After the hullabaloo that was made out of Marilyn Hagerty's Olive Garden review, I thought to myself, "What would make a crazier restaurant review than Olive Garden?" Fortunately, while I was driving home tonight the answer was shining at me from the side of the road. In a mash-up that should turn out a whole lot better than that comic book where Indy was supposed to meet Chewie and Han, Taco Bell has just introduced the Doritos Locos Tacos! When I saw the signs beckoning me into the hallowed halls of the FourthMeal, I yanked my car across four lanes of traffic into the Taco Bell parking lot. A lovely young woman wearing a giant foam Doritos Locos Tacos hat took my order, and handed over the powdery, cheesy goodness. (My apologies for not snapping a picture of the hat. She was quite bashful. Orange County Register's article has a picture of the hat for reference)

Without further ado, here's my review of the new Doritos Locos Tacos at Taco Bell. As the slogan says, the Doritos Locos Tacos is "Taco Bell on the inside, Doritos on the outside." And, to no surprise, there is nothing new inside of the taco. It is just a standard Crunchy Taco Supreme: just good ole' diced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, and cheddar cheese on top of sour cream and seasoned ground beef. The flavor of the much anticipated Doritos shell is surprisingly mediocre. The shell did not have nearly as strong a flavor as I expected it would. It seems that they are using a lot less of the "flavor dust" on the shells than they do on the chips. Also, the texture of the Doritos shell is much softer than regular Doritos chips or even Taco Bell's normal hard taco shells. Isn't a taco shell supposed to break when you bite into it? It was crispy, but my teeth just sank into it when I took a bite. Also, my taco became soggy from the sour cream and meat in the less than 5 minutes it took me to find somewhere to park. The Doritos Locos Tacos came wrapped in paper and packaged in card stock packaging shaped like a taco. I found this out the hard way when I tried to eat mine in the car while I was driving; it was quite a surprise when I bit into cardboard! This is most likely to prevent "Doritos fingers" and to help it keep its shape, which I appreciated after the initial surprise.

In summary, the Doritos Locos Taco wasn't bad, but unfortunately, it wasn't good enough to make me want to buy it again. Although this seemed like the perfect combination of two brands' iconic products, it turned out to about as boring as that episode of The Simpsons when Jay Sherman of "The Critic" judges a film festival in Springfield. Perhaps if Taco Bell and Doritos improve the hardness, or crispiness, of the shell and consider adding more of that yummy "flavor dust" I would consider trying it again. Until then, I'll stick with the Cheesy Gordita Crunch.

Here is my first radio news piece in case you missed it, or if you just want to hear it again.

HP Open-Sources webOS

TRANSCRIPT:

RAY HOLLISTER: Recently HP announced that they are open-sourcing the operating system that runs their phones and tablets called webOS. In a nutshell, open-sourcing means that Hewlett Packard will be sharing the source code of webOS, the human readable code that the operating system is programmed with. Now this is quite different compared to companies like Apple who jealously guards the code that their iOS operating system runs on.

This puts HP's webOS at a crossroad. This could revitalize the operating system to where you could see webOS devices everywhere, or they could just be putting it out to pasture.

To give you some background story, webOS itself was wildly praised by many critics and users when it was announced by Palm at the Consumers Electronic Show in January of 2009, but the phones and tablets that it ran on were all disappointing sellers.

JEFF BAKALAR: The phone is great, they just have absolutely no quality control.

RAY HOLLISTER: That was Jeff Bakalar, Associate Editor and Co-Host of CNET's "The 404" on the episode just after he had received his 9th Palm Pre. All of his previous eight Palm Pre's had to be taken back to Sprint because they were defective. Sales of Palm's phones were so dismal that the company was rumored to be on the edge of bankruptcy when HP announced that they were purchasing Palm for 1.2 billion dollars in late April of 2010.

After HP purchased Palm, they excited fans by holding an event on February 9th of 2011 announcing two new phones and a tablet device with what can only be compared with the excitement of an Apple keynote event.

("Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" by LCD Soundsystem begins playing. A crowd applauding and cheering can be heard.)

TODD BRADLEY: Well good morning! Welcome to San Francisco.

However, that excitement wore off quickly as HP did not announce prices or when the devices were expected to launch. The HP Veer, a diminutive phone with a face only slightly larger than a credit card finally came out over three months later, and the HP Touchpad was finally released on July 1st. Both sold so poorly that only 48 days after the Touchpad was released HP canceled all webOS devices. In the same announcement they stated that they would “explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.”

