Let’s see.\u00a0 What’s going on over here?<\/p>\n
Caught part of the recent Golden Globes awards “press conference,” which was just kinda painful.\u00a0 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<\/a>” tension.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Huh?\u00a0 People?\u00a0 You were all thinking it, right?”<\/p>\n Caught CBC’s “jPod”<\/a> tonight.\u00a0 Very close to the book, plot-wise, but not very close to anything to do with the geek culture<\/em> the book had.\u00a0 What’s missing is the odd people who work at the company in question.\u00a0 Through personal experience via professional placement, I happen to know<\/em> the author knows the ex-president of the real “Neotronic Arts,” and the question that Arwen had was a valid one:<\/p>\n “Do you think Coupland thought the company was like<\/em> that,\u00a0 or did the president<\/em> think it was like that?<\/strong>“<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yikes.\u00a0 I probably don’t want to know.<\/p>\n What they don’t seem to have any of is the alarming humongousness of “Neotronic” Arts.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Not at all.\u00a0 It looked like they took over the set of Good Rockin’ Tonight<\/a> and Switchback<\/a> combined* (see that flicker of tin? just me flashing my “old guy” badge), and put some big freakin’ LCD panels on ’em.\u00a0 The acoustics in that place would be repugnant.\u00a0 Nobody has headphones on, so you know it’s fake.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n They’re also missing the wonderful genius weirdo types.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You can’ write these people, or put them on TV.\u00a0 No one would believe you.\u00a0 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n There’s no Dodgeball League (I kid you not) in Neotronic Arts.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Beyond here be the brayings of a techie…\u00a0 Non-geeks might wanna take a pass on the rest of this post.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And now, some OpenSource Operating System Drooling, from your host.<\/p>\n As many of you know, I love to install strange flavours of Linux<\/a> onto things, just to see if I can.\u00a0 I’ve run just about every “LiveCD<\/a>” version of just about everything out there, and while some of them have certainly become<\/a> tools<\/a> to stick<\/a> in the proverbial BatBelt, many many more have had little more than their 15 seconds of fame before I go “Huh.\u00a0 Weird.” and shut ’em down again.\u00a0 Unlike some techies I know<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n There’s many many<\/a> flavours out there, and most of them have strengths and weaknesses, but for my money (which is none, ’cause it’s FREE), Ubuntu<\/a><\/strong> did one thing the others didn’t:<\/p>\n Let me forget.<\/p>\n I forgot I wasn’t using XP or Vista.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Installation was quick and painless.\u00a0 Everything just plain worked, including wireless networking.\u00a0 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<\/a> (blaspheme, I know).<\/p>\n There’s even a sexy multimedia version of Ubuntu, called Studio<\/a> that does all sorts of interesting things with music and video.<\/p>\n Maybe one day soon, I’ll put the Mac OSX86<\/a> on a machine again, just because I can.<\/p>\n And now that Tate’s fallen asleep again, it seems, I need to get my own stupid self to bed.<\/p>\n