It's official: after a full 14 years of helping to bring some of the crappiest web pages ever conceived of to the internet, GeoCities is finally shutting down.

Geocities was started in 1995 as an online community for free hosting of web pages. Users with (painfully) basic HTML knowledge flocked to the site, which was soon plastered with hideous background patterns, tacky animated GIFs, and god-awful embedded MIDI files on autoplay.

The site went through a major transition in 1999 when it was purchased for $4.7 billion US by Yahoo, prompting analysts to remark: "Holy fuck! They paid 4.7 billion for that piece of shit?"

Upon hearing news of Yahoo's decision to axe GeoCities, people with good taste everywhere breathed an audible sigh of relief.

Now we just have to wait for Fortunecity to shut down their free hosting and Outpost 10F can selectively forget that Trek4God ever existed.

Posted at 05:13 PM | Comments (0)

The future is full of robot penguins:

Posted at 03:49 PM | Comments (2)

This morning brings troubling news. Professor Stephen Hawking, arguably the world's smartest man, and Lord and Master of all Geek-kind, has been rushed to the hospital after falling terribly ill. Professor Hawking has apparently been sick for a number of weeks. A specific diagnosis has not yet been made.

As an agnostic, I rarely ask people to pray for something, but if you could all send good thoughts and wishes to this man who has given so much to humankind... well, it can't hurt.

UPDATE (April 21): Looks like the good professor is on the mend. Here's wishing him a speedy recovery.

Posted at 10:54 AM | Comments (0)

Everyone else is posting this so I might as well too:

Posted at 08:14 PM | Comments (1)

Is anyone listening?

Posted at 12:53 PM | Comments (4)

Let's see...

The sun is shining. The sky is blue. The air is filled with the smell of lillies and cherry blossoms, women with great legs are wearing skirts.

After two incredibly busy days, I've been let go early for doing a good job. I'm heading home with a six pack of Granville Island Hefeweizen to watch hockey and drink beer with a bunch of ladies wearing fake beards. Their "playoff beards".

Oh, and I just wrote this whole blog post on my iPhone.

Sometimes, my life is truly awesome.

Posted at 04:10 PM | Comments (0)

Thomas Doyle is an artist who works in the medium of miniature dioramas. The images he portrays are often simultaneously very beautiful and deeply disturbing. The works are sometimes sealed under/inside glass vessels, giving the emotional and transformative scenes a quiet, forensic quality.

The quality of his work makes me wistful to get back into scale modelling. A lot of modern art has divorced itself from craft: drawing, sculpting, painting. So I'm always a fan of real artistic representation that is expressed in non-traditional mediums that are nonetheless fine crafts.

Mom, make sure dad sees these.

via boingboing

Posted at 09:58 AM | Comments (1)

For some reason, I started looking back at old e-mails from 2005. What a crazy, whirlwind year that seemed to have been. I have all these e-mail threads advising dear friends how to get through dire, emotional situations. Situations I seem to have mostly forgotten about. A few ill-advised kisses, too. The loss of my precious sidekick. Meeting Angela.

I've been reminiscing a lot lately. Because it seems like only yesterday that I was falling to my knees, bursting into tears as the second World Trade tower collapsed into a pile of rubble before my eyes on LIVE TV, having only minutes before shown the shot of people waving from the upper windows, unable to get out.

After that event, the decade moved by like freight train. In 2003, I wondered where and who I would be when the Olympics came to Vancouver. Where I'd be living. If I'd be married with kids yet. Here I am now, with the Olympics only a year away, wondering how I can get away from the utter chaos that will result in my stomping grounds when the Olympics do arrive. I'm still living with roommates. I'm still not married. I'm still blogging. I'm still working at the same job. Six years. Has nothing changed?

Generally, I'm someone who doesn't like change. I like to make a cozy nest and just curl up there. But I've become antsy. It's a combination of things. This isn't anything like the life I imagined for myself. Lots of change has been promised at work, mergers, big moves, big plans... but very little has materialized. At least I got to go to Toronto twice this year. That made me feel important.

And life continues at this dragon's pace. All around me, people are getting married and/or having kids, breaking up, moving from here to there, changing jobs, going back to school, finishing school. Etcetera, etcetera...

So now its 2009, and I'm 30. Is this it? Is this all that there's going to be in my life? Now I'm getting my thrills out of hackers attacking our network and finding ways to fend them off. What is it I want out of life?

Maybe I'm just trying to understand how I got to this point: a 30 year old, unmarried, guy who is essentially a university dropout, endlessly trying to see his old friends on a regular basis but endlessly failing. Who can blame them? They all have their own lives to contend with.

