Like It's 1994

A guy I know from the internet (which seems to be where I find most of my friends lately) is an astrophysicist who goes by the nom de web of ScienceTim. When he and his buddies are out at Mauna Kea playing in the snow at the top of the mountain and staring at planets through the telescopes, they use their downtime to make the world's geekiest music video parodies. It helps that one Kelly Fast (PhD, Atrophysics) has an incredible voice and is the hottest scientist this side of Denise Richards in The World Is Not Enough. If you don't believe me, check her out in her first geeky viral video, "Hotel Mauna Kea"



And that, as Jon Stewart would say, is your moment of nerd.

Anthropology Smack-Down

or
Fails To Verify The Mother-Fucking Hypothesis
or
Wait Until Dr Zaius Finds Out About This

Through the miracle of Facebook, I learned the a high-school classmate of mind was on The Daily Show last night. He's the NYU anthropology professor with the world's shortest mohawk refuting the claim that orangutans, not chimpanzees, are our closest primate relative:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Human's Closest Relative
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

And to think that thirty years ago he and I were researching the diplomatic positions of Gabon for the Model United Nations. Now I am an HVAC engineer and he is an academic giant worthy of some gentle mocking by a parody news-show. I'm glad to see we have both overcome our gawky geeky teenage roots.

And in the chimp-orangutan spat, I'm on Team Bonobo.

Pi Day Party

Today is March 14, or 3/14, which is also known as Pi Day. In honor of the event, I have baked two pies, one chocolate and one apple that I am going to take to a Pi Day party. Because that is how I roll (the pie dough). And I like that Blogger allows me to adjust the time stamp of my post. Figure out why.

The Hero Within

In honor of Watchman Day, I have used The Hero Factory to create my own superhero, Foma*Man aka The Asterisk. I had to do some minor photoshopping to the dorky name they originally gave me as well as put my cool logo on my massive superhero pecs.

My superpowers are withering sarcasm, a sense of ironic detachment and the ability to flame trolls in any forum.

Hat tip to Dave at Blogography for linking to the awesome site.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Who is your hero and what is their superpower?

BooksFirst - February 2009

Books Bought
None

Books Read
Snark by David Denby
Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe

Comments

I did a rather long full report on Snark, the book I love to hate earlier in the month, so nothing new on it.

Carrie Fisher’s book is an adaptation of her one-woman show Wishful Drinking and reads like it should be read aloud. While I didn’t have the audiobook, this would be the ideal format for it. The cover has a cinnamon-bunned model face down holding a martini glass with some pills nearby. While great visual short-hand, it is misleading in that much more of the book is about her addiction and mental health issues than her role as Princess Leia. Only one chapter of the book deals directly with her three-movie career-making role. her take-away message from the whole experience is that she is a little creeped out by fanboys describing their sexual awakenings because George Lucas believes that there are no brassieres in outer space.

The remainder of the book ping-pongs between cautionary tales of her various addictions, how her parents' failed marriages set-up her own miserable relationships (first to Paul Simon and then to the gay father of her daughter), and how undiagnosed bipolar disorder has ruined her life. In other words, it’s a laugh a minute. Really. The book is hilariously funny in a disturbing way. Paced like the stand-up routine it’s based on, the patter is witty and the sarcastic asides are brutally lethal. Every page has some funny anecdote or clever saying. Her dad, who left mother Debbie Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor before being quickly replaced by Richard Burton, bears the brunt of a lot of it. Of the small cast of characters, her mom and her brother come of the most sympathetic and Paul Simon gets damned with pretty faint praise.

The book is extremely short and as a quick hit and run therapy session by a tragic figure that has been abused by the sinister side of celebrity literally all her life it succeeds astoundingly.

The other memoir I read this month is even more nerd-related than a Star Wars actress. Mark Barrowcliffe (and the name alone sounds like a D&D invention) tells of his youth obsessed with roleplaying games in the infancy and height of the Dungeons and Dragons craze. The cleverness of the title, The Elfish Gene, a play on Richard Dawkins opus, made the book leap into my hands as I walked past it in the library. The subtitle, Dungeons, Dragons and Growing Up Strange struck me as something I could relate to. I’ve blogged about my own history with dice-throwing and Mark’s story is pretty much the same.

As a numbers obsessed geek he was playing the old-fashioned version of figurine-based war games when he stumbles across the still in it’s infancy first edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Barrowcliffe is English and translating the grade system and other Britishisms is a bit taxing but probably not nearly as it must be to someone unfamiliar with roleplaying games (in the very non-sexual meaning of the term). While Barrowcliffe does a decent job of explaining arcane concepts such as saving throws and character levels, most of this book is going to be gibberish to a non-player.

Which is a shame because the true underlying theme of this book is how vicious the petty alliances, feuds, and politics of adolescent boys can be. It’s like Lord of the Flies with dice. I will be the first to admit that most gamers, myself included, were on the fringes of social acceptability in high school, which makes it even more amazing how brutal the social outcasts that form gaming groups are to each other. I kept comparing his friends and their crimes against civility, fashion, and hygiene to the kids I played with and I can top him in several cases.

