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If you’re a regular reader of BoingBoing or the geek-friendly comic xkcd, you’ve probably already seen the strip in which Cory Doctorow gets name-dropped:

It turns out that the line in the last panel is more true than you think. Here’s a photo that I took at his birthday party in 2002, with Mr. Doctorow sporting his mail-order Mig fighter pilot goggles:

He might not be wearing a cape, but that shiny purple ‘Decepticon’ shirt is a pretty good substitute.

As for blogging from a hot air balloon, how about from a Mickey Mouse balloon chair? Here’s a shot of him at the original Toronto OpenCola office, taken March 2000:

“What I would I do with a million dollars of VC funding? Tell you what I’d do, man. Two computers at the same time, man.”

Here’s another shot taken ion the same session, from another angle.

Oh, those Web 1.0 salad days.

Anyhow, I hope this proves something about Doctorow’s Law: Any exaggerated statement about Cory Doctorow is closer to the truth than you might think.

Yes, Global Nerdy remains an ongoing concern. We’ve posted 4 new articles today. Here are the most recent ones…

• HotelChatter’s “Best Geek Hotels in the World” List. An interesting list; I don’t agree with all the choices.
• 16 Ways the Media Can Make Use of Blogs. Yeah, this should be screamingly obvious to longtime blogosphere denizens, whether readers or writers, but as George and I like to say, “There’s a lot of value in repeating the obvious.”
• PowerPoint Slide of the Day. Surprising candor at a Motorola presentation.
• Brokeback Excel. It was Friday, I was entitled to post a joke entry!
• Andrés Taylor: “Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me”. Includes a bonus list: “The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School”.
• Wear Them to Your Annual Review. Would you believe that they make USB-powered heated kneepads?
• Send Twitter Messages from the Command Line (Mac OS and Linux). It’s how the cool kids (well, me anyway) do it, yo.
• Quick, send in the clowns*. George’s take on the NBC Universal/News Corp. online video joint venture.

Last night, Mom sent me a collection of photos taken by my uncle in 1967. The photos are of Mom, Dad and my grandparents at my grandparent’s place in San Juan, a neighbourhood smack in the dead center of Manila, where I lived from 1972 to 1975. A couple of the photos showed Grand-dad’s sweet rides, one of which was the Corvette pictured below.

I remember getting rides to school in the Corvette from my uncle, a racing enthusiast, who lead-footed the short distance between home and school in an exciting run down San Juan’s narrow streets. The car was sold after we moved to Canada; I hope it’s still alive and kicking somewhere.

From the Washington Post:

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – Two Sudanese women have been sentenced to death by stoning for adultery after a trial in which they had no lawyer and which used Arabic, not their first language, the rights group Amnesty International said.

Sadia Idriss Fadul was sentenced on February 13 and Amouna Abdallah Daldoum on March 6 and their sentences could be carried out at any time, the London-based group said in a statement released late on Monday.

North Sudan implements Islamic sharia law.

“The women had no lawyer during their trial and were not able to defend themselves, as their first languages are those of their ethnic groups,” Amnesty said.

Both women are from non-Arab tribes but the proceedings were in Arabic and no interpreter was provided, Amnesty said. Their trial took place in central Al Gezira state.

I’ve been getting a number of emails asking me where one can buy the baby outfit I showed in the article For the Baby Whose Parents Play “Dungeons and Dragons”. I did a little poking around the ‘Net and found a couple of places:

• This CafePress shop sells a white one for US$14.99.
• J!NX, an online shop that bills itself as “clothing for gamers and geeks”, sells a black one for US$14.95. Their page for the outfit includes photos of cute, satisfied customers.

I know that there are a number of comic book/sci-fi/pop culture aficionados among my readership, so this one’s for you guys.

Here’s a page I like from the Iron Man comic book miniseries Hypervelocity. Iron Man (a.k.a. wealthy and powerful industrialist Tony Stark) isn’t exactly the star of the show in this one, as he’s been sidelined by a critical injury (a high-velocity railgun shot). The real star of the show is “Tony Stark 2.0”, a personality construct based on Tony’s own neural patterns that took control of the suit when he was taken out of commission. The construct isn’t a perfect copy, as it lacks a lot of Tony’s long-term memories, but it does act, react and “think” like Tony does.

Here’s a page from the book that I rather liked, titled Tony Stark 2.0’s Top 5 Positives About No Longer Possessing an Organic Human Body, a piece transhumanist enough for me to call it either “Gibsonian” or “Cory bait”:

If you’re a follower of the “cyberpunk” genre, this page (as well as the rest of the comic) should be giving you a sense of deja vu. That’s because the Iron Man comic has always been about ten years behind the times in terms of concepts, technobabble and pop culture. Consider:

• The tune he’s listening to: Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry. Dude, that’s from late 1991. I know, because I was a DJ back then, and had the regulars of Clark Hall Pub moshing to it by early 1992.
• Really dude, only 5,096 tunes in the super-advanced Iron Man suit? Let me get this straight, this suit has a battle computer and is capable of housing a personality construct and yet you’ve only loaded just over 5,000 MP3s? Dude, I have a machine at work that’s barely qualified to run Vista, and I’ve got 6,000 tracks in iTunes.
• The whole techno-transhumanist obsession with “transcending the meat”. That was an obsession of the cyber-freak magazine Mondo 2000 back in the ’90s (who in turn copped it from a concept often used by William Gibson in the 80’s).
• Later in the book, Tony Stark 2.0 gate-crashes a rave held by the “Mecha Underground” held in a secluded location: deep underwater. Also another late-’80s/early-’90s thing, if you forget the mechanized dancers and the bit about being underwater.
• He finally ditched having just the moustache and added a goatee. Also very ’90s.

I’ll give credit to the writers for using the “2.0” thing. Although it’s old school to us computer geek types, using “2.0” as an expression meaning “new and improved” has only recently entered the mainstream.

In spite of these quibbles, I find it a fascinating read. More on this later.

I can’t help myself!