Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

(7:47:16 PM) captainhogan65: A drunk guy came into the coffee shop I was in earlier and started harassing customers
(7:47:26 PM) Dio Brando: did you kill him
(7:47:30 PM) captainhogan65: No
(7:47:36 PM) captainhogan65: When he got up to leave, he was so drunk, he couldn’t even put his coat on, and almost fell over
(7:47:46 PM) captainhogan65: I called the cops and sat with him until they got there.
(7:47:56 PM) Dio Brando: then you killed him
(7:47:59 PM) captainhogan65: No
(7:48:27 PM) captainhogan65: While we were sitting there, he grabbed my hand and yanked me in close
(7:48:32 PM) captainhogan65: He looked me square in the eye and said to me, “If you send me to jail, I’ll send you to hell.”
(7:48:48 PM) captainhogan65: Then he said some stuff in Navajo
(7:48:53 PM) captainhogan65: And then the cops came and took him away
(7:48:56 PM) captainhogan65: Stair
(7:48:58 PM) captainhogan65: Am I cursed?
(7:49:11 PM) Dio Brando: YES
(7:49:23 PM) captainhogan65: I was afraid of this

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

It might should help if I included the real link: http://www.fourcornersfood.com

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

If anyone is interested, I’ve started a side project on local restaurants called Four Corners Food Project.

UPDATE: FIxed the link. Now it is real

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

Some quick reviews of TV shows I watch on a regular basis. I’m basing this on my Hulu subscribed queue, as well as memory, so I very well may be forgetting some things.

TOP GEAR – My English friends have been telling me about this show for ages, but I always shrugged it off as a car show, and that I wasn’t interested. Having been watching it steadily since the spring now, I would easily place Messrs. May, Hammond and Clarkson among some of the funniest people in TV. The specials are both hilariously funny and interesting to watch. Why can’t an American show like this? A non-fiction show with a live studio audience and entertaining hosts? I know NBC bought a pilot that did not take off, but I don’t think the Top Gear mode neccesarily even needs to apply to cars. I think with the right personalities, a show on any enthusiast subject could succeed on the Top Gear model.

TOP CHEF – I started buying the past seasons on iTunes during the summer after seeing my sisters watch an episode at home. I hate to say it, but this is the first reality game show I have ever watched. I’m sorry. I just like food too much.

STARGATE: UNIVERSE – Seeing as I have apparently blogged about nothing but this in the last three months, I think we can move on.

30 ROCK – I honestly don’t think I watch any comedies that aren’t on NBC these days.

THE OFFICE – See above

BLEACH – One of two anime series I watch for no other reason than I want to see where it’s going. Oh God! Why? This show is terrible! The interesting premise evaporated while the show was still in its teens when they traveled to the Soul Society. Wherein a gigantic cast of unlikeable characters was added to the already-large group, pushing actually interesting characters to the background. A quick look at Wikipedia tells me I probably would be better off just reading the synopses and taking this out of my Hulu subscriptions. Honestly, that’s what I should do, but since the filler arc just ended, I guess I’ll stick around a little longer.

NARUTO – The other one. Shut up. Don’t judge me.

FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST: BROTHERHOOD – The only anime series I still watch because I actually think that it is good. Because it’s not just good, it is very good. I was hesitant to watch at first, as I really liked the original TV series. I wasn’t looking forward to seeing its entire continuity invalidated in favor of the manga’s. I’m glad I tuned in though. After a slow and boring start that retread much we knew already, the show really is coming into its own. And like the original show, it scraps stupid speeches for intelligent dialogue that I can actually imagine a real person too. Plus, it really understands how to create a dramatic moment. There’s a recent scene in particular that gave me chills, no spoilers here though. Suffice it to say, it is very good, and I wish America could produce television fantasy this good.

SCRUBS – Enough anime, damn it. The only non-NBC comedy I watch, Scrubs is on probation. The current season was very lackluster up until the most recent episode, when Zach Braff finally left for good. I’m glad. After the “finale” of the previous season, we had already said goodbye to J.D. Having him around still was pointless and weighed us down from becoming interested in the new characters. Not to mention that he was just a caricature of J.D. from the previous seasons, all the silly effeminate quirks and nothing heavy or substantial. The first episode without him is the one I’ve enjoyed the most so far. This show could survive if the new cast comes into its own and John C. McGinley keeps doing that thing he does.

THE VENTURE BROTHERS – Do I really need to tell you why The Venture Brothers is awesome? No, I didn’t think so.

LAW AND ORDER – My interest in the show has been waning ever since they added Lupo. I really liked the old openings, wherein the murder suspect was discovered by a random passerby. The new openings, which just show a scene from the murder suspect’s day before they died seems like an overused technique, and one that isn’t in line with Law and Order’s cinema verite feel. I don’t mind the Lieutenant Van Buren cancer plot because it lets us see S. Epatha Merkerson more, and also gave us that awesome scene where Curtis came back to bury his wife, which was a real cool surprise. I will of course follow Law and Order until the day it days, but It’s miffing me more and more often.

