly fields as UPPER_CASE. ReSharper lets you choose for each of these, defining a prefix, suffix, and casing style; it also allows for multiple possible naming types. So you can have methods as UpperCamelCase, but also define event handlers for GUIs as UpperCamelCase_Click or btnUpperCamelCase_Click, or however your event handlers look based on your conventions.
Solution-wide Analysis ReSharper now can watch your entire solution looking for code errors in real time. So if you modify a class in one assembly that affects another assembly, ReSharper will tell you immediately, instead of having to wait until the next time you build your solution to find out that you screwed something up.
Performance This is one area that ReSharper 4.5 is supposed to be a significant improvement over previous versions. Version 3.0 slowed down my system quite a bit, causing it to lock up for as much as 30 seconds fairly often, and ate up a ton of memory. My primary development machine wasn't really all that powerful, so I blame my hardware as much as ReSharper itself. With 4.5, I've noticed some improvement, but I think my hardware is still holding me back considerably. Sometimes it takes 15-20 seconds just to open an .aspx file, which can be frustrating. But once everything's loaded and in memory, performance is generally fine. Memory consumption is still quite high, especially with the solution-wide analysis running - my 25-project solution fully loaded can take 700-800MB of RAM, even with no pages currently open. While this may not be much in a powerful 64-bit machine with a lot of memory and new processor, the 4-year-old machine I'm using with just 2GB RAM doesn't like this too much. I'd expect ReSharper to perform well in a newer machine.
Conclusion There are also a ton of small features that ReSharper provides, such as showing you your unused variables, using statements, and classes, providing code templates, reformatting your whitespace, and rearranging things like 'if' statements into ? or ?? statements, that just make ReSharper nice to have. There are some features such as integration with NUnit that can make writing test fixtures easier and faster. Many of the abilities of ReSharper are available elsewhere - Visual Studio 2008 added several things from 2005, and from what I've read, VS 2010 will provide a big jump as well (I haven't tried the beta yet, so I can't speak for them personally). FxCop provides many of the same code-analysis features, but it's an external program that doesn't work directly with the code the way ReSharper does.
For such a reasonable price, my opinion is that any development shop should give their developers a ReSharper license. It will keep them happy because they can code more productively and write better code, and will keep the development lead happy by making it easier to follow coding standards and conventions. And keeping developers and their supervisors happy is by far the most important thing for a company to do (from my point of view at least).
The new direct-to-DVD movie Battlestar Galactica: The Plan was recently released on DVD. This movie is a follow-up to the hugely popular series Battlestar Galactica, the reimagined series of the same name from the late 70's. The new series ran for 4 seasons, and was an excellent addition to the sci-fi genre that has become popular again in recent years. There were some aspects of the show, including the finale, that were a little out there, but for the most part, people have nothing but good things to say about the show.
The series focused on the conflicts between the human survivors and a race of machines called the Cylons. The Cylons are a very complex race, and their story evolved significantly over the four seasons. The Plan is supposed to give you some of the back story of the Cylons from early on, things that you wouldn't have known during the run of the first two seasons.
Like the other BSG follow-up, Caprica (a.k.a. Craprica), The Plan pretty much sucked. It was exactly as described - the first two seasons from the point of view of the Cylons. But there was absolutely nothing interesting about it, except of course for the unnecessary gratuitous nudity (just like Caprica). I'm no prude, but it really looked like they just did it for the "Hey, we're not on TV anymore, so let's throw some naked people in there" factor. The interesting stories that made up the series were set as backdrops for the boring and useless dialogue of the Cylons, with a noticeably missing character of "Number Three" (Lucy Lawless). Watching this movie was like watching two hours of deleted scenes from the show - a little bit of "hmm, that's something new, but not all that interesting", but mostly "this is a bunch of boring crap that I'm glad I didn't have to deal with in the show".
It's just too bad that a great show like BSG has produced such crappy follow-ups.
I just watched the unaired episode Epitaph One of the Fox show Dollhouse. The episode was not aired due to some kind of scheduling/contract problems, but was aired at Comic-Con, and was included on the DVD set.
***POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT***
The episode takes place in the year 2019, ten years after the rest of the season. The story revolves around life after the dollhouse - it explains how the imprinting technology went out of control, causing catastrophic results. The episode flashes back over the past 10 years, explaining some of the details on how life as we know it can turn into an apocalypse over the course of only a few years.
