Up for grabs are some essentials that Krissi and Michael feel every geek should keep close at hand for good geekistry

$25 iTunes Gift Card autographed by us

$10 Starbucks Card

1 Year Subscription to WIRED Magazine

Here’s how to win!

1. Write a blog post, send a Tweet, or post a Facebook note about something you enjoy that you consider to be ‘geeky’. Please include the link-back to this post using the shortened URL “http://bit.ly/geekistryftw” – invite your readers to visit us, too!
2. After you’ve shown some geek love, leave a comment here on this post (be sure to use your real email* so we can contact you) with the link you’ve added to your blog, Twitter, or Facebook (hey, we like to re-Tweet/post you, too) and you’ll be entered into the to Epic Name Change Giveaway. You’ll also be added to our newsletter list that you’ll be seeing in your in-box, soon.
3. Want more than one chance to win? Every time you write a new blog post, send a Tweet or update on Facebook that links to this post (leave a comment or ping-back each time) you’ll get an extra entry.
4. We will announce the winner on the second podcast using our new name (effectively podcast episode #23).

Winners will be chosen by random drawing using the Random.org tool.

Good luck and let the best luckiest geek grab the goods!

———-

*You can trust us! Like you, we don’t like spam and we promise not to give your email to anyone else. By the way, if for some reason you decide you’d rather not receive any correspondence from us, request the removal of your email from our list and a real, actual human being will delete it ASAP.

———-

2010/06/08 @ 8:00pm EDT – Comments and entries are officially closed. Thanks for all who participated; the winner will be announced tonight on the live recording of podcast episode 23 http://bit.ly/geekistry-live

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 13 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, contest, delomni, Facebook, iTunes, starbucks, starman, wired

The Force is a convenient way to get your characters to solve certain problems, but it can also be a crutch because it makes things too easy. The line by Darth Vader says in A New Hope, “the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of The Force”. Whoa. So does he mean The Force as a whole, or what a person can command from it? If it’s the latter, I see no point in bothering to do anymore more than twitching my trigger finger and ripping the top off the Rebel Base. Oh, and that Death Star you built, the Empire didn’t really have to build it because Vader can destroy Alderaan with a really loud sneeze.

Let’s say he’s talking about The Force as a whole, there are still some rather troubling inconsistencies. In Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan waves his hand across a door and it opens for him. Is that because he really did open it, or that the sensor finally saw him come out of the rain? Sorry to say, but we can do that here on Earth. Supermarkets have them. In Return of the Jedi, Luke’s struggling to open the door to the Rancor pit. I suppose Yoda never taught Luke the intricacies of opening doors.

Jedi Mind Tricks are great at parties, but apparently not on the Death Star. These guys are supposedly clones, if I were Obi-Wan, I’d be Jedi Mind Tricking these Xeroxed bastards to kill each other. He planted a suggestion in some kid’s head in Clones to get a better life, is it morally wrong for some fabricated mouthbreather to shoot the guy in white next to him? Problem solved. In fact, I’d be more subtle about it and suggest to the stormtroopers that pink is in this year and that painting his uniform would be a good idea.

Force Choking is another interesting device. Luke used it on the Gamorrean guards in Jabba’s Palace, but didn’t use it on the Rancor, or Jabba, or Fett, or that obnoxious, laughing muppet infatuated with Jabba’s tail (it WAS his tail, right?). That whole Rancor pit scene is ridiculous because it should have gone like this:

Luke falls in pit

Luke kills the Gamorrean guard by Force Choking him.
Actually, scratch that, let the guard get eaten
by the Rancor first because that was pretty funny.

Luke Force Chokes the Rancor, and then his keeper
because he looks stupid on screen crying like a baby.

But that’s not exciting, is it? It would have been damn funny, though.

Force Chatting is when you can call up your friend’s brain and have a few words with them. That’s got to be annoying as hell. You’re sitting alone, watching “Dancing with the Star Wars”, and all of a sudden your brother invades your brain and asks if your dad’s birthday is this Friday or Saturday. When you ask why he talks to you that way, he says he can’t afford the cost of the call from Tatooine to Sullust. Your Jedi brother is cheap. As a plot device, why didn’t Vader pester Luke between Empire and Jedi? Vader’s supposed to be evil, I think he’s get in Luke’s brain as much as he could. “Luuke, Luuuuuuuuuke, tomorrow’s Father’s Day. Want to watch a game on the big screen at my house?”