Like many former gamers, the testosterone finally found a more acceptable outlet in the chasing of girls and his more romantically challenged buddies got left behind. The book is written with a thick disdain for the game and he regrets the years and years he spent obsessing over it. And while some of it is exaggerated for comic effect, the passion he pursued it with is unmistakable. His bitterness reflects more on the realization of how awkward and emotionally stunted all of us at twelve. I don't regret my time playing D&D even if I cringe at how mean-spirited we got with each other. Barrowcliffe should do the same.

Dungeons and Dragons paved the way for dozens of movies that brought swords and sorcery into the mainstream and paved the way for online games like World of Warcraft that can be more addictive and perhaps more isolating than old fashioned RPGs could ever be. The other day my son apologized for not calling me on my birthday because he lost track of the time playing D&D. I asked incredulously “You mean with paper and pencil and dice and everything?” He assured me that it was old-school roleplaying with a bunch of his fraternity brothers around a table. My wife just mumbled something about acorns and trees.

Frii The Miis

Our family used to have a Wii but it followed my son to college. So I was shocked to sii a brand new one on the dining room table one afternoon. I asked my wife why shii had gotten a Wii. Shii said because they were on sale at BigMembershipWarehouse-OfOversizedStuff for five dollars less than regular riitail. Can’t argue with that logic.

But you can’t play a Wii without a Mii. My previous Mii which I have been using as an avatar all over the place is now trapped in the lost Wii off at college so I had to start over. The key fiitures are an oval face, pale complexion, short reddish hair and glasses.

While the new Mii looks better, I miss the smirk of the old Mii.

There is still no way to get a Mii onto a computer. You can carrii Miis around in your Wiimote when you travel and transfer them to different Wiis, but they can’t leave the Wiiniverse. As before I resorted to the photo capture kludge of taking a photo of my Mii off the TiiVii and uploading it into my computer

So I make this plli to the powers that bii at Nintendo: Pliise frii our Miis. Let them bii where wii can sii them on our PiiCii. Don’t be so griidy by kiipping the Miis proprietarii.

I would be diilighted if you would help mii with my follii. Let us siize the day and put this scriid on every site you sii:

Frii The Miis!

Broken Computer Blues

I tried to upgrade the memory on the homebrew computer my son and I built a few years back. It had two 512MB DIMM chips in it. I bought two 1GB DIMM chips. I took out the 512s and put in the 1 gigs. Everything worked fine. Then I got greedy. I added the original memory back in trying to get the system up to 3 GB and fried something.

The memory this motherboard takes is 184-pin and the industry has moved onto 240-pin memory. And motherboards that take AMD slot 939 chips are functionally obsolete. I found one online for $40 so I am going to give this upgrade one more chance before I quit throwing good money after bad.

I really don’t have a good reason why I’m bothering other than pride. My rationalizations include the following:

• I just spent a lot of time reinstalling my software including Quicken. Having to re-install everything on a new machine would be a pain in the neck.
• Everything I do is “just fifty more bucks”. If the memory upgrade been a success I would have gotten an older generation video card. I could eventually have the world’s fastest AMD64 machine.
• Sentimental value. I built the computer with my son just after he got out of the hospital from having his appendix removed.
• If and when I did get a new machine, I really wanted to use this one as media server.
• A new machine would force me to learn Windows Vista.
• The gamer style case just looks so cool.

On the con-side, here are reasons I should just s-can the machine and start fresh.

• For about five-hundred bucks I could get a complete pre-tested and configured machine that would be four times as powerful as anything I could make this one.
• Parts for this machine are already getting hard to find. We just barely found the right size chip cooler when it went out six months ago.
• The reason I was upgrading the old machine was so that it would be fast enough to run Premiere Elements 7 for HD video editing. It may not even be able to get that fast.
• Every day this machine is down, I’m having to use my seven-year-old Sony desktop that is so bloated and slow it takes nearly fifteen minutes to boot-up.
• I have all my important files backed up onto a portable hard drive, so the real hassle is re-installing software and not transferring files.
• My kid has moved onto a MacBookPro which is four times the computer than I can justify spending on myself.

Part of my geek-cred is tied into being able to work with and upgrade my computers on a hardware level. Every couple of months I have the case off as I tinker and play. But with as busy as I've been lately, the time to just futz with stuff is limited and I'd rather be doing things more quasi-productive than fixing things I have accidentally blown up.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: When and how should I pull the plug?

A Plethora of Palin Parodies

The announcement of Sarah Palin’s selection as John McCain’s running mate set off a Klondike Gold Rush level stampede to carve out territory in the blogosphere. The spot for the definitive viral YouTube impersonation has been taken by comedian Sara Benincasa and her spot-on take on the Alaskan Governor. The no-“h” Sara is the girlfriend of Francesco Marciuliano, the unseemly object of my long-standing man-crush. When I saw the first video it had been viewed 6000 times. It’s now gone viral with over 100,000 views and been picked up by the mainstream media. I wish these hard-working comedians lots of success. Let them ride that pony until it collapses like Eight Belles. And I also hope that “Bristol, go breastfeed your brother.” becomes the comedy catchphrase of the campaign.


