Category: Geek

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Geek It Happened to Me

I’m one of the cool kids now

I’d received an earlier invitation to Google’s GMail
service (which currently is available by invitation only, guaranteeing
that only the cool geeks have it right now), but I told the guy who
invited me that there was someone who needed it more than I.

Later, I got another invitation, which I was going to accept, until I remembered that I owed Boris a favour for his loaning me his apartment in Montreal for a weekend last September.

Last week, I got a third invitation — this time from Adam Hill — and I finally took it. I plan to use it for blog-related communication. It’s accordionguy {the-ubiquitous-at-sign} gmail {the-equally-ubiquitous-full-stop} com.

Thanks, Adam!

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Geek

APIs in Near-Obsessive Detail

Geek break!

Over the next little while, I’m going to be covering all manner of APIs
in near -obsessive detail. If you’re a programmer, I’m going to be your
new best friend. Watch this space for announcements.

Be sure to check out the blog I get paid to write — The Farm — where I’ve started to examine the classes of wxPython, starting with the humble wx.MessageDialog and Linus’ favourite debugging tool, the stdout/stderr window.

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Geek It Happened to Me

I hate it when someone beats me to a good joke

Last Sunday, Paul, The Redhead and I were enjoying an Atkins-friendly meat-a-riffic lunch at the Korean Grill House when Paul mentioned something about having your cake and eating it too.

Paul and I had recently seen the Dalai Lama at SkyDome,

and the bit about his interest in quantum physics must’ve stuck in my

brain. “Sure, you can have your cake and eat it too,” I quipped, “…if

it’s quantum cake!”

This amused Paul and I to no end; Wendy just shook her head at the

transformation of her boyfriend from sexy high-functioning geek to drooling Monty Python movie-quoter.

Later, I decided to Google the phrase “quantum cake”

to see if I’d come up with a truly original joke that would eventually

find its way to the web and earn me fame, fortune, money for nothing

and chicks for free. (It’s happened once before, and my joke pops up from time to time.)

It turns out that I’m almost original. Google returned a single page of results, one of which is this scientific paper on the subject (here’s the PDF version, and here’s an HTML conversion).

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods Geek It Happened to Me

BloggerCon Notes 1: National Anthem Session, Dave Winer

Saturday, April 17th, 2004 — 8:15 a.m. to 8:45 a.m.

Dave Winer, discussion leader

  • This is a user’s

    conference, not a developer’s conference. There are plenty of

    conferences catering to developers, but few address the concerns and

    needs of the users. Yes, as bloggers, we’re all users, but it’s too

    easy for us to think like developers.

  • The sessions are discussion groups — there are no “panels”

    nor “speakers”; just a discussion leader and all of you, the

    participants.

  • Everything said is on the record and for attribution. You need to explicitly state it if you want to say something off the record.
  • We’ve got lots of interesting people here, including   
  • Things to consider through the course of the day:   
         

    • Can we make money out of blogs?

      •    

    • Compare our ideas and experience

      •    

    • How are we better than other media? How are we worse?
    • At the end of the day, can we get a list of deliverable:”If we

      only had this and this…”, “Here’s what we need as an industry…”

      •    

  • The Star Spangled Banner played by Yours Truly on the Crucianelli accordion (a.k.a. “The Good One”).
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Geek

Thankfully, respondents ARE choosing at least one…

There’s a strange poll in Dev Shed, a site for computer programmers: Soap or Body Wash?

As I write this, the poll results are:

  • Soap: 11
  • Body Wash: 4
  • Other: 1
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Geek

Geeky goodness galore

Don’t forget my other blog, The Farm: The Tucows Developer Hangout. It’s the blog that I’m actually paid to write, so if you’ll visit it and even link to it, I’ll make my performance bonus and buy you a beer.

There’s PHP 5 information aplenty in today’s entries, as well as a

pointer to a stroy about the increasingly heated competition among game software

companies for developers. Check it out!

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Geek

I am not the point of Jack’s movie

Screen shot: Tyler vs. Jack in the upcoming Fight Club videogame.

No, your eyes are not deceiving you. This is a screen shot of the upcoming videogame based on Fight Club. Here’s the description of the game:

Immerse yourself in this gritty, visceral world of bare-knuckle fighting, with action, story elements and environments true to the Fight Club movie. The extreme realism of the game will make you feel every punch and kick by delivering shocking visuals, untraditional moves, and special effects in fully interactive environments.

If you’ve seen the movie or better yet, read the book, you’ll know that in Fight Club — unlike space operas like Star Trek or Star Wars or sword-and-sorcery epics like The Lord of the Rings — the fighting is only an incidental aspect of the story. Hopefully, Vivendi Universal Games will realize this and add equally nonsensical bonus rounds in which players have to beat themselves up, pee in soup, test their tolerance for pain, splice porn scenes into regular movies, park an explosives-laden van in the basement of the TRW building, swap the safety cards on airliners with terrifying homemade ones and best of all, have mad monkey sex with Helena Bonham-Carter.

My own personal feeling is that Chuck Palahniuk novels are better suited to first-person adventure games, and preferably text-based ones. Something in the spirit of the oh-so-terribly-wrong web-based Brad: The Game (text only, but may not be safe for work).

[ Once again, thanks to 0xDECAFBAD for the link! ]