I think those are all the shows I am currently watching.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

I may or may not be horrible at this(HINT: I AM HORRIBLE AT THIS). I’m hoping an app that lets me update from my spiffy Android phone will help alleviate that.

I do have some side-projects in the works. And I hope to talk more about TV I’ve been watching, games I’ve been playing and sharp objects I’ve been stepping on.  I do it all for you (HINT: I DO IT ALL FOR ME, THAT’S WHY I’M TERRIBLE AT THIS).

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

Once again, this just isn’t working. I wish I could say that I don’t care if it doesn’t work, but I really do need it to. It would be nice to know why, but I don’t. So I’m going to change some things up again, and we’ll see what happens.

Also, this WP theme has got to go. What was I thinking. This is horrible.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

Apparently I’m only allowed to post on Stargate Universe these days. Well, so far it’s been okay. As per my advice, they’ve laid back a bit on the communication stones. Yes, I am taking credit for that. What of it? I think it’s a better show as a result.

The main problem I think it has now is it is very military-centric. As in most of the military characters are presented as the bright shining lights that illuminate our universe while the civilian characters tend to be portrayed as weasely whiners who seem to have problems with anything.

Actually, it’s nowhere near as bad as that, but I can easily see it moving in that direction. It doesn’t help that most of the military characters are people whose names we know, and there are a lot of nameless civilians running around for the writers to pluck antagonists from.

Another big issue is that they need to do a little better with the continuity. I thought having Rush have a breakdown from caffeine and nictotine withdrawal was a masterful move. But let me tell you he went cold turkey better than any smoker or coffee drinker I’ve ever seen from one episode to the next.

Also, this is kind of a broad nitpick, but I feel as though Destiny isn’t quite alien enough. I forget the moment when the writers decided that the ship had bedrooms, but I don’t like it. There were lots of cool shots in the pilot of extras just strewn about and lieing in hallways because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. I think that the show really needs to ratchet the uncomfort levels of the characters up even more. The show is obviously taking a lot from the remake of Battlestar Galactica stylisticly. If there’s one thing the show should take away from BSG it’s that you should never stop screwing with the characters. Never let them get comfortable for even a second because the second they get comfortable, (SPOILER) they’ll suddenly realize that they are angels or that they want to abandon technology or something.

You know, it ocurred to me that this is probably the first new science fiction TV show I’ve started watching since I first started watching Battlestar Galactica. That is because TV scifi tends to be either aimed at mainstream TV watchers, or aimed at franchise sci-fi fans (which is why I was so skeptical about SGU in the first place). If you need a good example, go watch Flash Forward. Because, of course, the FBI has databases on every time a crow has died ever.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

I never watched the Stargate SG-1 series, or its spinoff, Stargate: Atlantis. Can’t really say why. Around the time the show switched from Showtime to Scifi Channel, I was kind of in the midst of my reaction against how horrible Star Trek: Voyager was turning out. I wanted to tune into another military science fiction show like I wanted an Intrepid class starship, bio-neural circuitry and a seemingly inexhaustible slupply of photon torpedoes and shuttle craft.

At this point, I’m not sure if I’ll ever really watch Stargate SG-1. It will probably go in my file of coulda/woulda/shoulda scifi shows like The X-Files or Farscape that always intrigued me, but I never tapped in to. I never even considered Atlantis seeing how it seemed to be a pretty closely tied spinoff of SG-1, and if I wasn’t going to watch the original, and when I heard about Stargate:Universe, my interest again was not really piqued.

Then I saw the trailer during the final days of Battlestar Galactica, and was quite impressed. I really liked the dark style and the air of panic and urgency it gave off. So I said that when the show came on, I would give it the ol’ college try.

I just finished the first three-parter and my attitude so far is cautiously optimistic.

The first third was a knockout. I love that they’re going with steadicams. Yeah, it’s a popular technique, but the reason it’s popular is I like it…or rather, people in general like it, although I prefer to think they are catering to me specifically. Honestly, the only thing I disliked about the show early on was the frame story. The more details you include of the earlier show, the more trouble you’ll get in with viewers like me who didn’t watch SG-1. I think most people get the idea that the Stargate acts like a portable wormhole of some sort. You started the show off great with the panicked, injured people coming out of the Stargate onto a strange and weird ship. Why flash back at all? Give us some credit here.

Anyway, my enjoyment lessened as it went on, and here’s why.