It's an incredible episode, and a real shame that it never made it to air. It seemed like it was meant as a conclusion to the show, and would have made a great finale if the series didn't get picked up. Since it did get renewed, there really were two possible paths for season 2: either they could continue in present-day, following the formula introduced in the first season, or they could continue where Epitaph One left off. From what I've read, it will flash forward back to 2019, but will still be based in present day, possibly starting to introduce the elements defined in Epitaph One.
The show has really grown quite a bit over the first season. When it first started, I thought it was interesting, and had some potential. After the first season, especially after Epitaph One, it seems that Dollhouse is really something bigger - a serious look at how technology can be abused, and some darker aspects of humanity, instead of the simple fun sci-fi that was introduced in the first 6 episodes or so. Definitely looking forward to the show's continuation. If you haven't seen the show, you've still got time to rent the first season DVD - only thirteen episodes, so you can catch up before the season premiere on September 25th.
Just finished the complete series of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. on DVD. The show lasted only 27 episodes from 1993 to 1994, but like many other short-lived shows, has somewhat of a cult following.
The series follows the adventures of bounty hunters Brisco County Jr. and Lord Bowler in 1890's California, as they tracked down various members of the John Bly gang, the gang responsible for murdering Brisco's father, as well as other fugitives. It's a mix of western action, science fiction, and comedy, featuring colorful characters and fun subplots. There were many well-known guest stars, such as John Astin, Terry Bradshaw, Denise Crosby, and several others.
One running theme of the show focused on "the orb", a mysterious device whose origin and purpose are revealed a little bit at a time throughout most of the series, and was behind most of the science fiction elements of the story. Many episodes also featured newly invented technologies (the "coming thing"), such as motorcycles, rockets, tanks, blimps, denim, and "rain baths" (showers), and out-of-time cultural references, such as Dunkin Donuts, an Elvis-like character, and several lines alluding to future pop-culture.
Aside from the science fiction and comedy, the show was a pretty straightforward western - chasing the bad guys on horseback, gunfights in the streets, rescuing the damsel in distress, and facing imminent doom nearly every episode. I personally wasn't a fan of the sci-fi elements of the show - the orb and magical powers seemed to get in the way sometimes, and the show would have been just as strong without it. However, this was a quality show with a lot to offer as both a western and a comedy, and I definitely recommend it.
A few weeks ago, I decided to try a product called The Big Skinny, a revolutionary wallet designed to be significantly thinner than the typical wallet. It's one of those deals that appears to be too good to be true, but at a reasonable $24.95 and a money-back guarantee, I figured I'd give it a shot.
The site includes a picture comparing a normal filled walled with the Big Skinny filled with the same number of cards and bills, and the picture seems doctored or somehow fake, like the food on TV commercials. However, it really is that good.
From the site, comparing a full regular wallet with a full Big Skinny:
Actual, with an empty regular wallet and a full Big Skinny wallet, containing 27 cards:
The 27 cards:
A skinny wallet means a more balanced seat - a big bulky wallet can lead to back problems and other pain. I've noticed a significant decrease in discomfort while driving or sitting for a long time.
The wallet itself appears to be pretty tough. The design I chose, the "Thin Super Skinny", is made of an ultra-thin nylon microfiber material, which looks like it will hold together pretty well. I am slightly concerned with the stitching - after only a few weeks, there were a few loose threads. I cut them off, and it seems to be fine now - I guess only time will tell how long the wallet lasts, but it's looking good so far.
The only complaint I have is that their website is less than professional - I actually bought mine through Amazon, for the same price and same shipping.
There are plenty of competitors out there, but this brand and style seemed like the best deal. Overall, I would definitely recommend this wallet.
Hi. You also might want to check out the Slimmy slim front pocket wallet. It's a premium leather alternative. It's available at http://www.koyono.com and http://www.superslimmy.com
Date: 2010-04-08 10:42:26
Name:
Joe Enos
Update: After nearly a year, the wallet is still in like-new condition. Other than a few scuffs and scratches, you'd never know that it was old. It's not falling apart at all, the stitches aren't coming out, and the pockets still hold everything in place as well as the first day.