Four months later, HP’s newly appointed CEO Meg Whitman finally announced that they would be open-sourcing webOS.

So, unless you're already familiar with how open-source software works, you are probably asking, "OK, what does that mean?" Well, it means that HP is letting everyone take a look under the hood, and take out the parts they want, or they can take the entire system and install it on their own devices. This is the same way that Android, which is primarily made by Google, works. In fact, webOS could potentially become a serious competitor to Android, which has taken over the market share from Apple's iPhone.

The question is, will webOS be successful as an open source platform? The main factor that has separated the successes from the failures has been the level of manufacturer support. If only modders, hackers and tinkerers put webOS on their phones and tablets, and hardware manufacturers like HTC, Motorola, Samsung and Sony do not adopt it, then webOS may not find success in the open-source after life.

DEREK KESSLER: If that is to be the future of webOS, that’s a death sentence.

RAY HOLLISTER: That was Derek Kessler, Editor-in-Chief of webOSNation.com, a news site dedicated to webOS news and discussion. Derek has been following the news around Palm and subsequently webOS and HP since 2000, and despite his concern that HP still has not announced any partners in manufacturing, he still remains optimistic.

DEREK KESSLER: I'm very hopeful that HP and other companies latch on to this open-source webOS and actually do something with it, and they do something amazing, and make hardware and software that is actually worth putting out, and worth buying, and good for the users, and good for the companies that make it.

From 89.9 WJCT, I’m Ray Hollister

If you were a child of the 80's like I was, you most likely remember that iconic moment in Back to the Future Part II when Marty arrives in 2015, and he has to change into clothes that fit the time period so he will pass for his future son. He puts on a jacket that looks five sizes too big for him, but with the press of a button it adjusts to fit him perfectly. Before he did that, he slipped on the coolest pair of high tops ever designed. The Nike MAGs had glowing lights (not really sure why, but they looked really cool), and everyone's favorite part, they had automatic, power laces.

Today, Nike announced that they have made 1,500 2011 Nike MAGs! The sneakers are almost exactly like the shoes that Michael J. Fox wore in Back To The Future II, with one unfortunate exception. They do not have power laces, yet. According to Nike's commercial starring Bill Hader, Christopher Lloyd, Tinker Hatfield, Donald Fullilove and Kevin Durant, this highly coveted feature won't come out until 2015.

Nike is auctioning these items of sneaker geek lust off on eBay with 100% of the net profits going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research starting tonight at 11:30 pm EST, and ending September 18th, 2011. Also, Google Co-Founder, Sergey Brin has pledged a matching donation of up to $50 million. Michael J. Fox will appear on The Late Show with David Letterman tonight wearing a pair of the famous shoes "for the future" to announce the auction.

Personally, I think this is a lot of fun, and I'm glad all of the money is going to a great cause, but I'm hanging on to my money until somebody finally releases a working hoverboard!

You can have Marty McFly’s shoes from 2015 today! (Power laces, not included.) is reprinted with permission from Deemable.

I've never understood why people hate the rock band Creed so much. While I'm not a huge fan, I've always found their music at least palatable. However, from all of the Creed hate I read on the interwebs, it would seem that I am not in the majority. There are over five million pages of search results for the phrase "I hate Creed" and several Facebook pages and groups dedicated to the hatred of all things Creed. Now, apparently even wild life hates Creed.

Earlier this week, a Norwegian boy used Creed to fend off a pack of wild wolves. On his way home from school, a pack of four hungry, but clearly  musically snobbish wolves approached young Walter Eikrem. Thinking on his toes, Walter grabbed the nearest weapon he could find to fight off the beasts: his Sony Ericsson Xperia X8 phone that was blasting Creed's "Overcome" in his earbuds. He yanked the headset out of the phone and turned the phone up as loud as the little tiny speaker could go. He yelled and waved his arms while Scott Stapp's vocals screamed from the little white Android phone. Seeing, and most importantly, hearing all of this, the wolves just turned around and left.

