Gecko Bloggle

via Digg‘s ever-changing front page, ‘tho it looks like this thing’s been around for a while, since the video on YouTube (link below) has been around for five months.

Looks like a company called BetaMinds in the UK has created the ultimate bar toy. Or maybe it’s a toy bar.  All I know is if I had a bunch of friends, and some drinks around one of these things, we wouldn’t leave for a very long time.  And or, we wouldn’t talk to each other at all, ’cause we were too busy playing with the flashy lights…  Of course, that’s sorta how our bar nights go anyway.

The iBar (video here)

iBar is a system for the interactive design of any bar-counter. Integrated video-projectors can project any content on the milky bar-surface. The intelligent tracking system of iBar detects all objects touching the surface. This input is used to let the projected content interact dynamically with the movements on the counter. Objects can be illuminated at their position or virtual objects can be “touched” with the fingers.

powered by performancing firefox

Okay, I would understand if someone made headphones that would hold an iPod Shuffle (especially the new and smaller Shuffle), but these are just plain… stupid.

The writeup is pretty funny on CrunchGear.

I’ll stick to my Logitech Bluetooth headphones, thanks even if they are prone to cracking.

Interesting stuff, and since they have a new application/utility every day, it’s worth going back over and over again. I’ve installed a few games here and there, but today’s giveaway is DiskInternals’ Uneraser (normally $39.95). It’s a full version, and there’s a little online-only unlocker, which doesn’t seem to have any nasty sorta payload (that I can find), so they seem to be legit.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Geekin’… sorry for folks who were reading me for the warm fuzzies.

So, I’m writing this from a machine that’s running the *REAL* honest-to-goodness Vista Ultimate. Downloaded from MSDN a mere two days ago. I’d played with some of the Betas and Release Candidates, and for the most part kept thinking “Yeah, it’s sorta pretty, but I don’t really NEED any of this stuff.” It’s mostly true, too, ’cause for the most part, I could make my XP machine look like Vista, and could add a sidebar with or without gadgets/widgets, and since Office 2007 runs just fine under XP (so far, except for the new “x” that appears on the end of document extensions – hope that means everything’s a nice recoverable XML format, ’cause that might make it worthwhile for once again having backward compatibility issues).

I’m still wary of MS after the stunt they pulled with Word 97, which claimed to be able to save in Word 95 format, but didn’t… It would save in “RichText” format, which would lose all *sorts* of formatting and chewy goodness. They didn’t fix it until after people started noticing that the document didn’t appear to be the same when saving as previous verison (like Law Firms like to do). Whooopsh.

Outlook is still using the single-file PST/OST format for storage though, which will keep data recovery folks like myself in business for a while (sorry St. Aardvark, your Very Good Idea wasn’t incorporated into this version of Outlook).

But what does it all mean? What’s the point of a new OS, and a new Office? Is anyone actually going to USE the new feature sets in either of them? As a Desktop Engineer (there’s the brave young souls on Helpdesk doing triage, there’s the slightly slower moving, but more dangerous rocket-launcher-carrying Desktop folks, and then there’s the snipers in the unmarked helicopters like myself and my cubemate), there’s a lot of new stuff to learn and implement to allow the Development Teams do their thing, but not be able to completely hoop themselves or the network. We also (due to Sarbanes Oxley rules) have to have a process in place to make sure they’re not pirating stuff from other gaming companies or music houses.

So this new version? Complicates our lives at work. All of our lives. There’ll be the people who will bang their highly-skilled knuckles on their desks until we roll out the new OS, even though half of the applications and pipelines they rely on (and have, in some cases, built themselves) WON’T WORK on the new system. It’ll create more work for them, in the long run. At least pre service pack 1. The one good thing it does that I’ve seen so far that XP couldn’t do?

See more than 2.75GB of RAM. Now maybe you’re reading this on a machine with 128MB or something, but for developers of HiDef gaming “experiences,” or Accounting folks who’re working on spreadsheets for a multi-billion dollar company, the might RAM rules. Being able to put 6GB of ram in a machine and have the OS actually, y’know, USE it, is pretty cool.