One of the unintentional funny parts of Return of the Jedi is when The Emperor removes Luke’s shackles with a lift of his finger, and Luke looks up with his best Keanu Reeves imitation and has a look like “whoa, snap, he can do that with his finger”. I never understood why Luke had to have the look of utter shock on his face from that. Luke has seen Yoda pull an X-Wing out of a swamp, but releasing shackles is apparently bigger than that.

So in the end, the use of The Force is nothing more than a convenient plot device. It may not be deus ex machina, but it sure is deus ex force.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: delomni, luke, rancor, sci-fi, science fiction, star wars, the force, vader, yoda

I’ve watched a lot of television, good and bad. Except for perhaps the MASH finale, I can’t remember a time when so many people were glued to their televisions for a series finale. Lost was definitely worth the trip.

At its core, Lost was about the characters. It might have had glowing caves and time travel, but in the end it was the characters that mattered. What made the ending so satisfactory was that there were no gimmicks used to sell you the ending. In fact, the writers did a great job of allowing people to interpret it the way they wanted.

The didn’t answer a lot about the island, but we know all we need to know. Perhaps in time we’ll learn more through other mediums like books or comics, but for now, we’re happy with the information we have. We can postulate that the island was created specifically to keep evil out. Somehow, good and evil started sparring on Earth, and the island was a way to keep evil from spreading.

– Spoilers below –

There was a lot of discussion about the sideways timeline. When the bomb went off in 1977, the characters thought it would destroy the island, and Oceanic 815 would never crash. In a sense, it’s what we all believed until we saw Desmond on the flight. Desmond was supposed to be on the island pressing that damned button, so if he’s on the flight, is it because time changed and he wound up on the flight, or was it for some other purpose? If the island really was destroyed, it’s a pretty creepy coincidence that Desmond wound up on the same flight as everyone else.

People can analyze it for years, but in my opinion, the ending was rather clear. Jack saved the island, and in effect, the entire world. He did the job he swore to do, and sacrificed himself to do so. He passed the role of caretaker to Hurley and Hurley finally gave Ben the purpose he wanted by making him his right hand man. Awesome scene.

What the sideways timeline was, to me, was Jack’s friends coming together in a timeless purgatory after they died to help him pass on after he died on the island. To be specific, they all died at some point in time, but they came together at this one point for Jack. The ability to remember their past lives is what was necessary for them help Jack. Why didn’t Ben go inside? My guess is that somehow he’s become immortal and can’t die, so he had no place in the church, or maybe he’s not ready to pass on yet. People like Michael are trapped on the island and unfortunately cannot pass on because of their sins.

The writers did a great job of allowing people to interpret the ending the way they wanted. Did anyone notice the symbols of different faiths in the stained glass window of the church? That was most definitely done so that the viewer can take what they have of their faith and apply it to the ending.

I’m happy with the way it ended. I feel like the last six years of investing in this show and its characters were worth it. In the end, it’s about love, and friendship, and asking yourself who’d show up in that church for you.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: charlie, claire, delomni, hurley, island, jack, jin, kate, linus, lost, sawyer, sci-fi, science fiction, sun, tv

What a thrill it was to learn as a kid that a new Star Wars movie was going to be made. Sequels weren’t unheard of in the 70′s, but they weren’t as prolific as they are now. How could George Lucas not make another Star Wars movie? He had the hottest property Hollywood has ever seen, and he always spoke about how Star Wars was supposed to be a nine-part series.

In the 70′s and 80′s, movies that did well were re-released in theaters because home video wasn’t yet the big business it was to become in the mid-80′s. There was no internet to connect to, so the only way to see the trailer for the new Star Wars movie was to see it in the theater when Star Wars was re-released in 1979. The trailer for Empire has to be one of the best trailers ever made. Not only did it show brief clips of unexpected events from the new movie (OMG was Han shooting at Vader? Luke fighting Darth Vader?), but showed clips that were enough to get your nerdgasm going (Walkers…’nuff said, right?).