• Everyone instantly seemed too familiar and comfortable on this ship. I want it to be like they just unpacked a stereo and all the instructions are Japanese. The way it is right now, it’s more like German. A lot of it is meaningless, but you can string together some meaning through the cognates.
• The ancient communication stones are trouble. Lose ‘em. Make it something like the only way they con communicate with earth is through morse code. Or better yet, semaphore.
• No more cameos from the previous series. Especially not Richard Dean Anderson. I should’ve mentioned it earlier, but he’s another reason I never watched SG-1. He’s too smug. He looks like someone who just bought a Prius, but all the time.
• Dear God, don’t let Rush make anymore speeches about his backstory. Next time you want him to get in a fight with a character, have him just let off a string of Scottish expletives, not explain how his father worked on the docks and he got a scholarship to Oxford while working two jobs and walking a thousand miles in the snow. I didn’t like the character he was pontificating too until that moment.
• Also, no more desert planets. What is it with science fiction and desert planets. There’s never any plains planet that are just endless fields of grass. Try that. It’l be like driving through Iowa.
• Give guest actors strict instructions against chewing the scenery. Specifically the senator’s wife and the guy who inhabited the body of the colonel.
• When you do the communication stones, don’t switch out the actors. Let us see how jarring it is for everyone. Of course, this shouldn’t matter because we’re not going to see the communication stones anymore. Right?  RIGHT?
• Let SOMEONE be disturbed about abandoning two of the crew members on some mystery planet without any explanation as to what happenned to them.

Anyway, it has problems, but I’ll keep watching and evaluating on an episode by episode basis.

Oh yeah. I will never EVER call it Syfy. Deal with it.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

Since the last time I’ve posted I’ve gone to Seattle, Kansas City, started the process of applying to grad school and made a little papier mache robot man.

I suck at this blogging thing.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

Sorry I’ve been incognito for a bit. I spent most of last week in New York, and most of this week suffering at work because of it.

The Great South Bay as soon from my uncle's boat, "Hogan's Hero"

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

Last night was my first time attending an event with the Farmington Young Professionals. It’s a new group being run as part of the Chamber of Commerce. Our paper is very heavily involved in it, probably because we have so many young professionals here.

Last night was the first social event, set up by Brianna Ferran, who is the HR Administrator at The Daily Times, where I work. It was held at the new gourmet deli/liquor store Distil, and I gotta say I had a great time.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately from sites like Mashable about a movement called “IE6 no more.” Now I am no fan of IE6. I gave up on Internet Explorer a long time ago, moving first to Firefox, which I was never a huge fan of, and then finally finding Google Chrome as a browser that fit me very well.

At home at any rate. At work, it’s a different story.

No, I don’t use IE6 at work. My computer at work has a different handicap. It’s a Power Mac G4 running Panther. So if I was crazy enough to use Internet Explorer for work stuff, which I used to have to for some proprietary systems the company had that were developed for use on Windows machines only, I would be using IE5.

Now, I don’t really have the problem with IE6. When I browse the Web, I use Firefox 2.0 or Safari 2.0, which does okay for now. But these are both software dead ends for me. Apple decided long ago they wouldn’t make newer versions of Safari backwards compatible to other OS X versions (what a lovely business practice this is), and now even Firefox has given up, as Firefox 3.0 required Tiger and onward. Now usually these older browsers run okay for me, but they’re starting to slip. I’ve long since given up on Safari, and how long until the sites I need stop showing up in Firefox.  There was no campaign for this. Developers just dropped us.

The leaders of this IE6 No More campaign claim to have addressed corporate users. I love that this is the phrase they use. Because no small business  might be using computers too old to upgrade. It’s just monolithic evil corporate guys holding back the Web. Bet it makes ‘em feel good. Anyway, their logic is that if the Web suddenly becomes useless for IE6 users, the corporate bigwigs will be forced to have IT invest.

Sure, that will work for companies with locked systems that just need an upgrade. But what about people who can’t upgrade? I’ve been using the same obsolete computer for three years, and if they weren’t going to upgrade before the recession, I know I won’t be getting a new one anytime soon. What about older computers at companies that are trying to save money in a tight economic climate? What about computers at low-income schools and community centers? What about hand-me-down computers in homes that couldn’t afford a computer otherwise?

Again, this doesn’t even affect me, but there’s this attitude on the Internet that people who haven’t upgraded their browser are lazy. Consider that they can’t upgrade. And that your attitude to them is elitist and obnoxious.

I know that’s how I’ll feel when my copy of Firefox 2.0 at work suddenly becomes useless.