Now, did the wolves really just hate the sound of Creed's first single in seven years, or is there something more sinister afoot here?  Wind-Up Records, Creed's label, just happens to be owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which just happens to be owned by Sony,  which just happens to own half of Sony Ericsson, which just happens to be the company that makes the Xperia X8! (OK, when I started that rant, I didn't realize how many layers were involved. I even skipped Sony Corporation of America.) The Xperia X8 was featured prominently in every story about this young boy's little convenient miracle. Perhaps, this was all an elaborate setup to create a viral story to promote two of Sony's interests. I would like to believe that just the wolves were agents working for Sony, (maybe they were prototypes of Sony's new attack AIBO) and Walter is innocent in all of this, but honestly, even in Norway, what kid is going to admit that he listens to Creed? This whole story smells of a conspiracy, or I've been watching too many TV mysteries and I haven't had enough sleep lately.

Source: Der Spiegel, via Gizmodo

Image mashup by Ray Hollister. Scott Sapp image by kindofadraag via Flickr. Wolf image by Steve Gregory via Flickr.

Now for something completely different. Since I have a four year old daughter, I have an excuse to watch Disney Channel. One of Zoe's favorite shows is the cartoon Phineas and Ferb, a show about two brothers who are creative geniuses that take every seven year old boy's craziest ideas and make them into realities, i.e. building a roller coaster through a major city, going to Mars, traveling through time, making it snow in the summer, etc. In true Saturday morning cartoon style, their sister plays the role of the "villain" that is always trying to "bust them" by showing their mother what they have done. They don't seem to mind though, and they have even assisted her in the busting on one occasion. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to them, their pet platypus, is a secret agent that is constantly disappearing to thwart the evil plots of his nemesis, a clueless, evil scientist. In true deus ex machina style, these two plots usually come together with the evil scientist's new invention inexplicably causing the boys creations to conveniently disappear or otherwise go away. OK, yeah, now that I wrote that all down, it does seem kinda crazy, but it is a fun show to watch. It's also a heck of a lot more cerebral than Thundercats was!

Anyways, now that you have a general idea of what the show is about, in an episode that Zoe and I just watched, the boys pretend to be detectives on a manhunt for their sister's lost doll. During the search, they do a montage of detective show parodies. The funniest one is when they parody the opening scene of CSI: Miami. They managed to squeeze in a total of 6 well used gags from both shows in only 21 seconds.

My friend, Grace Gilbert, was diagnosed with liver and colon cancer back in 2004 when she was in high school. It was a long struggle, but she began doing well and the cancer went into remission. However, in 2007, when she was a sophomore in college, her cancer came back out of remission. She also started losing her hair because of a change in her medicine. So, she decided that she was going to shave her head.

To show Grace how much we loved her, ACCESS218, the Christian college group that I belonged to, decided to have a head shaving, hair cutting party to support her. A bunch of guys shaved their heads with her, and a couple of girls cut their pony tails and donated them to Locks of Love. I was planning on shaving my head, also. This which was a fairly normal routine for me; I used to get a buzz cut about every 3-4 months. However, Grace told me how beautiful she thought my hair was, and she said that I should grow it out. So, I told her that I would. Now, almost three years later, I have a 7 inch long pony tail, which isn't too bad considering I have very curly hair, and I started out almost bald.

Unfortunately, Grace passed away later that same year. I often think about her when I am spending the extra 15 minutes every morning that this heap of hair takes to make it look professional! I really don’t mind it too much because thinking of her, reminds me to live every moment to the fullest and make sure that the people I love know that I love them, because that is how she lived.

I was planning on cutting my pony tail and donating it, but after reading a lot of negative criticism about Locks of Love, I decided to sell my hair once it is long enough and give the money to Grace's favorite charity, Dreams Come True.

Amazing Grayce Helps Others

This is a video project I did a voice over for a few years ago for CrossRoad Church. The amazing art work is by Ambler Hutchinson, the music is Svefn g Englar by Sigur Ros, the words are from "Waking the Dead" by John Eldredge. The video was created by Joshua Holdman.

Seriously? Windows Phone Series 7 will not have cut, copy and paste? You idiots!

OK, it was bad enough that every time I saw the user interface on Microsoft's new operating system for phones it literally made me want to throw up. (I don't know why. It had something to do with how the virtual screen was larger than the monitor.) Now, the latest news from Redmond is that Windows Phone Series 7 phones will not have the absolutely BASIC function of copy and paste! Do the engineers at Microsoft just totally block all Apple news from passing through their firewalls? Where were they three years ago when everyone, techies and noobs, were screaming about the lack of copy and paste in the iPhone? Eh, stupid.