The events leading up to May 21, 1980 were pretty intense. The Star Wars Fan Club had a special phone number to call to hear messages from characters in the film (1-800-521-1980). I had those recordings at one point and apparently lost the one tape that I think had them all. I wanted to know which theater in my area was playing the movie. Star Wars played at the General Cinema in Menlo Park, NJ and it was the best theater in a 30 mile radius. Sure enough, Empire was going to make its area debut at that theater. The Monday before the movie opened, my mom bought me the novelization to the movie. If there was ever a time I tested myself to not spoil a movie for myself, this was it. Turning to the dark side for just a little bit, I opened to a random page near the end of the book. There, in black and white, were the five words that would make the audience gasp, and send fans into disbelief for the next three years. As a twelve year old kid, I had to tell everyone I knew, and I did, and I learned to never, ever spoil a movie for anyone ever again. To this day, I’m told by my friends of how I ruined Empire for them, but we laugh about it now.

The day the movie was released, one of the morning shows in New York teased scenes from the movie all morning. It was tough having to rip myself away from the TV to go to school, but I had to, hoping to see the movie itself that evening. My friends and I wanted to see it badly that night. Forget homework and chores, we refused to wait until the weekend to see it. My parents told me I couldn’t see it that night because my they were busy, but fortunately my dad was able to change his plans and took me to the 5pm show. There was already a line forming and we were lucky to get near the front, but as time went on, more and more people showed up and the line wrapped around the theater. I had never seen a line that long for a movie before, and it definitely wouldn’t be the last.

General Cinemas, Menlo Park, NJ. Photo courtesy of Joseph Scotti

Inside, my dad and I sat in the balcony’s front row. I got a copy of the Empire Strikes Back Movie Magazine, and flipped through a few pages before stopping myself. I had already spoiled the movie for myself once, I didn’t want to make it worse. I mean, all, we wanted to know is if Luke wound up with Leia, right?

Nobody knew how the movie would start. Flashbacks? A different opening altogether? Will things pick up at a point in the future? At 5pm the lights dimmed, the crowd went nuts, the 20th Century Fox and Lucasfilm logos came up, and there it was: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away….”

The Star Wars logo erupted on the screen with the saga’s theme, but George threw us a curve ball: Episode V? Did we miss three episodes along the way? No, it was already stated that George decided Star Wars would be Episode IV, and Empire would be Episode V. Most fans already knew this, especially members of the Star Wars Fan Club who found out about it early.

Episode V

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

It is a dark time for the
Rebellion. Although the Death
Star has been destroyed,
Imperial troops have driven the
Rebel forces from their hidden
base and pursued them across
the galaxy.

Evading the dreaded Imperial
Starfleet, a group of freedom
fighters led by Luke Skywalker
have established a new secret
base on the remote ice world
of Hoth.

The evil lord Darth Vader,
obsessed with finding young
Skywalker, has dispatched
thousands of remote probes into
the far reaches of space….

As the opening crawl ended and started to fade into the distance, there was a great disturbance in The Force…the film broke. A brand new 70mm print decided that it was going to snap just as everyone was getting excited about seeing the first frame of new footage from the movie. The audience, applauding just a few seconds earlier, was now booing the projection booth. They got the film fixed quickly, and we were on our way to Hoth by way of following a probe droid’s path.

I won’t go into the details of what happens in the film (since I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else!), but the audience was hooked. It was one of the few times in my life where watching a film was a communal experience. We weren’t watching it individually, we were watching it as a collective of fans. One point about the film which I always bring up is that I think the movie did well because it grounded the characters. Instead of these people being superheroes, they were characters we could relate to on a personal level, with only their environment being different than ours. The sets were incredible and really pulled the audience in. Dagobah in particular was done so well you’d think it really existed. Cloud City, to me, was the pinnacle of architecture used in any of the films because it took an unrealistic place and made you believe you could really float in the sky.

The story unraveled with such perfect pacing, something that’s lacking in today’s action movies which try to shove so much at the audience. Empire is an example of how you can make a movie that rivets the audience without having to blow something up every 12 seconds. Luke’s training on Dagobah resonated with many people and the struggles they’ve had in their lives to do their best, while Han and Leia tried to work out their romantic issues. Who hasn’t dealt with these things themselves? It all comes to a head when Luke has to decide between saving his friends and completing his training. Stay, and his friends may die. Leave, and he may be turned to the Dark Side. Both paths have their consequences.