The trouble with parody and satire is that they can be too subtle or people just prefer to be blinded by their own prejudices and preconceptions. As a person that dabbles in the under-recognized art form of putting politicians heads on silly pictures, I’m pretty suspicious of pictures that are too good to be true. The star-spangled bikini picture of Sarah Palin at a pool party just couldn’t be. It was quickly noted as a paste-job by those in the know, but that didn’t prevent it from going viral among the more gullible schadenfreudistas.

With all the self-proclaimed photoshop experts out there all too willing to vouch for its authenticity, it didn’t take much sleuthing with my mad googling skilz to find the original pictures on Flickr. The bikini picture was taken by one Doctor Casino in August of 2006. The picture itself was taken tongue in cheek and the good doctor is mildly amused by the attention and is philosophical about his unwitting role in a viral phenomenon. Here is his take. Be sure to read all the comments on the picture page and the photoshopped version. They are very interesting:

To anyone else reading - I still have misgivings about all this. The tropes being attached to Sarah Palin here - of being unserious and also of being a sexual body rather than a professional intellect - are, not coincidentally, sexist tropes about womanhood generally. The image is funny to the extent that it plays on something specific to Palin: she is a goofball and more specifically a gun nut who makes lipservice to patriotism (a la American Flag Bikini) while harboring dubious views on fundamental American principles ("Can you tell me how to go about banning a book?"). But to the extent that it's a lightweight's first resort against a female political candidate, it's odious. The proliferation of lizard-brain responses to/uses of the image is particularly telling.

When the more conspiratorial minded are confronted with the source picture, they knee-jerk respond that maybe the “first” picture is a photoshopped cover for the REAL picture. That would be plausible if it weren’t for the fact the Palin head cut into the picture is also on Flickr. It was also taken in 2006, at a Fourth of July event. Note that the face has been mirrored to fit the image. There is also a Flickr post of a screen capture by a person alleging to be the original photoshopper. On it he says:

What I choose to do in my free time is no concern of yours. If I want to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon Photoshopping Sarah Palin's mug on a bunch of bikini-clad gunslingers, then so be it.

Who am I to judge indeed? If this guy is the real deal, there was never any intent to pass this picture off as a legitimate photo as so many mailing list forwarders did.

I think what makes this image so compelling is the ‘truthiness’ of the portrayal of Palin as a redneck gun-toting bimbo. Much of the humor directed at Palin plays up the snow-billy aspect of Alaskan culture that makes Wasilla look like Yoknapatawpha County with moose. And the photoshops that aren't nearly as funny rely on just the shock value of Palin's face on a nude or embarrassing picture. These just aren't funny and will lead to a backlash eventually. It takes a certain panache to make a photoshop that hits on an underlying vein of humor. And most don't.



Taking another track is this geek humor site that stretches the conceit that John McCain and Sarah Palin resemble Battlestar Galactica characters Saul Tigh and Laura Roslyn. This one-joke gimmick seems to be doing quite well with regular posts and a discussion forum. Who knew that geekitude and politics could be a hit on the internet.

And of course there are fake Sarah Palin blogs and Twitter accounts of varying humor level. It's all part of being in the public eye. But something tells me Palin will be giving internet humorists a lot of material for a long time.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What is fair game in parodying politicians?

MangaJkt

I am such a sucker for these silly avatar generators. Here is the latest:


It's supposed to be your manga self, but I look like the dorky guy that tries to cheat at Yu-Gi-Oh but gets foiled.

I got the meme from HRH Courtney, Queen of Everything who looks positively ravishing in hers and you can get yours here.

And to prove that it is the sensation that is sweeping the nation, I even independently found the secret manga-tar of 2fs. And in some weird coinky-dink, we are all wearing the same glasses. I'm not sure what that says about us, but it sure makes me nervous.

BlatantMemeSpreading™: Show me yours.

Don't Cut Out The Middleman

One of the first things I am going to miss with my son off at college is watching campy geeky TV shows with him. Previously, I've mentioned that our favorite shows last season were Chick Chuck and The Big Bang Theory (which had very little banging unless you count Melissa Gilbert).

Earlier this summer, at dinner my son said he wanted to get home early in order to watch a new show called The Middleman. I said not to worry, I already had it programmed into the DVR. Great minds think alike that way.

The Middleman is an hour long comedy on ABC Family that can best be described as a cross between Men In Black and Alias. There are also generous dollops of The X-Files and The Avengers mixed in. All done in a campy winking at the camera style.

A mysterious fighter of things supernatural and extraterrestrial recruits a young artist as his apprentice. Wendy Watson (or Dub-Dub), played by Natalie Morales, is a cute twenty-something art student that lives in an illegal sublet with her even more attractive roommate. There are also a series of mysteriously omnipresent other hipsters hanging around as eye candy.

