It seems that a waxing geek chic is detailed instructional manuals for things that are utterly fictional. Perhaps it's nothing new, when I was younger I filled my brain with details from the Star Trek technical manuals (I still have a painfully adept understanding of the mechanics of warp drive). I bring to your attention two new books in this genre.

Most recently released was How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion by Daniel H. Wilson, author and graduate of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. The cover looks like Optimus Prime is running amuck. From Daniel Wilson's manual: "Any robot could rebel, from a toaster to a Terminator, and so it is crucial to learn the strengths and weaknesses of every robot enemy." Sage words, Daniel.

The other geektacular volume is The Batman Handbook: The Ultimate Training Manual. Yes, this book teaches you how to be Batman. It's chock-full of humorous diagrams and step-by-step instructions such as how to throw a Batarang, how to train a sidekick, and how to bulletproof your Batmobile. Evildoers beware.

Posted at 10:45 AM | Comments (2)

As I was walking into Pacific Centre to get some lunch, I passed the lotto stand and saw a BCTV cameraman interviewing the customers, gathering footage. This is no doubt because this week's lotto 649 jackpot is a 'big, BIG $40 million!!!' I found myself trying to recall exactly how many times I'd seen such stories on the evening news about the current lotto jackpot. Human interest story? Yeah, my ass. I wonder how much news organizations have been paid off to run these thinly-veiled lotto advertisements. And of course, it is our conservative-leaning friends at BCTV perpetuating the Horatio Alger myth that if we're all just patient, we'll eventually all be fabulously rich. Isn't there some more important story they could be running? Doesn't their journalistic integrity compel them to present something relevant and educational to the public? Oh, silly me: I'm being an idealist again...

Posted at 01:52 PM | Comments (2)

Angela is back from Europe now. We spent the evening together yesterday. We are very happy. You'll meet her soon, if you haven't already.

For those of you who have ever wondered what The Fellowship of the Ring would look like if it were a quest in World of Warcraft, I'd say that this describes the scenario with a painful degree of accuracy.

Another milestone was acheived this week in the glorious pile of shit that is human civilization. The American military death toll in Iraq has now topped 2,000. That's 2,000 American soldiers dead. We're not counting Brits and other nationals. We're not counting Iraq civillians killed in "unfortunate incidents" as the U.S. likes to call them. We're not counting the hordes of civillian workers who have been kidnapped and killed by insurgents. And we haven't even touched on the soliders and civillians on all sides who have been wounded, crippled, or disfigured. I wonder, Mr. Bush, do you sleep well at night, safe in the delusion that you are making the world a better place by ridding it of terrorism?

Posted at 10:11 AM | Comments (3)

Okay, I have an easy commenting solution for those of you who don't use LiveJournal.

Moveable Type supports plug-ins. And being that Moveable Type is so popular, many people have written useful plug-ins to overcome limitations. I've discovered a handy one that will allow the system to trust commenters based on their e-mail address. So, next time you leave a comment, just punch in your main e-mail address and I'll add it to the "e-mail whitelist" so that your comments will be approved automatically. Your e-mail will not appear anywhere on the public website, so there's no need to worry about spambots harvesting them. Sound fair?

Posted at 11:03 PM | Comments (3)

My mom sent me an e-mail this morning informing me of yet another boneheaded conservative move by U.S. president George W. Bush. U.S. Congress has passed a bill which protects gun manufacturers from lawsuits filed by the families of victims of gun violence. "I look forward to signing this legislation into law," said Bush before cackling maniacally and vanishing in a burst of flames. We can now see the Republican party is in the pocket of the NRA and the gun industry.

Posted at 12:09 PM | Comments (2)

Okay. It doesn't seem like I can get the system to trust commenters unless they're logged in somehow. So after some tinkering I've managed to get TypeKey authentication to work. You can login using your LiveJournal ID, if you have one. Then I have the system trust you, and then your comments will be posted automatically. TypeKey, LiveJournal, and Moveable Type are all made by a company called SixApart, which is why they work so magically well together.