…and yes, I know Macs could do that before the cavemen learned how to bang rocks together.

I don’t know how the heck it happened, but I made it through round one of the Canadian Blog Awards in the Sci/Tech category.

Well, that’s not an entirely true statement. I *DO* know how the heck that happened: I have some wonderful friends and readers who were kind enough to go and vote (every day!) and I ended up with enough votes to place third. How Canadian can one get? If I’d come in first, I’d be embarassed that someone somewhere was doing something they weren’t supposed to be doing, but luckily the contest only allows one vote per day per person, so I can’t just let my devious mind sit there and hammer on the Vote/Back buttons. Second would have felt sorta like I was a poser or someth-

That’s it: #3 is the “kitchen party” of any contest.

But no! I really didn’t harness my techie skills for evil! Not that I’ve ever done that in the past on slightly less… stringent… online sweepstakes? (Seriously folks: I think gone are the days when we can sit at our desks and alternate clicks between the “See if you’ve won” and “Back” buttons for hours on end. If they hadn’t, I’d have a truckload of iPods in my storage locker right about now.

Oh, and Happy Birthday to SomeChick, even though she did end up at home with a Snuffleuppagus (is that how that’s spelled, or am I now going to get hits from other typo-addled muppetfans?)

(5 things people wouldn’t know about me if they only read my blog)

Long post warning, I won’t be offended of you go “Oh FORGET it.”

1. My shoulderjoints are funkier than James Brown. (And not in a good way).

Seriously. When I was younger, I would throw one end of a tea-towel over my shoulder and down my back, and then grab the hanging part with my other hand, and pull/climb my two hands together. As I got older, I could just reach behind my back with both hands and make a fist (try this: link your hands together with one palm facing up and one palm facing down, and then imagine them linked like that in the space between your shoulderblades). I used to do that to stretch in the morning. It was easy, and didn’t hurt. When I was about 20, I got the bright idea of doing the “handcuff flip” and reach both hands behind my back like I was cuffed, and then (while holding on), cranking my hands up and over my head until they were in front of me… still linked.

Reminder: 20 years of age. The time of tattoos, damn-near-blackout drinking (actual blackouts weren’t until later), and dating women who were “crazy enough to date me,” instead of “crazy enough to *like* me.”

So yeah, anyhoo. My arms would always hurt after the handcuff trick, but I didn’t think too much of it until one morning, a few years later, when I woke up to find that my right shoulder was dislocated, and asleep, with pins & needles. I was totally freaked out (it’s a shitty, shitty way to wake up, lemme tell ya), but managed to get my arm back in before the shock wore off. Went to the hospital, spoke with a Dr. who took an x-ray to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be, and who then showed me how to put my own arm back in again (essentially, you lean over and bend your knees until your knuckles are dragging on the ground, stand on the hand of the arm that’s “out,” and then, as the good doctor put it “you stand up.”) You may ask “Doesn’t that hurt?” and the simple answer is “Yes, but not as much as having your muscles and tendons desperately try to pull your 12lb arm back into its socket from a position three inches lower than it should be.

Doesn’t happen very often, but it’s always a shock. Last time I “blew my arm out” was on a plane in Cincinatti while getting myself and three big bags out of the seat. I did something tree-frog-like with my arm/hand/shoulder to get one of the bags slung, and then found myself half-way out of my seat with a dislocated shoulder, watching my wife walk off the plane with our two kids while I felt like a weakling bird with a busted wing… I got it back in, but it took me a minute of the stewardesses looking a little like “Okay buddy, get off the freakin’ plane already, let’s GO.”

