Gecko Bloggle

Let’s see.  What’s going on over here?

Caught part of the recent Golden Globes awards “press conference,” which was just kinda painful.  Mary Hart from Entertainment Tonight fame just couldn’t seem to figure out how to turn it off for a moment, which gave her segments this weird “The Office” tension.  You kept expecting her to do/say something desperately inappropriate, and then try to get a high-five from someone while saying “Am I right?  Huh?  People?  You were all thinking it, right?”

Caught CBC’s “jPod” tonight.  Very close to the book, plot-wise, but not very close to anything to do with the geek culture the book had.  What’s missing is the odd people who work at the company in question.  Through personal experience via professional placement, I happen to know the author knows the ex-president of the real “Neotronic Arts,” and the question that Arwen had was a valid one:

“Do you think Coupland thought the company was like that,  or did the president think it was like that?“

Yikes.  I probably don’t want to know.

What they don’t seem to have any of is the alarming humongousness of “Neotronic” Arts.  It doesn’t look like a University with low fuzzy walls instead of classrooms, fortified with games-that-don’t-yet-exist posters, and nerf-hurling railguns.  Not at all.  It looked like they took over the set of Good Rockin’ Tonight and Switchback combined* (see that flicker of tin? just me flashing my “old guy” badge), and put some big freakin’ LCD panels on ’em.  The acoustics in that place would be repugnant.  Nobody has headphones on, so you know it’s fake.  Actually, come to think of it, I didn’t see speakers, either, so they’ll never have a round of “My music has more bass than yours,” which is a near-daily tussle in our department.

They’re also missing the wonderful genius weirdo types.  The ones that wander the common areas, muttering to themselves, listening to $800 worth or portable audio equipment while wearing $8.00 worth of clothes.  You can’ write these people, or put them on TV.  No one would believe you.  People don’t like to think that the chainsmoking sketchy dude at the bus stop might have had something to do with a game like Playground.

There’s no Dodgeball League (I kid you not) in Neotronic Arts.  Of course, the book was done before Phase II of our Burnaby campus was completed, so I guess I can’t fault Doug on that one.

That, and playing “let’s hide the ringing cel phone someone left on their desk,” which is, I’m pretty sure, why cube walls are hollow.

Beyond here be the brayings of a techie…  Non-geeks might wanna take a pass on the rest of this post.

And now, some OpenSource Operating System Drooling, from your host.

As many of you know, I love to install strange flavours of Linux onto things, just to see if I can.  I’ve run just about every “LiveCD” version of just about everything out there, and while some of them have certainly become tools to stick in the proverbial BatBelt, many many more have had little more than their 15 seconds of fame before I go “Huh.  Weird.” and shut ’em down again.  Unlike some techies I know, who have this amazing drive to learn everything there is to know about a particular product, or build of Operating System, I tend to learn a little about a lot, and then find something interesting I can really sink my geek teeth into.

There’s many many flavours out there, and most of them have strengths and weaknesses, but for my money (which is none, ’cause it’s FREE), Ubuntu did one thing the others didn’t:

Let me forget.

I forgot I wasn’t using XP or Vista.  It’s not that it acts like either of them, it was just that it got out of the way, and did, more or less, what I expected it to.  Installation was quick and painless.  Everything just plain worked, including wireless networking.  Finding and installing new software was painless and clean, and I’ve only had one or two applications hang on me ever, and they were usually trying to do something crazy like manage music on my iPod without actually, y’know, using iTunes (blaspheme, I know).

There’s even a sexy multimedia version of Ubuntu, called Studio that does all sorts of interesting things with music and video.

Maybe one day soon, I’ll put the Mac OSX86 on a machine again, just because I can.

And now that Tate’s fallen asleep again, it seems, I need to get my own stupid self to bed.

* Any of my peeps from my TheatreWorks days will know the “easter egg” about those two shows.