Is The Walking Dead About to Die?

Posted on November 16, 2011 by mikebryant

I can’t believe I waited all summer for new season of The Walking Dead, which was simply the best show on TV last year…

The only thing I can figure is that AMC must have fired the original writers and replaced them with actual Zombies. This season has been a disappointment since about the second episode, when they started searching for Sophia.. and have been searching ever since. I mean, how many episodes can you get out of a creepy old man in a farm house? Evidently a whole season’s worth.

Come on! I started watching this show for the Zombies, not some soap-opera love triangle between Rick, Shane and Lori. And who really cares if the the ‘little asian boy’ Glenn is doing the hookie-pookie with the farmer’s daughter. The show is called ‘The Walking Dead’, remember AMC?

So, please, let’s see some more Zombies, less old creepy farmer dude and not so much lovey-dovey. And please, we all know Darly is a redneck, do ya have to play that up so much?

I’ll stick around for this season, but unless something changes, my DVR will have other priorities next year.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic Beta

Posted on November 12, 2011 by mikebryant

So I spent about five hours last night beta testing the upcoming MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic. My verdict? In a word: awesome!

While having a very World of Warcraft feel, it’s just different (and that means better). After trying Rift, EVE Online, Runescape and a few other online games, I always came back to the runt’n'grunt of WoW, doing the same dungeons we’ve been doing forever. None of those other games just did ‘it’ for me.

Enter SWTOR, finally a game that will, once again, make me want to call in sick and spend all day killing monsters and leveling.

Note: Due to the confidentiality agreement, I unfortunately cannot provide screenshots and other details.

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Watching standard definition instead of high-def on your iPad or iPod

Posted on October 19, 2011 by mikebryant

OK, unless you connect your iPod Touch or iPad to an HDTV, do you really need to store all the movies and TV shows in high-def format? I mean, the screen isn’t that big on these devices and you can store tons more content if you use standard def instead of high def video.

So, how do you do that? It’s quite easy, actually. Simply connect your device to your computer, fire up iTunes, click on your device in the left-side iTunes bar, then click the ‘Summary’ tab. Near the bottom of that page, you’ll see a number of options, one of which says ‘Prefer Standard Definition Videos’. Clicking this option will tell iTunes to copy the old fashioned standard def versions of your videos to your device.

Of course, if you connect your device to your high-def TV to watch your shows, copying the high-def versions is preferable. But, watching standard dev on a little screen is really just fine. And you’ll be able to stores so much more stuff to your device!

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Quick funny for the day…

Posted on September 15, 2011 by mikebryant

US Population =237,000,000
104,000,000 Retired
133,000,000 To Do The Work
85,000,000 In School
48,000,000 To Do The Work
29,000,000 Employed By Federal Government
19,000,000 To Do The Work
2,800,000 In The Military
16,290,000 To Do The Work
14,800,000 State and City
1,400,000 To Do The Work
188,000 In Hospitals
1,212,000 To Do The Work
1,211,998 Jails and Prisons
2 To Do The Work ( You and Me )

And you’re sitting there reading jokes.

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Fellow East Kentuckians- Don’t Vote Farmer for Ag Commish

Posted on June 22, 2011 by mikebryant
Bob Farmer is the Democratic candidate for KY Commissioner of Agriculture. Mr. Farmer is a marketing executive and a public speaker, not a farmer. He frequently travels to other states to give speeches and do his ‘comedy routine’ (portions of which can be seen here).

 

Of course, there is nothing wrong with being a marketing executive. Not being a farmer and running for Commissioner of Agriculture is a bit of a stretch, but I can even overlook that. What I can’t get past is what Mr. Farmer says in this comedy routine of his. This Jefferson County, non-farmer, marketing executive who wants to be Agriculture Commissioner says absolutely terrible things about us here in Eastern Kentucky.

 

What sorts of things does he say? How about in Eastern Kentucky, the “cars are on blocks and the houses on wheels”, or that the FBI wouldn’t investigate a particular county “’cause all the DNA is alike and there ain’t no dental records.” Yea, those are quotes from this funny man’s speeches.

 

Only when it became public that he routinely mocks his fellow Kentuckians who happen to reside East of I-75 and South of I-64, did Mr. Famer offer an apology. His not-too-contrite apology consisted of “I sincerely apologize if my comments offended any of my fellow Kentuckians…” So, this joker is only sorry if he offended anyone. Wow.

 

Now I understand humor, and I realize that Mr. Farmer was going for a laugh at the expense of us who live in the eastern part of the state. Do we really want to elect a man to represent Kentucky’s Agriculture interests who makes a habit of making fun of the people he is supposed to represent? It was a joke, I get it. But I for one am not laughing.