2. You can push me a lot further than I’d let you push my friends.

It’s weird, ’cause I’ve struggled with this a few times, socially. I’ve found that people will overstep boundaries with ME (generally because I expect them to notice that they’ve done so, and back off, instead of saying “Uh, hey, you’re getting up my nose.”) I think that comes from growing up with the sort of social-climber heritage that demands that nobody should do/say anything that’d make a guest feel uncomfortable, and I try to figure out how that actually WORKS in real life, but screw it up from time to time. So I’ll put up with a lot of crap, and being used/abused for a long time, and then I finally just sorta go *click* and I’m done with the person who’s been pissing me off. Maybe it’s not fair of me, maybe it’s somewhat cruel to the person who has unknowingly offended me in whatever way, but that’s how I’ve done things. If it’s someone I really want to keep as a friend, I’ll tell them what’s going on, but if there’s not a lot of friendship left to save, or I feel like it’d be a whole bunch of work on both our parts of “save the friendship,” then I’ll just cut ties. If it’s not easy to be someone’s friend, maybe they shouldn’t be your friend. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you’re RIGHT for each other.

What was my point? Oh yeah.

Mess with a friend of mine? Blammo. First time. You’re done. You screw over a friend of mine (especially men screwing over women friends of mine), and you’re not a person any more in my book. Not entirely sure why that’s the case with me, but it is something I’ve thought about on many occasions, and generally speaking, it’s worked out “okay…” Not always great, but okay. The only major drawback is that sometimes friends will have conflict with another friend, tell me all about it in gory detail, but then make up with the friend, and NOT TELL ME… Months later, I’ll still be mad at X for offending Y, and THEN find out that Y apologized profusely the next day, and X is now okay with it. I get labeled as carrying grudges, but maybe I do.

Yeah, actually, I do.

Note: There’s ONE person I can think of who directly offended me who I wrote off at that moment. I was at a party with my soon-to-be-ex at the time (she was moving far away in a month or so, and I wasn’t going with her – it was sad, but for the best), and someone who knew we were a couple, but also knew that we wouldn’t be soon went on at great length about how much my soon-to-be-ex was going to LOVE living in her new place because “It’s so *easy* to get guys to go down on you.” Hello? I’m standing right here! I don’t need to hear about all the sex she’s going to be getting after she moves. She already gets lots of that here at home… It was beautiful. I finally got over the anger by realizing that being offended wasn’t going to get through to the person who said it ’cause I wasn’t about to point out to her what an unbelievably attrocious thing that was to say… Still: I’m not about to ask her out for coffee, either.

{whew, only 2/5ths of the way there, and already crossed the line WAY back there for both length of post and… shall we say… depth of information}. Better lighten up.

3. I like food!

I like to eat almost anything except liver, raw onions, and uni (it’s a type of sushi which sorta goes ka-salty-MUDBALL in your mouth).

4. I used to be the biggest kid around. Now, not so much.

I was 5’11″… in grade seven. Stayed there though, so now I’m just a little below average height. I was always the biggest kid in my class until grade eight, but never got into a fight (despite many many invitations from a certain kid in my grade with early-manifesting short-man complex, abusive parents, and boxing lessons). As a teen, I did break a grown man’s finger once, but he was my karate instructor, and kept saying over and over again that it was his own fault. When I was 17, I could leg-press just slightly less than 800lbs, and could probably still push a whole bunch of weight with my “junkyard legs.”

5. I can be kinda funny – and I can do impressions (mostly of other people’s impressions).

I grew up listening to comedians on the radio (and tapes, thanks to Toren’s archive of comedy radio shows), and got really good at remembering those standup bits, and learning to imitate *them* and sometimes I got good at imitating THEM while They imitated someone Else. I can do a near-perfect “Billy Crystal – Sportsbeat” in which he imitates Howard Cosell and a bunch of boxers talking. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be happily married with a brilliant and beautiful wife, and two cutenaroidulent kids if it weren’t for the fact that I can recite the “I like eggs… A lot Hawad… I LOOOOOVE EGGS…” with near perfect tone and timing. When Arwen and I had been dating for about three weeks, she had her wisdom teeth out, and I made her laugh and laugh and laugh (the painkillers helped, I’m guessing), and to this day we still call each other “Hawad.”