Battlestar Galactica is a reimagining of a short series by the same name from 1978. The new show lasted four seasons, providing a science fiction experience unlike any other shows. The series was about a group of people who survived an apocolyptic attack, who search the galaxy for a new home safe from their enemies. The show was excellent - it's not your typical high-tech sci-fi series, focused on the futuristic toys and the action. Instead, it was about the people, their anger and pain, their struggle to survive and hope to thrive on their journey.
I'm sorry to say that the finale was kind of disappointing. The entire fourth season was a build-up to the end - the questions that had come up over the past seasons were starting to be answered, and events had reached the point of no return. With only one episode left, I still had hope that the show would have an exciting and interesting ending. The finale started out okay, but about halfway through, it just kind of fizzled away. The main characters' fates seemed rushed and forced, and the final destiny for the people was ridiculous and unbelievable. Plus there are still plenty of unanswered questions that I would have expected to be addressed in the finale.
Even with the below average finale, I still highly recommend the show. And there are still two upcoming events: Battlestar Galactica: The Plan is an upcoming TV movie telling the story from a different point of view, and Caprica is a new upcoming series which will take place 50 years prior to the events of Battlestar Galactica.
A sarcastic but honest review and summary of the episode can be found at: http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/battlestargalactica/daybreakpart_ii.php (Extremely spoiler-intensive, and also reader discretion advised for strong language).
Indeed, the finale was kind of disappointing. I mean what happened to Starbuck? Nevertheless, I am looking forward for Caprica and maybe some insight on how the frak is Kara Thrace. :)
@Galactica Fan: From what I've read, you may find some of your answers in The Plan. I don't know about Caprica - that could go either way - my guess is that it will have a few links to BSG, but that it will stand alone, and may not even touch the topic of Starbuck or some of the other unanswered questions.
I've been trying out a product called NDepend (version 2.11), a .NET code analysis tool, for the past few weeks. NDepend was written by a Microsoft MVP named Patrick Smacchia, a software developer and author from France. NDepend provides dozens of useful features for reviewing and analyzing your .NET assemblies.
NDepend uses CQL (Code Query Language) as the backbone for its analysis. CQL is a query language based loosely on the SQL standard syntax, and is fairly easy to read and write, especially due to the similarities to SQL (SELECT, WHERE, ORDER BY, etc.).
Some samples of the CQL code:
SELECT TOP 10 METHODS WHERE NbLinesOfCode > 30 ORDER BY NbLinesOfCode DESC
SELECT TOP 10 METHODS WHERE MethodCa == 0 AND !IsPublic AND !IsEntryPoint AND !IsExplicitInterfaceImpl AND !IsClassConstructor AND !IsFinalizer
Out of the box, NDepend provides a significant number of useful queries, such as identifying unused members, improperly encapsulated objects, and code quality features like types or methods that are too big or complex. These queries are all customizable - for example, you can change the "Methods with too many parameters" query so that it only returns methods with more than 8 parameters, instead of the 5 that comes by default - or exclude the query altogether. Adding queries to the analysis is just as easy - just write a CQL query and add it to the project.
In addition to the CQL query results, NDepend provides a few visual representations of the projects. The dependency graph is a diagram that shows each of the assemblies in your project, along with their relationship to one another. The size of the boxes and thickness of the edges represent properties of each assembly, such as number of lines of code, or code complexity.
The metrics chart is a little more difficult to make sense of. It displays fields, methods, types, or namespaces as little boxes inside assemblies, with the sizes representing one of several metrics, like number of IL instructions or number of members. When dealing with large projects, the sheer number of types makes this collection difficult to look at. However, if there are any significantly large methods, types, etc. in your project, that may tend to jump out at you and give you the opportunity to review your code architecture.
Once your NDepend project is ready (or you select a quick project and go with the defaults), you can fire it up, and it takes all of your CQL queries and graphs, and writes them to an HTML report, complete with query results, warnings, and summary information. This report is a great starting point for improving your project and customizing your queries.
There are plenty of options out there when looking for a code analysis and verification tool. In my opinion, what makes NDepend unique is how truly customizable it is, based on the CQL specification. Other code analyzers may allow you to build your own rules, but they typically are all based on what the tool wants you to be able to check. With CQL inside of NDepend, you, as an architect, can decide what's important to you, and query for it, regardless of whether anyone else thinks it's important.