UPDATE: Joe Terranova pointed out that Digg came to similar conclusions, but they actually backed them up with a survey.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

I was reading Kotaku this morning, and saw that they had put up a review for a new Square game called Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord. It’s a Wiiware game, so I wasn’t particularely interested. Most of what I’ve seen on Wiiware has been pretty bad with some notable exceptions. The review was actually pretty good. The writer seemed to like the game except for the fact that it got so hard toward the end, it was tempting him to buy DLC Square had put out there that would make it easier to beat. However, I immedietly latched on to one of the points in the negative side of the review:

The FF-Ness: It’s cliche to complain about Final Fantasy cliches, but come on. Into a tower defense game they managed to stuff a protagonist with dad issues, an excessive amount of dialogue, an overly-long quest that evolved its gameplay style too slowly and a super-tough final boss battle that requires level-grinding to beat. None of that improved the game. The worst offense here was that there were more than 40 quest levels, most of them indistinguishable from each other, a far cry from the less numerous but more distinctly laid out levels of PlayStation 3 downloadable tower defense game PixelJunk Monsters.

This is something I’ve been complaining about for a while now. It’s endemic of pretty much every Final Fantasy game, and I know I’m definately not the only one to feel this way. In fact, I’ve registered a growing malaise with the series that probably began shortly after the release of X or X-2. Final Fantasy XII was definately a victim of this as well, although the way the battle system ran certainly did not help things.

What I have to wonder is why this continues? Do the developers see the silly overwrought stories and unbalanced gameplay as characteristic of the games? Or is this a culture thing. Are the elements we find jarring and interfering items that the Asian markets enjoy or demand.I’m seriously asking. I really want to know.

Looking at the bishounen characters in the Final Fantasy XIII the only clear thing is that Square has no intention of changing any time soon.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

One of the best parts about living in Farmington is that we probably have one of the most awesome libraries in the world. I’ve been nervous ever since the city government announced that they were making cuts that it might diminish their awesomeness.

What I’m most worried about is the libary’s digital download service. They partnered with an outside vendor to allow people to download eBooks and audiobooks for two week periods. I’m not a big eBook person. I do have an eReader app on my BlackBerry, but I don’t think I’d like reading stuff on that tiny screen too much. Audiobooks are a completely different story. Two days a week I work on the copy desk by myself, and I’ve come to find that this is the perfect scenario to just push play on a book and I can usually get it down in two days then move on to the next one. Audiobooks can get very pricey otherwise, so this is a good solution.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been trying to check out more of the local farmers markets this year. I went to the one in Durango last Saturday, and it was a great time. Three weeks ago, I had tried to go to the Farmington one, but I showed up at 10:30pm, and no one was there except for one table selling houseplants. That was the same day our interns had gone to write an article on it, and they had told me there were many sellers there early, they just had sold out really fast.

So today I set my clock radio for super early and got down there by 8:30 am. It was a little busier then I had remembered.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

Scifi wire (I refuse to call it Syfy) has an article up explaining why Stargate Universe is no Voyager/BSG mashup. Honestly, that’s too bad because a Star Trek Voyager/Battlestar Galactica mashup sounds pretty neat.

BSG already is pratically a Voyager do over. Ron Moore’s opinions on Voyager aren’t exactly top secret. The reason BSG worked in this fashion is Moore didn’t worry about baggage from the BSG universe, he just did whatever he wanted with the source material.

That’s going to be the test of Stargate: Universe. I have to admit, I’m not a Stargate fan. I mean, the movie was good stupid fun, but the TV show just went on and on and on and was so corny and pulpy. Universe has a good premise, but can it leave behind the original show’s baggage.

It deserves at least a few watches, and I’ll give it that when it premieres.

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

Last Friday, I got to go up to Durango to go to an event at the world headquarters of Ska Brewing Company.  It’s just one of many beer-related events I learned about by reading Jeff Hammett’s Beer and Bikes blog. I may not be much of a biker, but I’ve been spending much of the last year educating myself more on beer, and Ska Brewingwas one of the few local microbreweries I had never been to in my three years in the Four Corners.  So when I heard they were having an event to celebrate launching their Wheelsucker Wheat, I made plans. The creation of the beer was a joint effort along with Avery Brewing. I went up there with my friends Jeff and Jim and my roommate Darren. We got there late-ish because we went there straight after work. Still, for the short time we were there, we had a great time.

It’s amazing how something can be right there and you pass it by all the time. Ska Brewing Headquarters is on U.S. 550 right accross from the Durango Mall. I drive by it almost every time I come in to Durango, unless I’ve taken the La Plata Highway. I never had any clue it was there, and I’m lesser for it. It’s in a really cool spot with a nice yard for music and food and a really cool tasting room.

I’m always a little hesitant to talk about beer, because I don’t have the lexicon to avoid sounding like I’m pretending to know about something I don’t know a ton about. So in as simple terms as I can: I liked it. It was sweet but not too heavy. A good beer and I’ll be keeping an eye out for it in Durango bars.

Here are some photos from the day:

Originally published at Highly Advanced Cheese. You can comment here or there.

This post is testing my new theme. It does not exist and shall be deleted shortly.