Matt Keeslar plays the titular yet unnamed Middleman as a 50s era Dudley Do-Right straight arrow that drinks nothing stronger than milk and swears with G-rated exclamations that would make the Cleaver family wince.

Each episode has the two Middlemen fighting some ridiculous form of villainy. So far they have fought talking gorillas, fish zombies, and cursed tubas. The witty banter is razor sharp and filled with pop culture asides. If you don't know who Gorilla Grodd or Howard the Duck are, you are missing some of the best zingers. There are also funny running gags like the little time and place in the establishing shots. It's all very high density comedy.

While being on ABC Family would make you think it's too clean cut to be entertaining, that is not the case. There is some sly mild sexual and drug-related innuendo (I did mention that the lead character is a twenty-something artist, didn't I?). One of the funny recurring gags is the beep and black mouth bar anytime a character says something that would draw an FCC fine.

With my son at college, I don't have anyone to laugh along with while my wife rolls her eyes at the zingers that go over her head. The show airs Mondays at 10pm EST. Their website contains the usual silly promotional gimmicks including a Middleman character generator. I always like to use these things to create a Mii-like avatar, but the guys seem to come out sort of androgynous and emo-ish. The girl dress-up doll is intended to replicate Sexiest Woman Alive Angelina Jolie circa Mr. and Mrs. Smith because their kids would probably make great Middlemen themselves someday.

Book List Ballot Box Stuffing

Modern Library, the highbrow imprint of Random House did one of those 100 Best Novels list things that anyone can do. Since such lists are ubiquitous the value lies in the prestige of the listmakers. Modern Library which reprints classic works of literature would seem to have that sort of clout. Indeed, their list is full of the usual suspects. This particular list could have been made any time in the last fifty years and not have been much different.

Say what you want about contemporary fiction, but there is a notable absence of anything written in the past twenty-five years. The literature canon ossified solid about the time that John Steinbeck pushed James Fennimore Cooper off of required reading lists.

Honestly, if you make such a list in this day and age without including at least one book by Toni Morrison, you are setting yourself up for accusations of fuddy-duddyness. Slaughterhouse Five doesn't appear until number 18, but I can live with that, even if I don't recognize a few of the books rated higher.

Where they really made a mistake was in letting the readers vote on their own list. Methinks some folks with a little too much time on their hands and some rather ideological agendas did some ballot box stuffing. Let's compare the top ten in each.

THE BOARD'S LIST ULYSSES by James Joyce THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner CATCH-22 DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

THE READERS' LIST ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee 1984 by George Orwell ANTHEM by Ayn Rand WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

So according to the readers of this site, the greatest authors ever were Ayn Rand and L.Ron Hubbard, followed distantly by J.R.R. Tolkien. Noted horndog and crypto-fascist Robert Heinlein gets five entries on the longer list. I could go on for days about what this says about the internet community at large, but I won't, largely because I dislike death threats from rabid cult members.

But it does make clear to me why Ron Paul is not President in real life and why we better never go to online voting for things that really matter. At least not until the counting software is really, really secure.

FiOS Follies 3

The last time I left off on this tragic tale, I told of my new high-def television and no high-def signal to use it on. I had called to get an HD set-top but was told that they were out of stock until the end of March. Well, in April I went and gave them a call. By now I had decided that I really wanted an HD-DVR downstairs so that I could record and watch all those great nature shows and maybe the next season of The L Word. I got the usual pass around from tech support to orders to billings. It seems my old order was still in the system and had to be deleted before I could request a different box.

I was told it would take a few hours to cancel the old order and that I would have my new box in three to five days. That was two months ago.

Yesterday, my wife had some spare time so she said she would give then a call. Again they told us it would be a few days. Today we went out for a late night at BigBoxOfBooks. When we got back at about eleven there was a box on the steps that hadn't been there when we left at six. My wife looked puzzled and said she hadn't ordered anything off the internet lately.

It turns out that it was the new set top box. After running some new wires around I had Showtime in HD just in time for the reruns of Weeds, Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, and Penn and Teller's Bullshit: The War on Porn. Penn Jillette is explaining how porn is healthy and wholesome. At least on premium cable. And in high definition.

BlatantCommentWhoring®: Would anyone pay for premium channels if there weren't late night smutty pseudo-documentaries?

A Series Of Tubes

I don’t spend a lot of time on this blog bragging about my son. It’s not that there’s not a lot to brag about, but because I remember how embarrassing it was to me to have my mother talk me up to people I didn’t even know. And what is a blog but talking to hundreds of strangers in the grocery store check-out lane all at once.

But I have several things to be proud of even if I can’t take credit. About two years ago he became fascinated with the concept of carbon nanotubes. These things did not even exist when I was in college. Think of a sheet of paper rolled into a tube, only the paper is a one atom thick slice of graphite. Carbon nanotubes are so new they don’t even know what can be done with them yet.