I would definitely recommend NDepend for anyone interested in analyzing and improving their codebase.
I recently finished watching the complete series of Stargate SG-1, which ran for 10 seasons from 1997 to 2007. I never saw it while it was running on TV - I've been watching the DVDs for a little over a year, and finally finished it a few days ago.
The series started as a direct continuation of the 1994 movie Stargate, which starred Kurt Russell and James Spader (replaced by Richard Dean Anderson and Michael Shanks in SG-1). The movie was decent, but nothing special. But it was good enough to get me interested in the series.
Stargate SG-1 revolves around a secret government program where a team consisting of military officers, an archaeologist, and an alien warrior travel to different planets through a piece of ancient technology known as a stargate. Their mission is to acquire weapons and technology that could be used to defend themselves from hostile forces, specifically the Goa'uld, the parasitic enemy introduced in the movie. While on this mission, they make contact with various alien races, both advanced and primitive, and form alliances with several of them in their fight. It's not your traditional space opera, but rather a present-day military adventure, that happens to involve aliens, advanced technology, and some space travel. The later seasons had significantly more interaction with space ships and more traditional sci-fi elements, but the focus was still generally with the characters and the struggle for survival and inter-planetary relationships, rather than with starships shooting at each other.
The first eight seasons focus on the battle, with the Goa'uld as the primary antagonist. It's a very interesting storyline, and with the show's long tenure, they had plenty of time to tell the entire story, including a strong finish. Seasons 9 and 10 were focused on a new enemy, the Ori, who were more powerful than anything they had faced before. Season 9 also saw the departure of Richard Dean Anderson, replaced by a relatively unknown actor named Ben Browder.
The first seven seasons of the show were very good. It combined present-day science fiction with plenty of action and just the right amount of humor. The camaraderie between the characters made for a fun and interesting show. Starting in season 8, the show started to decline a little in quality, and continued through seasons 9 and 10 - the replaced characters and the new enemy just couldn't live up to the old ones. It was still good, but just not the same.
One of the most fun things about the show was its tendency to poke fun at science fiction, and specifically at itself. Anderson's character, Jack O'Neill, was a Star Trek fan, and several times referred to Star Trek - for example, when doing a pre-flight check, he asked if the phasers were online, and when they built a full-size space ship, he tried (unsuccessfully) to have it named Enterprise. Episodes 100 and 200 of the series were specifically about having fun with the show's concept - they dealt with a show inside a show, called "Wormhole X-Treme", which mirrored much of SG-1's story and characters. They were able to pick specific parts of the show to have fun with, by talking about them in the context of Wormhole X-Treme. At the end of both episodes, there were cast interviews with the "cast" of Wormhole X-Treme, just adding to the humor of the episode.
The series was followed up by two made-for-TV movies, The Ark of Truth and Continuum, both released in 2008. In addition, a spinoff, Stargate Atlantis started in 2004. Although the last few seasons of SG-1 coincided with the first few of Atlantis, I haven't seen any episodes of this series yet. From what I've read, it was reasonably safe to finish SG-1 without spoiling much of the early episodes of Atlantis, so I decided to do that. I do plan on watching this series before moving on to the two SG-1 movies, so it may be another year or so before I get around to watching those. I'm hopeful that Atlantis will be as good as SG-1, but with a completely different cast and totally different story, it's hard to guess what the show will be like. I guess I'll find out.
Overall, I definitely recommend the show for any sci-fi fan, or for anyone who just enjoys a good action series.
My own personal experience with online services began in the mid 90's, so I missed out on quite a bit of the excitement. I used Prodigy, and had heard of America Online and CompuServe, but really didn't understand the events leading up to the information superhighway. My goal in reading this book was to understand some of the things I missed out on, and to get a better picture of how the web really got started.
The book is arranged reasonably chronologically - chapter one takes place mostly in the 1960's; until reading this, I never even considered the possibility that computers could do anything that long ago, let alone do any networking. As the chapters go by, we see the growth of networks, online services, bulletin boards, and email. We see CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, and The Source, as well as several other unsuccessful products and companies. They even throw a few screen shots from some of these services back in the 80's - ridiculously lame by today's standards, but they were all the rage back then.
The book ends in the mid-1990's, when the one single web really replaced all of the individual online services. In addition, there's a summarized timeline from 1945-1994, showing each of the major advances leading up to the web.
