so i know that i’m pretty late to this party, but i just watched the first 5 or so episodes, and man ‘battlestar galactica’ is freakin’ – er, frakkin’ – AWESOME! i’m totally hooked. although i have to say, unlike cecile, i don’t think jamie bamber (apollo) is super-hot. i think the chief of the flight deck and halo are way cuter.
Archives for category: I must retire to my nerdery
andrew carol, great mind behind much of the LEGO serial protocol, has constructed a working LEGO technic difference engine able to “compute 2nd or 3rd order polynomials to 3 or 4 digits.”
i mean…holy shit right? his explanation of his process is really interesting (if you’re into that sort of thing) but also pretty dense if your brain has been out of calculus – or algebra…or, let’s be honest, math – mode for awhile. more photos at the bottom of the page.
link via eric
stripped books is running a serial based on a comics panel that took place in chicago last year. it was moderated by ivan brunetti and mostly has to do with the other artists’ workflow and respective styles. what is really cool is that as the subject and speaker changes, so does the style of the comic. sometimes it looks like a page from ‘it’s a good life if you don’t weaken‘ and sometimes you could swear you were reading chris ware‘s comic in the reader.
the funniest song i’ve heard in awhile – ‘make you happy tonight’ by tripod.
of course, when jon sent it to me he thought that i would be playing it via some headphones, but we don’t rock the headphones here at work, so instead i played it out loud and everyone got to hear it…and thus my status as office loser is cemented.
still, the song is hilarious.
this morning i spent about half an hour getting everyone in the office on ichat/im/[insert your preferred client here]. now we can use the ‘current itunes track’ function in ichat to show everyone in the office what’s playing on the stereo so we (meaning “i”) don’t have to yell out, “hey, who is this??” every 5 minutes.
idea thrown out before deciding on ichat: buying a big scrolling billboard sign and hanging it above the stereo. write custom interface program to send current tracks in real-time to the scrolling sign from the pc. would be cool if i could get it to work, but i’ve no idea how to do that. if anyone out there does know how to do that, by all means let me know.
ah, the gods of nerdery are smiling on me today.
first of all, i would like to direct everyone’s attention to the worst album covers over on pitchfork. jon sent me the link today and it’s been entertaining aaron, antonio and i all afternoon. the captions are the best part, reminding me of the do’s and don’ts from vice.
also, a sad little observation: somehow tuesday has become my favorite night of the week. and why? not because of half-price movies or half-price pizza (which doesn’t exist at o’famé anymore anyway), but because it’s my favorite night of tv. T. V. admittedly, i have always been a tv fanatic and usually have a whole roster of shows to watch each night, but somehow tuesday night tv is the only night of shows that gets watched live (gasp!) or only stays on the tivo for 18 hours, max.
despite all past failings (all of those prematurely-cancelled shows. sigh. moment of silence for ‘firefly’ and ‘profit’ and ‘strange luck’ and ‘space: above and beyond’ and ‘the inside’, etc etc), fox has managed to snag my two favorite shows for this year – ‘house’ and ‘bones’. ‘house’ stars hugh laurie as a particularly crotchety misanthrope who will go as far as necessary to prove a point and ‘bones’ stars emily deschanel as a forensic anthropologist (one of my many toyed-with ideas for a profession) and david boreanaz as an fbi agent (also once my chief aspiration). if only fox had ‘numbers’ (two hot jewish brothers, one an fbi agent, one a genius mathematician – basically an entire family of the hottest things i can think of), then i would have to go ahead and offer up my soul.
i’m seeing ‘harry potter and the goblet of fire’ this thursday night at 12:01 with a big group. the girls will be all a-twitter over daniel radcliffe and the ruskie who plays ‘viktor krum’ while lamenting the absence of the graduated ‘oliver wood’ and the boys will be all over emma watson and maybe the chick who plays harry potter’s girlfriend (i haven’t seen her yet). both groups’ obsessions will freak out and disgust the opposing gender/sexual-preference group while at the same time, each group will have no idea what is wrong with their own brand of barely (if-at-all) legal lust. fun times ahead.
last year i pointed hyperbolation readers to an article about light transmitting concrete. today i was looking at luxist and saw a little blurb about the new litracon lamp. pretty cool! now where is that $600 i had laying around…
photos from cali are trickling in.
just finished watching the director’s commentary for star trek: first contact. man, that movie is SO good. The Best Star Trek Movie, in my opinion. oh, there’s wrath of khan and everything, but the fact of the matter is first contact is almost perfect. i think a big part of what makes first contact so good (and what made nemesis so very very bad), is jonathan frakes and brannon braga and ron moore. nemesis, while well-meaning, was like a kick in the nuts. what kind of send-off for the franchise was that? the director clearly didn’t care about the character relationships or the history of the show, and i’m appalled that no one stopped him at some point to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing.
meanwhile, jonathan frakes was intimately familiar with the source material (the tv show), had a real respect for the franchise and knew how to capture the moments that made the audience feel the history of the characters and their loyalty and sense of family and all of those other fuzzy feelings that make a movie special (also, patrick stewart’s ripped arms. mustn’t forget the surprising sexiness of picard as action hero). brannon braga and ron moore wrote a script with fantastic pacing, a titillating premise and rich secondary characters – i cannot honestly, or in good conscience, refer to shinzon as a ‘rich character’. i’m not even sure that’s john logan’s fault – i think the movie was simply poorly executed. it was stylistically interesting, but where was the heart? no moment with geordi about the death of his best friend? wtf? sad. really really sad.
i think i’ll continue my nerd-day by either watching the commentary for insurrection or the hunt for red october (another facet of my nerdiness: submarines. also naval aviators. it runs in the family. the navy, not the nerdiness.)
qoop is still in beta, but they’ll print up a book of photos from your flickr photostream! awesome!
today i was waiting for the bus in front of the high school near work when suddenly i heard the all-too-familiar thud of bass drums. soon i could hear the whole drum line practicing their cadence. i was overcome with sentimental feelings about marching band – pretty odd considering that i dreaded marching band and all of the sweatiness and smelliness and aerobicizing it entailed. but still, i could feel my legs automatically trying to get in step and my ears perking up, listening for the whistle commands.
i guess i never realized how good of a time i had in marching band – all of us music warriors, down in the trenches, suffering for our art, trying to look our best, make our movements snappy or fluid as need be, spending hours circling that black-top student parking lot practicing the perfect barn-door turn and learning to mark time properly. heh. i guess there were actually some pretty exciting/fun/interesting parts, like a bunch of hormonal teenagers changing clothes together in a cramped bus, playing cards and trading cds and those long night-time bus rides [insert eyebrow raise here]. i do believe it was on a band trip that i took that incriminating picture of brandon making out. nothing like flash photography on a pitch-dark bus to scare an adolescent on the make.