Are the best days of my life behind me, or still ahead of me?

Something has to change, and I've yet to figure out what that is.

If you have any comments, you can submit them to me privately.

Posted at 08:21 AM

Printers ARE brats...

Posted at 09:43 AM | Comments (0)

Adam: I have little interest in driving. in fact, i've had nightmares all my life about it.
Geekman: Well, everyone has those. Not being able to stop the car, etc...
Geekman: When I was a kid I dreamed that I'd be playing in the car and then it would just start rolling away from my parents.
Adam: Yes! the brakes would never work!
Adam: But then i learned to drive. and then my learners expired. and now i have nightmares of driving without a license and being caught.
Geekman: Yes, yes...
Geekman: Or forgetting to renew your insurance and getting in an accident
Adam: Ooo. i hadn't even anticipated that one.
Geekman: Excellent. I have infected you with a brand new neurosis
Adam: Well done.
Geekman: We all do our part...

Posted at 01:20 PM | Comments (1)

Random updates:

- IT has kept me busy at work. I like this.

- Have you heard of Japadog? They were one, and are now two of these hot dog stands in downtown Vancouver. They serve hot dogs with Japanese toppings. You could have a Terimayo dog , with onions, teriyaki sauce, Japanese mayonnaise, and sliced nori. Or you could have a Misomayo dog, with miso sauce and kaiware sprouts. Today I had an Okonomi dog, which is like like the Terimayo only garnished with dancing bonito flakes. Dancing, dancing...

- It was so enjoyable to watch the Canucks steamroll the Calgary Flames last night. There was something special about seeing our team give our main division competitor an utter pantsing. I think I might try to get some playoff tickets on Saturday. Wish me luck.

- I need to clean up my workstation.

- You may have noticed GeekMan's World has experienced some outages. This is unfortunately due to someone (probably cleaners) messing with the metal clip that keeps my laptop-server from going to sleep with the lid closed. I have now TAPED it on and this will hopefully not happen again.

- Windows Server 2008 is not nearly as bad as I expected. It owes this to its XP-like interface. Fuck the Ribbon.

- Marx was right!

- Star Wars + Super Mario = Mario-StarWars paintings

Posted at 12:29 PM | Comments (3)

Extending from a discussion Angela and I had this weekend: I have always, even in childhood, had a strange hatred for the fable of the The Tortoise and the Hare. In Western society we must constantly be subjected to this flawed allegory and its bizarre logic of "slow and steady wins the race". It is true that, in some cases, a slower and more meticulous hand is best when performing delicate or complicated tasks. However, "slow and steady" does not win a race. Slow and steady loses a race. Fast and furious wins a race (allusion NOT intended, by the way).

Society's utter failure to glean any true value from this story derives from the folly of seeing the tortoise as the protagonist. That is, WE can ALL be the tortoise. That if we simply bask in our mediocrity we can rest assured that, eventually, our vastly superior opponents will make a crucial error that will allow us to overtake them. This is utterly stupid logic. You can't rely on your opponent to slip up. You can't expect them to take a nap in the middle of the race course.

The way we should really analyse this tale is from the perspective of the hare. In this way, we can say that no matter what edge we have on our opponent, we should not become complacent, or let a task languish half-completed. Showing such blatant disregard for the quality or completeness of our work because we are otherwise so-darn-good-at-it is a mistake. Knowing not to repeat such mistakes is the TRUE lesson we should take away from the fable.

I am especially prompted to think of this lesson lately because I've had lots of time to watch the Vancouver Canucks: they are a team full of very talented players. But they're also hockey team who are especially fond of playing their hearts out through 50-75% of a hockey game only to inevitably slack off and give the opposing team enough time to recover and win the game. The Canucks don't bother to make the effort against weaker teams, only to be blindsided by those teams before the Canucks have a chance to regroup.

Never show your opponent a moment of weakness, they will always exploit it.

Posted at 11:19 AM | Comments (4)

I spent today fumbling around inside a crowded server enclosure, trying to make space for our new fileserver. All the servers were running, and it made the work surprisingly hot. I was constantly wrestling with a spaghetti-like tangle of cables, ever-afraid to knocking our mailserver or local network offline.

My hands got scratched up and blackened with dust. I cursed as I dropped nuts, bolts, and screwdriver bits. Configuring Windows Server was a pain, due to all the default security restrictions. It was a lot of time-consuming, frustrating work.

It was the best day of work I've had in a while.

Posted at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)