Yoda was a pleasant surprise. When I heard there was going to be a Jedi Master in the film, I thought that it had to be a tall, warrior type. Instead we got this short, green, backwards talking character who really showed us that “size matters not”. Luke towered over him, but Yoda displayed such wisdom and power, you’d think Luke was still that whiny farm boy on Tatooine.

Boba Fett was shown during the only decent part of the Star Wars Holiday Special. That animated segment of the show was so popular that they decided to put Fett into the film. Again, the creative team did a fantastic job with his character, making him mysterious and giving him very few lines of dialog while still making him a badass.

The music of the film was beautiful. John Williams did a masterful job of creating a sonic landscape for the film. What Williams is extraordinarily good at is matching a musical score to the visual environment, and this is his best example of how he does it. One of my favorite pieces is Yoda’s theme which portrays his wisdom and patience which Luke needs to learn in this movie, as well as Yoda’s whimsical personality. Williams also created a theme for Darth Vader which resonated the very evil that Vader personifies. Some of the other notable pieces are the music in the Asteroid Field, the attack on Hoth, the theme between Han and Leia, especially when used at the end of the film in the carbon freeze chamber, and the music written for when everyone tries to escape from Cloud City. John Williams won an Academy Award for Best Original Score.

Similar to the musical landsape, I have to mention the amazing work by Ben Burtt and his sound design team. Ben made the environment believable by using sound effects which came from items in the real world. By using sounds that have their basis in our world, they don’t sound that alien and we believe what we hear.

Laughter, sadness, disbelief, anger, and confusion filled the theater that early evening. My dad asked me in the car on the way home, “So which did you like better?”. I had no immediate answer for him. Star Wars was fun, but Empire was more of a film. I think I told him I had to think about it. Thirty years later, I still teeter between the two for different reasons. Today, Empire is listed as one of the best films ever made, and it really is.

At the end we all shook our head thinking “wait, we have to wait three more years to see what happens?”. Yes, we did. Those were three very, very long years to wait.

Thoughts on the Special Edition

I felt I should weigh in on the Special Edition of Empire that was released in 1997. The changes to Star Wars were a mixed bag. I absolutely loved the shot of the Falcon taking off from Mos Eisley, but wasn’t thrilled with some of the other changes like the shot of Luke approaching Mos Eisley which looked poor, the edited shots of the Imperial officers being shot, and some of the bad CGI at the end of the film.

I was very nervous about the changes to Empire, and to be honest, I think they were all pretty good except the shot of Vader’s shuttle landing on his Star Destroyer. Not only did it destroy the pacing of the film, but it was a reused alternate angle shot from Return of the Jedi. I loved the redone shots of Cloud City. The pacing of the escape from Cloud City irks me a little to this day because I was so used to the original film. One other nitpick is a line that was changed. Luke says to Artoo “You’re lucky to get out of there”, which was changed from the original “You’re lucky you don’t taste very good”. The new line makes isn’t funny at all and I can’t understand why they’d alter that line.

I can’t complain too much about it, bit I hope those little nitpicks are fixed for the Blu-Ray release.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 1-800-521-1980, 30th anniversary, artoo, c-3p0, darth vader, delomni, featured, general cinema menlo park nj, han solo, lando calrissian, luke skywalker, princess leia, r2-d2, sci-fi, science fiction, star wars, the empire strikes back, threepio

Not only is HTML5 powerful for web sites, but games. Google demoed a running version of Lego Star Wars running in HTML5 using Chrome. Most impressive.

The biggest surprise was seeing Tweetdeck running in HTML5. While other Twitter clients are running in Adobe Air or Silverlight, Tweetdeck has embraced HTML5 which was probably the smarter move.

I was also impressed by the Sports Illustrated demo using HTML5. The magazine was shown along with a copy that literally just came off the press, and they were exactly the same, except for the rich content in the version using HTML5. This was a perfect example of traditional media understanding how to keep up with changes in technology.