Posted at 09:28 AM | Comments (2)

One of my favourite scenes in Star Trek IV is the one where Scotty, posing as an inventor, gives the president of a 1980s acrylics manufacturer the formula for transparent aluminum in exchange for tank materials. Scotty justifies the blatant timeline alteration to McCoy by asking, "Well, how do we know he didn't invent the thing?"

Slashdot reports that we may now add transparent aluminum to the science fact column, as the US air force is currently testing a compound called aluminum oxynitride as a replacement for the traditional multi-layered glass now used in their vehicles. Neat-O.

Posted at 09:53 AM | Comments (4)

Damn, I really miss Angela. Another week and a bit... just grit your teeth, boy...

Danielle has been keeping me company though, which is nice. While riding in the SkyTrain, Sarah took this picture of us. I can't stop looking at it. I think we both end up looking very attractive, but while I look good and light, Danielle looks pretty dark (she's already expressed fondness for the hoodie because it makes her feel like Emperor Palpatine). I just love staring into things that seem like elemental opposites, yet are also the same.

Something that has been talked about in that regard would be to create a portrait of Nadia and I which illustrates my element as order and her element as chaos. The picture would show the conflict between the elements while still indicating the closeness of our friendship. See? I'm a concept man.

Posted at 10:01 AM | Comments (1)

My iBook has failed. It looks like a logic board problem, again. For those of you who don't remember, my iBook has conked out on me three times before because of a problem with the logic board. It simply amounts to bad design on Apple's part. I'm pretty frustrated, so I think I'm going to call them up and tell them I want a discount on a new mac. As a loyal Apple customer, I shouldn't have to deal with this shit.

Posted at 10:29 AM | Comments (2)

This looks really good. From the makers of Traffic, the movie that pulled the hood off America's war on drugs and looked at the grim realities of crack cocaine, comes Syriana, a movie that apparently aims to pull the hood off the western world's dependance on oil and show us the grim reality. I will definitely see this movie.

If you go to the gallery, you'll notice a bunch of pics (generously supplied by Danielle) from Steph's pirate party. It was a private welcoming party for Steph, so I recommend that those of you who did not attend enjoy the hilarity of the photos.

Lastly, thanks to Bryn I've become a reader of Questionable Content. It's hard not to get sucked into the story by these endearing and attractive cartoon characters. I love their shirts, too.

Posted at 08:50 PM | Comments (3)

LiveJournal users, eat your hearts out.

The news system of GeekMan's World is now powered by the awesome might of Moveable Type, and as such users will be able to leave comments after my posts. Some cleaning up still needs to be done on the archive/comment pages, but overall once I grasped MoveableType's "template" concept I found the system to be very easy to configure.

For the moment, I'll be holding comments in quarantine before I authorize them. Through that, I'll authenticate my friends as "Trusted Commenters", so from then on, their comments will be published immediately.

Posted at 12:18 PM | Comments (5)

The fact that this exists brings a smile to my face, because I love Morbo too.

Posted at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

Freaky coincidences are a part of everyday life. With the internet, they become all the more easy to identify. For example, while browsing around Google Images looking for other Joker costumes. I came across these pictures on some guy's blog. If you scroll down to the middle of the page, you'll see that last year this guy's group of friends got together and had Batman Halloween party. What's really freaky? The guy who dressed up as the Joker was named Jesse. Ooooooo... It's a freaky alternate universe in Indiana. Freaky.

It's been year of awful tragedies, Tsunamis, Hurricanes, and now the earthquake in Pakistan/Kashmir. It seems there are much more pertinent things to worry about, but it still breaks my heart to learn that last night, the Aardman Animations building in Bristol was utterly destroyed by fire. The company which produced Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit has lost almost it's entire history in the fire. The sets and props for all three original Wallace and Gromit shorts, and Chicken Run have all been lost.