Having finished up most of the courses he needed to graduate last year, he got interested in the school’s intern mentorship program. High school students get paired up with people in industry or commerce. He put down carbon nanotubes as his interest. At the beginning of the year he was told there was a chance to work with a researcher that was doing just that.

For the entire school year he has been putting in ten hours a week doing real lab work for a real PhD doing real research. Carbon nanotubes are small and finicky and delicate. He spent a lot of time cleaning glassware, preparing solutions, waiting endlessly for the centrifuge to work its nano-magic and logging raw data. Some of it was boring and tedious, but so are a lot of things.

Overnight, he upgraded his wardrobe from black denim and ironic tee shirts to twill pants and golf shirts. He would come home some days later than me from having to fight traffic from all the other enclaves of Really Smart People that lie between DC and Baltimore.

He never lost his sense of humor or his relaxed attitude to schoolwork that bored him. We had a few bumps along the year, but he is now in the senioritis strewn back stretch and it looks like he might make it.

Someday nanotubes may make the saying that the internet is just a bunch of tubes more than a misguided metaphor. And my son had some small, small part of it. He may not continue on with this field, but the skills and exposure he has gotten will serve him well in the future.

I may even be bragging about him more in the weeks to come. But only because he deserves it so much. Indulge me because I only get to do this once and it’s too exciting to not stop people in the street and tell them how proud I am of my son.

Drunken De Maio

I don't do many diary style blog posts but today wans;t a typical day. I woke wup at 6:30 this morning wanting, no needeing, to go on a bciylce ricde. This was my firest time down to Ellic0tt City for the biking season. I love screaming down Main street in excess of 25 miles per hour and then having to make the hard right from Main Street onto New Cut Road and climbing out of the saddle to begin the two mile uphill ride back to Montgomery Roaad.

I put 16 miles on the odometer which pushed me over 100 miles for the year so far. I keep a pretty detailed log of my rides and I tend to sandbag the first ride or two each yera on a specivic route. I checked my rather anal-retentive records and saw that this ride beat my best time for that route from all of last year. Yay, me. I credit the new bike shoes and pedals that my wife gave me for Christmas. I get a lot more power going up hills. I'm still not used to stepping out of the pedals at stops so I tend to run more red lighst than I should, which makes me the sort of discourteous rider that motorists hate. Trust me, at that time of day, I'm not risking too many squealing breaks.

When I got home it was time to figure out why the computer in the den no longer connected to the wireless network in the basement. I dusted off a Belkin Wireless network extender I had bought and never got working right. This time I found a website whti tips on how to get into the web interface embeedded in the router rather than the through the useless interface program. I got it working and syncing, but no help for the computer.

That meant a trip down to BigBoxOfElectronics to buy a new wirelless network card. The original was D-Link but when I had FiOS installed, it wasn't strong enough to hook to the wimpy router/moden that Verizon gives. About six months I decided to go name brand and got a Linksys card that was doing fine, but has been slowly decaying. After perusing the choices, I went back to D-Link because their new 802.11n card had two antennas and gave me an upgrade path just in case Verizon ever decided to support that standard.

The card went in without a hitch and immediately found the network extender. Since I was futzing with the network already, I went ahead and chabged from WEP to WPA security since all the other wireless networks in my neighborhood use that. Peer pressure is a bitch.

Then it was time to get ready for not one, but two Cinco Di Maio parties. The first was at a coworker's of my wife who is the PE teacher at one of the schools she works at. Not to traffic in stereotypes, but.... well, nevermind. She throws great parties with a delightful cross-section of poeple. The second party was at my bosses house. I tagged along on the hosue tour and she has a wood shop that puts my son's middle school technical arts wing to shame.

So I managed to drive the two or three miles home without attracting any law enforcement attention. Normally I edit my posts in Microsoft Word and get rid of amy typos and missspellings, but tonight I feel very stream of consciousnness and will see in the morning just how embarrassing this post is.

BlatantCommentDismissing(tm): Really, I was fine enough to drive. Just nto sober enough to blog.

Card Carrying Geek

I brag and/or lament about my geekitude often on this blog, but until now you have had to take my word on it. However, now my status and is official and permanent. I have a DCI card. DCI does not stand for Drum Corps International (that would represent a entirely different plane of geekdom), but for, well, I’m not quite sure. It does mean I am a certified tournament player of Magic: The Gathering® (check out this post if you have no idea what that is).

Last weekend, my son and a friend wanted to go to the pre-release tournament for the Shadowmoor set of Magic cards down at College Park. I offered to drive and rather than make the whole trip down just to turn around, I decided to stick around and see what the big deal was.

Wizards Of The Coast publishes new Magic cards three or four times a year and they make a big production out of it with sneak previews on their web page and hints about all the new rules. Part of the point of Magic is to make the rules as cumbersome, arcane, and confusing as possible. Then about two weeks before the cards go on sale to the public, they have a pre-release tournament with the new cards.

The tournaments require that you be a DCI member (which is free) so I filled out my form and now I have a permanent record. I could go on the pro-tour (and there is one) if I were good enough, which I'm not. The tournament is divided into several categories. I entered a sealed deck tournament that cost $20 to enter but came with about $15 worth of cards.