I really enjoyed this book. It provided a lot of information that I never knew about how online services evolved throughout the past several decades, and gave me a better understanding of why some things are the way they are. The tone of the book is mostly dry facts and stories, but with a little humor and light-hearted fun thrown in on occasion to keep it entertaining as well as informative. And I don't believe Al Gore's name was mentioned once. Maybe he didn't invent the internet after all...
Highly recommended if you are interested in the topic...or if you were around for this stuff, and are just looking for some nostalgia.
Last month, I wrote a short review on my initial experiences with LifeLock, a company that protects your identity by handling various tasks related to your credit, such as registering and renewing fraud alerts and removing you from junk mail lists, backed up by a million dollar guarantee. At the time, 45 days had passed since I had signed up, and I still had not received my credit reports.
About a week after that post, I received my first of three reports, and the second came in a few days later. However, here we are, 3 months after originally signing up, and I still have not received the third. A few days ago, I send a message to LifeLock informing them that I had not received my third report. As of this morning, they still have not even acknowledged my message. I guess this answers the "How's their customer service" question. Any legitimate company should send a follow up email within 1 business day, even if it's just something like "we're looking into it".
Based on what I've seen so far, it looks like at the end of this contract in May, I will not be renewing. There are plenty of alternatives out there, and I'll find one that actually delivers in a timely manner, and provides reasonable customer service.
Update: After my second request to LifeLock over the weekend, I received a response on the same day, stating that they will reorder the report. So maybe it was just a fluke that my first message was not responded to.
LifeLock's services include setting fraud alerts with the credit bureaus (and renewing them every three months), removing you from the pre-approved credit card and junk mail lists, ordering annual credit reports, and several other features that are designed to prevent identity theft. While most of this can be done yourself, the work involved in handling all of this is what you're paying for. In addition, they give you a $1 Million guarantee, so that if all of these efforts fail, and your identity is stolen, they will fix it, and pay for any damages (accountants, lawyers, etc.), up to $1 Million.
I signed up for the service on May 21st. I signed up for one year, at an annual cost of $110 - a reasonable price to pay, considering the amount of money it would cost if my identity was stolen. On June 28th (38 days after signing up), I received an email from LifeLock stating that my credit reports have been ordered. Last time I ordered my credit reports myself direct from the bureaus, I got them immediately online. As of today, July 5th (45 days after signing up), I still have not received my reports either in the mail or over the web. In my opinion, this is unacceptable.
I have noticed a significant drop in junk mail, almost immediately after signing up. The only junk mail I seem to get now is the normal "resident" stuff, and ads from my own vendors (my banks, cable company, cell phone provider, etc.). While this alone isn't worth anywhere near the price of the service as some customers claim, it is nice to have.
If I move or request credit, I expect to receive a phone call requesting confirmation. Until then, however, obviously I won't know how well the service works.
It's too early to tell if LifeLock works as well as they say it does, but I feel better knowing that I'm now actively protecting my identity. I'm very unhappy with the length of time it's taking to receive my credit report, but if that's my only complaint, I suppose it wouldn't be enough to give a bad review. I will follow up on my review when I receive my credit report, and if anything worth mentioning happens over the next year.
I haven't talked with their customer service yet. Since I received a message on June 28th that they've been ordered, I am expecting to receive the reports in the mail in the next week or so.
There is an Answer Center on the site, and if you search for the phrase Credit Report, you'll find that they say it takes 4-8 weeks to expect receipt of the reports. It's possible that it was in the fine print when I enrolled, but it definitely wasn't in the marketing materials.
A few months ago, a Papa Murphy's Pizza restaurant opened near my house. I'd heard of it, but hadn't tried it before - I didn't even know there were any in Phoenix until this one opened. As soon as I tried it, I knew it was the greatest pizza ever. It's a different type of pizza place - they build you a pizza, using fresh ingredients, and give it to you to bake at home (Take-N-Bake). Since it's priced about the same as some of the other popular chains, without the need for ovens, delivery drivers, or other expenses found at other places, they can afford to provide significantly more quality than the other guys. It's better quality than the other guys, and significantly better quality than even the best frozen pizza brand.
I've been trying to cut back on pizza lately - it's not exactly a part of a healthy diet - but when I do get pizza, I make sure it's Papa Murphy's.