Last but not least, Dark Matter. Now, I don't certainly think of myself as an astrophysicist, but the whole concept of Dark Matter has always bugged the hell out of me. It seems like a sloppy fudge factor which is a poor attempt to explain the disparity between the rotation of galaxies under Newtonian Dynamics and their actual observed behavior. So imagine my delight when physicists from B.C.'s own University of Victoria claimed that the discrepancy can be resolved by substituting the Newtonian rules with General Relativity, thus eliminating the need for Dark Matter. Dark Matter still has a lot of support from traditional Astrophysicists, so naturally the paper is generating a lot of static in the physics community. Frankly, I hope this is the beginning of the end for Dark Matter. Anyone want to make me a t-shirt on this? "Dark Matter Sucks", or perhaps, "Dark Matter is Fudge"?

Nerdalicious...

Posted at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

A madman runs the United States of America. I don't normally like to make blanket assertions like that, but the latest news byte on Dubya is more of his statements that he's on a mission from God. In 2003 he told a delegation of Palestinians the following:

I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan'. And I did. And then God would tell me 'George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq'. And I did... And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East'. And, by God, I'm gonna do it.

Generally, I don't care what people believe. If they want to believe in Jesus or Mohammed or Yahweh or Buddha or Brahma... that's fine. But if you think that you can justify violence by saying, "God told me to do it", then you are insane. You are insane and you are a blasphemer. This is coming from someone who doesn't prescribe to religion. Unless you're a prophet or the son of God you're got no right to make such statements; and I doubt very much that the president of the United States is either of those things.

Posted at 12:00 AM

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Hi, I'm Al Harrington, President and CEO of Al Harrington's Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man Emporium and Warehouse! Thanks to a shipping error I am now overstocked on wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men, and I am passing the savings on to you! Attract customers to your business, make a splash at your next presentation, keep grandma company, protect your crops, confuse your neighbours! African American? Hail a cab, testify in church or just raise the roof! Whatever your wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man needs, come on down to Al Harrington's Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man Emporium and Warehouse, route two in Wequapog!

Posted at 12:00 AM

I don't respect the media in America. The past four years have demonstrated that they are a pack of cowards; unwilling to speak the truth about how the rest of the world regards the USA right now and unable to comment on how the Iraq war has negatively affected so many, many things. For the past four years the impartiality of journalism in America has been in a coma.

So imagine the shock of the rest of the world when Andy Rooney of 60 minutes dropped the hammer on the Bush administration and its war in Iraq during his weekly commentary. If you don't believe the transcript, you can hear them man himself speak it in an audio sample here.

Its about bloody time the mainstream media in the US gathered its courage. Good for you, Andy; you've more courage than anyone else in the media today. One can only hope its the beginning of a trend, but I've been disappointed before.

Posted at 12:00 AM

It seems that random blogging is the thing to do when there's a period of nothing to do at work. Lyrics class was cancelled today; our teacher is sick.

Yesterday was devoted entirely to spending time with Angela, who will be leaving for Europe tomorrow. She'll be gone a couple of weeks, and will be missed. We went on a date to the aquarium to watch cetaceans and fishes and other critters of the sea. Nadia would point out that as Cancer and Scorpio, Angela and I are both water signs. And that would provide us all with an amusing astrological insight.

I saw Corpse Bride on the weekend with Iain and Steph. I had to say that I wasn't terribly impressed. The characters were likable (or dislikable in a likable way), and there was a (excuse the pun) skeleton of a plot that was very romantic and enjoyable. I could have done without Danny Elfman's plodding songs speckled sparsely through the film, whose melodies are quickly forgettable (stick to writing scores, Dan). The style of the movie was also awfully familiar, much in the Nightmare Before Christmas vein. At a mere 76 minutes long, I felt that there was a lot more room for Burton to work with what he had. This is a decent fairy-tale for kids, but for me it was just okay.

Posted at 12:00 AM