We got there quite early so we could be near the front of the line. Plenty of other people had the same idea. Some were in such a hurry that morning that they hadn’t bothered to shower. The guy standing in line next to me was a student from a private school in Baltimore with a particularly tragic case of acne and a rather distinct odor. Not a way to impress the ladies.

But then that point was fairly moot. Of the couple of hundred participants, at most a dozen were women. In the second round of my tournament, I happened to draw one of the more attractive female players. She had a vaguely Eastern European accent and seemed a little shy and unsure of herself. In hindsight I’m certain that at one point the both of us badly misinterpreted one of the rules. She may have only been an average player, but she had great accessories. While not the biggest I have seen, her icosahedron was one of the prettiest I had ever laid my eyes on.

I ended up losing my first two matches two games to one, which put me out of prize bracket, so I forfeited my other two matches and ended up 29th out of 32 in that draw. My son fared little better, placing second in a draft tournament earning him three booster packs, but he didn't make the prize pool in any of his other entries.

Back at home I showed him the cards that I got from the tournament and he was impressed with my Oona, Queen Of The Fae (who is a mighty sweet legendary creature). He explained which of my cards were better than others and what I would have to do to build a better deck. Most of that went over my head.

Next weekend is the official release and my son wants to go to another tournament. I think I will pass. I have had all the nerd-bonding I can handle for now, but that doesn't change my status as a world class geek. After all, I’m official now. And I've got the card to prove it.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What are your geek credentials?

Cables And Wires And Dongles Galore

Faithful readers will recall that I made the plunge into the world of high definition television recently. One of the first things that got hooked up to it was my son’s Wii (which is only 480p for those of you that follow these things).

We had the Magic League (remember them?) and one of the players was wearing an obscure tee shirt with an funny logo. He said it was based on a web cartoon called Making Fiends check them out). Curious, we wanted to watch some sample episodes so we fired up the Wii that has a built in web browser and started watching the deranged but funny cartoons. Unfortunately, the quality was fairly poor and the navigation really clunky. Wiimotes are great for playing games but lousy for typing in url’s.

A couple of weeks later, we were planning our summer vacation with two other families. We’re planning on sharing a vacation rental and we wanted to reach some consensus on which property to get. We used a video to S-video adaptor to send the signal from my wife’s four-year old MacBook to the TV. The image was also grainy, but serviceable. It was also awkward barking commands at my son who was sitting at the laptop running the mouse and keyboard.

I remembered that the TV has a VGA input suitable for a computer. I knew I had a spare VGA cable around but it turned out to be female to male and I needed male to male. Even more than that, the laptop has a non-standard outlet that Apple calls mini-VGA so I needed a mini-VGA to VGA converter and a VGA cable. I daisy-chained that all together and adjusted the resolution on the laptop. Voila! I was surfing the web in crystal clear full color.

My wife gave my the url of a YouTube video she wanted to watch. Youtube videos look awful on a bigscreen no matter what, but the tinny sound out of the laptop was something I could do something about. I had two choices. I could use a 1/8” stereo wire and run it straight from the laptop into the television or I could use a 1/8” jack to RCA cable splitter and use the auxiliary input to the home theater system. I settled on the latter even though YouTube video through anything is just as bad. What did sound good was the AOL.com full CD listening party stream of the new Hillary McRae album while I was surfing blogs with my feet up on the couch.

While I was at MallStoreOfWires I noticed that they had a very small USB cordless mouse. That would go a long way to freeing me from having to keep the laptop within arms distance. That took a certain amount of experimentation to learn that while the arm of the sofa made a terrible mouse pad, the seat cushion next to me worked fine. Coupled with a Bluetooth keyboard, I can be anywhere in the room as long as my eyesight is keen enough to read the text.

My wife also has a newer PowerBook from work that is, of course, incompatible with with all the adaptors for the MacBook. It’s video connection is mini-DVI which converts to standard DVI which then connects to the TV with a DVI to HDMI cable. The DVI cable resulted in some weird stuff. Program windows (like Firefox) that appeared on the laptop screen wouldn't show up on the television. But then the Mac program Dock only worked on the TV. It was like the set-up was haunted. I gave up and switched back to a VGA cable and fiddled with both the Mac and TV settings until I got a really great full screen image at 1280 x 768 (the internal video card will support higher resolutions, but the TV won't). Still, it's a great image.

So here is the full list of items sitting in the backet o’cables next to the TV:

Mini-VGA to S-video convertor
Mini-VGA to VGA convertor
Mini-DVI to S-video convertor
Mini-DVI to DVI convertor
6 foot DVI to HDMI cable
6 foot male to male VGA cable
6 foot male to female VGA cable
6 foot 1/8” stereo cable
6 foot 1/8” to RCA cable
6 foot S-video cable
USB mouse
Bluetooth keyboard

And that doesn’t include the various sundry Wii peripherals.