I also have a number of standup-like “bits” that I’ve created over the years, but would NEVER consider actually getting up on stage in front of, y’know, people who don’t know me, and/or might not like me. Ask me about The Friendly Giant and His Giant-Chicken-In-A-Bag, sometime. It’s funny, I’m told.

I can also (again, so other people have told me) do a near-perfect Kermit the frog singing “Rainbow Connection.” After Jim Henson died, I saw a Christmas special on TV, during which everyone was waiting for Kermit to show up (the show was created after Jim died), and there was a part of me that was secretly hoping they wouldn’t try to do it: that it was wrong to think Kermit was just a puppet, and that Jim was just “driving” Kermit. They were one entity.

Oh yeah, so then at the end of the show (spoiler alert!) Kermit DOES show up, and after the show was over, my wife turned to me, and could see that I was sorta torn that they’d used some other person to do the voice, and she said “You should be doing that: you do Kermit better than that guy.”

I thought about that, and thought “Yeah maybe I could, maybe I couldn’t. One thing I know though – I can’t imagine being that guy, and having to look Frank Oz in the face while we stood under the stage, even if I was a perfect voiceprint match for Jim, ’cause I just wouldn’t BE the bearded hippy guy who’d helped raise an entire generation (or four) on the idea that you didn’t have to yell at kids to get their attention. You could just talk to them like people, and they would respond like people, and they would respond like YOU were people, even if you were a collection of green felt and two half pingpong balls, with a bearded hippy’s hand up your butt.

I’m pretty sure this is the longest post I’ve ever made on my blog, so I’ll stop now, and tag Toren, Chris, SomeChick, annnnnnnd… KarlaBabble (mostly ’cause I can’t possibly *imagine* what she’d come up with that wouldn’t attract the attention of the local authorities).

Remember the video I posted a while back that contained the Hurratorpedo cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart, with the three guys destroying a bunch of kitchen equipment?

Well here’s another song by them. “All the Things (S)he Said”

This is probably the closest thing out there to a Stomp “Band” (but I’ve seen Stomp, and dude, I would’ve danced if there was room). Check out video of Stomp in performance here.

…and then there’s the lead singer acoustically ranting about spraypaint “tagging,” I think.

Check out this 2003 Oscar Award Nominee for Animated Short Film.

Rocks “Das Rad”

Put that under your mouse and click it.

It was recently pointed out to me that I’d been nominated for the Canadian Blog Awards in the category of Best Sci/Tech Blog. I asked aloud why this was the case, I was reminded of a few of the geekier things I’ve posted about in the last… while or so…

Let’s recap a little (ooh, ooh, a clip show!):

We’ve got programs that makes phones call other phones, taxidermied robotic owls, optical mice and turntables *do* mix, iPods minus the iTunes, awesome bluetooth iPod remote headphones that crack in half three weeks after you get ’em, elderteapots and yell-controlled blenders (both in one post, too!), sites you don’t click on, network drive mapping problems (my MOST popular post ever, sadly), video/audio fragmentation performances, wicked-looking games that never actually get launched ever, me writing about DNS and Active Directory the way some blogs write about food, Google putting yoni in my bible pocket, going on an absolute TEAR regarding LG’s marketing video made in 2001, commenting on Boogaloo Shrimp (from Breakin’ and Breakin2 – Electric Boogaloo) and then having HIM SHOW UP in the comments on my very own blog, hassling the guy who put Princess Leia in the GoldBikini (it’s okay, I work with him), finding secret messages regarding a certain digital audio format in my can of Edwards coffee, our cat smuggling LEDs in her ocular cavities, guys playing a cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” while ruining a number of kitchen appliances, fighting with a whole bunch of people online over who gets to spell what with fridge letters, insane robofish, the Rohypnol version of “Who’s On First?”, carrying a midget around as a cryptographic tool, and who could forget “Why a deep focus in my temporal lobe makes me hate Kirk Cameron in specific, and religious zealots in general.”

So, yeah… It’s been a long and weird trip these last three years…

Thanks to whomever nominated me, it’s nice to be reminded why I write any of this stuff down…