Who says pizza isn't part of a healthy diet? Meat, dairy, vegies, and bread. What other all-in-one meal can provide that? Pizza is perfect ... as long as you don't wolf down two or three pies in one sitting!!
I was looking at the numbers, and a whole large thin-crust pizza at Papa Murphy's is roughly equivalent to a 4X4 and fries at In-N-Out - so you're right - I guess it's not all that unhealthy...
I've been using a product called ReSharper, from JetBrains, for several months. The product is a plug-in to Visual Studio, and is designed to help refactor code, provide additional shortcuts, formatting, and other code maintenance services. I use several of the functions on a regular basis, and have experimented a little with the rest of the features.
My review follows:
The good:
As a plug-in to Visual Studio, all of the hints and shortcuts are right at your fingertips, as opposed to tools like FxCop, which checks your assembly and forces you to go find your problems before you can deal with them.
ReSharper informs you if you have any unused local variables or private members. It also tells you if a value assigned to a variable is not used in any execution path. This allows you to cut out unnecessary parts of your code, with no worries about breaking anything else.
It auto-generates your "using" statements at the top of your codefile, so you don't have to remember or look up namespaces that you don't use frequently. For example, if you add the following line of code: FileInfo fi; It will add a "using System.IO;" line to the top of your codefile, after confirming with you that this is the namespace you want to add - if there are multiple possibilities (for example, if you have a different FileInfo class in another referenced assembly), it will display both, and let you select which one you want to add to your codefile. In addition, if you have "using" statements that are not referenced in your code, it will tell you, giving you the opportunity to clean that up without any trial and error.
It tells you if a method can be made static, which gives you the opportunity to reduce the instance-level members of your class.
It provides a testing interface for use with nUnit, so you can run or debug tests directly from the IDE instead of a separate application.
The bad:
Ever since I've started using this, performance inside Visual Studio has been inconsistent - definitely worse than normal, sometimes much worse. It takes extra time to load projects, and occasionally locks up the IDE for 5-10 seconds for no apparent reason.
One of the default code refactorings it suggests is eliminating redundant "ToString()" calls. While this is fine in most cases, it sometimes is not appropriate. The idea behind the refactoring is to provide EXACTLY the same output with the same or better performance. Here's the classic example: int i = 4; string s = string.Format("I ate {0} pizzas", i.ToString()); ReSharper will tell you to remove the ".ToString()" - which will provide the exact same result, since string.Format by default calls the .ToString() method on all objects. However, if you call ToString() yourself before passing to the method, you're passing a reference to a string. If you pass the int, it will box it to an object, pass that object in, and will unbox it back to an int before it can call ToString(), which is additional processing. Granted, it's a tiny amount, but anything that changes the flow of the program should not be done during refactoring.
While ReSharper provides very good support for basic nUnit cases, it does not handle certain situations. If you have two classes within the same namespace, where one is the SetUpFixture, and the other is the TestFixture, nUnit will run the SetUpFixture once prior to starting the testing process. ReSharper ignores the SetUpFixture, so those tests will not run properly, and must be run directly from nUnit.
It doesn't appear to function quite right for ASP.NET. VS2005 provides several ways to build a web application - you can build a "WebSite", or a Web Application project, which allows you to either work with partial classes much like Windows apps, or the old fashioned way, where all of your server controls and events are declared on a single codefile. ReSharper gets confused sometimes, depending on which model you are using.
One of the features is auto-generating parenthesis, braces, brackets, etc. While some people may find this handy, I don't, and I've turned this feature off. However, in some situations, they still come up without my approval, and usually just slow me down, since I have to correct them.
Overall opinion I believe ReSharper has some great features, most notably the nUnit integration and the code optimization. However, for the amount of additional overhead it brings (processing time, money, and "undocumented features"), I don't believe it's worth it. I'd like to see a "light" version of ReSharper, or an open-source alternative, but that doesn't seem likely anytime soon. My only alternative is to build one of my own - keep an eye out on my downloads page over the next year or so, and I may just have something.
This was based on ReSharper 3.0. I'm currently using ReSharper 4.5 on VS2008, and I'm significantly happier with 4.5 than I was with 3.0. I may write something about 4.5 one of these days coming up, after I've had a little more experience with this version.