The point wasn't to brag or show more pictures of my BigAssTV, but to take some baby steps towards convergence and see what I could lash together using my existing consumer electronics inventory and some cables. Now that I've completed the proof of concept phase, I can move on to exploring online video options and go from there.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is a 48" monitor too much or not enough?

Beware The JabbaWockeeZ

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

My son asked me to watch some MTV last night. Normally he is nowhere near the home of sudsy teen drama like The Hills, so I decided to see what became appointment television for him. It was the final episode of the unwieldily named Randy Jackson Presents America's Best Dance Crew, a blatant American Idol rip-off showcasing hip-hop dance teams, or “crews” instead of bad pop singers. My son’s loyalties were with the dorkily named JabbaWockeeZ. My son had never even heard of "Jabberwocky", so I called it up in the Googles and read it out loud to him.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

Every crew seems to have a gimmick and the Jabbas do all their numbers wearing gloves and plastic masks that make them look like kabuki thugz. As if the odd garb and Lewis Carrol/Monty Python inspired name weren’t enough, their final routine was called “The Red Pill” as in The Matrix down the rabbit hole. You can watch their routine here.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

To get into the finals, the all-guy pan-ethnic JabbaWockeeZ had to defeat the all-Asian co-ed group Kaba Modern, which has its roots in a UC-Irvine talent show entry. This group is really good and was the favorite of many. Nevertheless, JabbaWockeeZ went on to defeat the Boston-based Status Quo.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

Who knew that geek culture touchstone like Jabberwocky could burrow so deep into the zeitgeist of the latest MTV Generation. Or maybe is just a cool name that lets them go snicker snack on the competition.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Character - Good, Evil and Otherwise

This is my last Dungeons and Dragons related post for a while, so the non-role playing folk in my readership (and there are a few) can relax. While wandering the web the other night I, unsurprisingly, ran across a lot of other memorials to Gary Gygax. I found that my "Gary Gygax failed his saving throw" line to be outstandingly non-unique. I also stumbled across a blog meme quiz from, of all people, Michelle Malkin. She too was a gamer in high school which explains some things. Not everything, but a lot. This quiz is very long, but worth it because it does ask some intriguing questions.

I Am A: True Neutral Elf Wizard (6th Level)


Ability Scores:
Strength-12
Dexterity-9
Constitution-14
Intelligence-16
Wisdom-11
Charisma-14

Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn't feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he's not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Elves are known for their poetry, song, and magical arts, but when danger threatens they show great skill with weapons and strategy. Elves can live to be over 700 years old and, by human standards, are slow to make friends and enemies, and even slower to forget them. Elves are slim and stand 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall. They have no facial or body hair, prefer comfortable clothes, and possess unearthly grace. Many others races find them hauntingly beautiful.

Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

As I mentioned in my last post, my favorite character was a half-orc fighter, which is nearly the exact opposite of an elf wizard. Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy game. If I wanted to be a tall, pasty, wimpy nerd, I could have stayed home. I also found on the web this article from The Believer which is as good a exegesis on the role playing phenomenon as I have ever seen. Paul La Farge also is amazed by the thought and obsessive detail that went into the manuals. He uses the following example as just one case where nothing, or rather everything, is left to chance in the game.

THE HARLOT ENCOUNTER TABLE

01-10	slovenly trull
11-25	brazen strumpet
26-35	cheap trollop
36-50	typical streetwalker
51-65	saucy tart
66-75	wanton wench
76-85	expensive doxy
86-90	haughty courtesan
91-92	aged madam
93-94	wealthy procuress
95-98	sly pimp
99-00	rich panderer

D&D was more than a game, it was a primer on mythology, culture, and morality. One of its great innovations is the alignment axis. It includes good and evil which is as hard to define as it was in the times of St Augustine or of Nietzsche. It also uses the concept of lawful vs. chaos. A lawful character was a goody-goody that followed rules no matter how unfair. A chaotic character believed the ends justified the means. Here are my archetypes for the different alignments:

Lawful Good: Superman
Chaotic Good: Batman
Lawful Evil: Adolf Hitler
Chaotic Evil: Charles Manson

You can quibble with the nuances, and you are expected to. The game concept of a moral alignment was, of course, shamelessly stolen from other sources, but that is what made the game unique. It invited thought and exploration in the wider world where the players lived when they aren't casting spells or atacking trolls.

BlatantCommentWhoring™:What is your alignment or character type?

Credits: Elf image from DPI Studios

Dungeon Dice

Gary Gygax has lost his final saving throw. The founder of TSR games died today after a long illness. For a guy I know nothing about other than that he invented Dungeons and Dragons, he sure shaped and changed my life. When my son dragged me into his Magic league, I unearthed my ancient dice so I could show off my pathetically worn icosahedron with corners that has been rounded nearly spherical. It’s my geek badge of pride from my roleplaying past.


It may come as no surprise to readers of this blog that I used to play D&D. I was in fact a Dungeon Master, and a very good one if I do say so myself even though I came into the hobby by accident. In junior high, I played tons of military games, mostly the Avalon Hill games like Panzerblitz and Squad Leader. I thought that role playing games were beneath me.