 

And Bob Farmer will not get my vote in November.

 

See Mr. Funny Man, Bob Farmer, in action here.
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Abortion Legislation Killed Again in Kentucky House

Posted on February 22, 2011 by mikebryant

Again this year- and this makes FOUR years in a row- the Kentucky House of Representatives has allowed legislation to die that would restrict abortions in our Commonwealth. The trick they love to pull is to put the abortion bills in a committee where they are guaranteed to die.  This keeps the bills from ever coming to the full floor for a vote.

The House Bills that have been killed this year include HB 374 (to require a face to face meeting with a doctor prior to getting an abortion); HB 243 (to keep minors from other states from getting abortions in KY without parental consent); HB 215 and HB 390 (to prohibit an abortion after 20 weeks of fetal development except in cases of emergency).

It is beyond me how Speaker Stumbo and others can actually be against these! How can anyone want to allow a minor from another state to get an abortion here without a parent’s consent? Is requiring a simple face-to-face meeting between a doctor and the expectant mother too much to ask, especially considering the severity of the procedure?  And, isn’t 20 weeks long enough to decide whether to get an abortion or not?  Are these so outrageous?

I know this: it is time for change in Frankfort.  Speaker Stumbo, and Jody Richards before him, consistently put these bills into committees where they are sure to die.  It’s a foregone conclusion.  It’s Kentucky politics.  Why do our Legislators keep electing these people to leadership positions? Is no one else tired of the same old, same old?

There are over 4,000 children legally murdered each year in this state.  Should taking a stand for these children be such a difficult position to take?

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Toys!

Posted on January 18, 2011 by mikebryant

I’m writing this on my new, ultra-cool (and ultra-tiny) Lenovo S10 Netbook, which is indeed a very cool toy.  It ain’t the most powerful computer I’ve ever used, but it serves the purpose for which I intend to use it, which is basic surfing and note-taking. And the full-size keyboard is nice!

Another new toy I have been playing with recently is a new PHP IDE called phpStorm, made by the same folks who brought us the IntelliJ IDEA Java development platform.  As cool as IntelliJ is, Eclipse (with the MyEclipseIDE addition) is my most favorite Java IDE.  But Eclipse just doesn’t cut it for PHP (for me, anyway).

But phpStorm is great, so far.  Before I pluck down the $100 for it, though, I am gonna try some other stuff.  phpDesigner, well, sucks, but I still am going to use NetBeans for a while to see its PHP abilities.  Zend Studio would probably rock, but the $299 price tag takes it out of contention.  So, for now, the two contenders for my new PHP editor are phpStorm and NetBeans.

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NASA Finds New Life

Posted on December 2, 2010 by mikebryant

Uber Cool, heh?  NASA Finds New Life.

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Zombieland!

Posted on November 30, 2010 by mikebryant

Zombieland has got to be one of the coolest movies I have seen in a while. There is, of course, one flaw, and this is a serious breaking of the rules:  we all know zombies don’t run.

The ‘surprise’ cameo is really, really cool and Woody Harrelson’s character certainly has his priorities in order. And I can definitely understand Jesse Eisenberg’s character in the movie– when the Zombie Apocalypse comes, I too could miss out on all the fun by sitting in front of a computer screen playing World of Warcraft for days on end.

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Which is scarier- the Monsters or the movie?

Posted on November 27, 2010 by mikebryant

I gotta admit that I was pretty excited yesterday when I rented the movie ‘Monsters’ from iTunes. It looked very promising, and I do me love a good in-your-face alien apocolypse movie. So at bedtime last night, the iPod went with me…

About an hour and a half later, I was lying there thinking that, yet again, I had been duped.  This is not sci-fi, it is a very poorly written love story with a sci-fi background.  It’s yet another day-in-the-life movie dedicated to the story of a couple people and how they fare in the face of some undefined, sometimes distant, alien threat. Think of ‘Cloverfield’ or ‘Skyline’ but with bad, er, worse, acting.

Of course the ending provided no real closure and the characters were never developed at all. In fact, I still have no idea what Sam was doing in Mexico to begin with. Now that I think about it, I guess I don’t really care- neither of the two main characters managed to evoke the smallest bit of empathy from me- even when they finally came close to the ‘monsters’.

And, yes, I got the symbolysm…  The monsters making love, the wall separating the US and Mexico, the coyotes. It just didn’t do much for me- this just wasn’t a ‘thinking’ movie. If it was mean to be, they sure didn’t think much about how to pull it off.

Of course, I’m no professional movie critic. But I am a person who has disposable income enough to watch the occasional movie. Wonder who the writers/producers/director were trying to please?

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