When I moved to Florida for high school I spent a lot of time that first summer at the local library because as a new kid in town I had nothing to do and nobody to do it with. One afternoon I saw a bunch of other teenagers going into the meeting room behind the circulation desk. Curious, I asked what they were doing. It seems the library was a great place to meet for gaming since the meeting room was nearly always available and it was large and comfortable. I swallowed my pride and learned the ways of fantasy role playing games (which as an adult has a whole different meaning).

That was in 1979 and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (or AD&D, to distinguish it from its more convoluted predecessor) had just hit the market. D&D impressed me with its comprehensiveness. No aspect of the fantasy world was too obscure to be cataloged and quantified in obsessive detail. There were names for every level of character class. The spells and creatures covered every possible sub-genre and milieu. Somewhere deep in my closet of childhood paraphernalia is a first edition of Deities and Demigods complete with the copyright infringing Cthulthu mythos. I found it odd that the titular dragons were often much wimpier than many other far more obscure creatures in the namesake dungeons.

The kids I had hooked up with were a local group of gamers that called themselves The Bombers for no apparent reason. For the next couple of years, I spent at least one night a weekend with a floating group of maybe a dozen other people that shared common interests in addition to the need to pretend to be battle-ax wielding dwarves. We would trade book recommendations, order pizza, and even engage in substance abusing activities when the game got too dull.

My signature character was a half-orc fighter with astoundingly low charisma. I eventually tried my had at dungeon mastering and became the de facto leader of the rather loosely strung group. My crowning achievement was to get a girl to take up the game. My future wife and this other girl were taking a summer drivers ed course. I would ride my bike down to the school on the way to the library and flirt with the both of them while they stood around in the hot Florida summer sun waiting for their turn behind the wheel.

This girl was a voracious reader of fantasy and got intrigued by the D&D reference manuals in my backpack. I got her to start coming to our regular weekly games. She was short, nearly anorexically thin, and very pale. Between her pallor and her shock white hair she appeared nearly Melnibonéan. She would come to the games dressed in dark denim and a black Frazetta tee shirt. Her presence cut short the gameplay barmaid wenching in the town pub that often took up half the game before the characters would head off to the dungeon. This classic Dead Alewives routine pretty much summed up a typical evening for us. It’s like they had hidden microphones in my dining room.



From Wikipedia, I found that there is an audio only sequel to that sketch that includes a girl.

I eventually cast aside my dice tossing days to spend more time with the girl that I have spent the last twenty-five years with. Who has never played D&D once. I don’t regret leaving that nerd rite of passage behind, but every now and then I see a group of pimply, poorly groomed geeks with both the traditional six-sided and the d20 decimal dice generating characters with those critical 3-18 stats. I watch them and can’t help but fondly remember those days when I too mastered the dungeons.

Thanks for the memories, Gary, and I hope you fondly look back on us fellow gamers as you walk the planes.

Drunken Astronomy

Yesterday was my birthday but I didn’t make a big deal out of it. We had an evening full of the detritus of suburban living lined up but they all got canceled when a few snow flakes showed up and sent school officials scurrying for cover. Instead we ordered pizza, bought an ice cream cake and invited another family over.

After two glasses of wine and five shots of amaretto (it would have been rude not to drink my birthday presents), we were reminded that there was a lunar eclipse. Just after the peak, I went out with my camera and decided to take a few shots with my new camera. Here was the first attempt:


Eschewing any tripod, I decided to instead use a handy lamppost to steady myself. This picture which has a star or planet or something on either side of the moon is much better:


And this one, brightened a little with photoshop magic, is the best of the bunch:


Edwin Hubble is spinning in his grave at my ineptness and the fine folks at NASA have no fear of me working their turf. The only constellation I can identify is Orion’s Belt and other than the three stars that make it up, I have no idea where the rest of Orion is.

Over the years I have been suckered into either getting up very early or staying up too late to see some vague phenomenon that is usually underwhelming. That includes comets, meteor showers, lunar eclipses, and various planetary syzygies.

When I had a dog to walk late at night and in the pre-dawn morning, the planetary alignments were the most interesting because they usually lasted for days or weeks and I could see the minor shifts over time. And the planets are about the only astronomical objects that can be reliably seen through the eastern seaboard light pollution.

The only time I have been genuinely impressed was in the mid-80s when a true solar eclipse hit Atlanta. I was working a co-op job and all my fellow students had built little science fair viewing boxes or borrowed welding helmets from the shop. The sky briefly got late twilight dark and all the birds stopped chirping.

The ancient people were much more in tune with the rhythms of the night. Predicting astronomical events was a ticket to power. But in our modern world star gazing is just another eccentric geeky hobby along the lines of trainspotting or Civil War re-enacting. Anyone that takes it seriously is viewed as just a little out of kilter. Much like my drunken astronomical snapshots.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What have you been impressed by in the sky?