Google also announced support for WebM, their open-source video format. A few weeks ago it was discovered that the h.264 format had a clause in it saying that the format was free for non-commerical use, which took most people by surprise, especially since not many people read EULAs, and it was buried so deep not many people knew it existed.

This is an exciting time for the web. Apps will start moving to the cloud and developers are trying more and more to move towards standards instead of proprietary extensions. It’s going to be great to see what comes out in the next two years.

You can read all about the Google I/O conference here.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: delomni, flash, Google, google io, h.264, html5, silverlight, vc8, webm

I first signed up for Foursquare when it launched at SXSWi 2009, but didn’t use it much until I began my #WTFAmI cross-country road trips last summer. When Foursquare broadened it’s horizons to include Tampa in late 2009 I was ecstatic. In combination with my Starbucks ‘addiction’ I quickly realized the potential fun I could have with location-based social networks, the free WiFi I get as a reward for using my Starbucks Gold card, and my iPhone.

I’ve been a Starbucks reward card member since it’s introduction in early 2009 and the recent change to the current fee-free membership added extra bonuses to what I was already getting. Gold Card membership scores me sweet deals from Starbucks and now I’m scoring even bigger with Starbucks AND Foursquare…

…and so are thousands of other Foursquare “mayors” of Starbucks around the country.

Starbucks isn’t the only business getting on board to reward customers through social media, business of all types are doing it. I saw this first-hand when I was recently a charter member of the HQ team that planed the first international Foursquare Day. I watched brand  loyalty change in my community and shift toward embracing what existing, and potentially future, customers are already doing: Tweeting, Facebook-ing, blogging, and podcasting about every aspect of their life. Social media networks are potential gold mines for business and “word of moth” marketing has gone digital.

We all know it – some things just seem to “go together,” like ketchup and mustard… and Starbucks and Foursquare. It seems like a match made in geek-heaven!

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 4SQDay, brand loyalty, delomni, foursquare, foursquare day, foursquare mayor, gowalla, LBSN, marketing, rewards, Social Media, starbucks

Dr. Sbaitso was a game that shipped with many new sound cards from Creative Labs (the Sound Blaster was the most popular) and was supposed to demonstrate the awe-inspiring use of ‘advanced’ audio technology for speech synthesis. “Sbaitso” was an acronym for “Sound Blaster Acting Intelligent Text to Speech Operator,” though the game’s “voice” wasn’t very life-like. His primitive programming and interface begged to be messed-with by entering answers to his questions that would return compromising phrases. Getting the good doctor to say something funny became the game within the game, and for me, it’s biggest appeal.

HELLO [UserName], MY NAME IS DOCTOR SBAITSO.

I AM HERE TO HELP YOU.
SAY WHATEVER IS IN YOUR MIND FREELY,
OUR CONVERSATION WILL BE KEPT IN STRICT CONFIDENCE.
MEMORY CONTENTS WILL BE WIPED OFF AFTER YOU LEAVE,

SO, TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS.

I’d love to take a walk down memory lane and run Dr. Spaitso on my Win7 machine, but alas, Dr. Spaitso is 24-bits short of being compatible with my OS (he was 8 bits vs. my 64 bits!) However, if you’d like to download an aged, but still entertaining digital friend, you’ll find him here. Otherwise, here’s a video (and some related ones, too) that I found on YouTube that helped me relive some nostalgia…

My favorite part of this video is when Dr. Sbaitso reads aloud the number 120,349,810,927,490,283,740,198,26,345! You can say that three times faster?!

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: delomni, DOS, Dr. Sbaitso, games, geeks, nostalgia, old tech, PC

What it doesn’t yet do is share content with your friends, or allow you to watch what you recorded on your Comcast DVR (no word if it works on a Comcast-enabled TiVo Series 3). If it did that, you’d have a killer app right there which would compete directly with Hulu and Slingbox. I would hope that Comcast puts this functionality in their app soon because I’d love to be able to watch one thing downstairs while the kids are watching something upstairs.

The next step would be to work with other social networks like Twitter and Facebook and integrate channel sharing into them so that one tweet or Facebook update could bring in thousands of potential viewers; at least for that time zone.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: app, channel, comcast, delomni, iPad, remote, share, Social Media, xfinity

Apple announced today that they’re releasing a new MobileMe, and you can sign up for an invitation. Highlights include:

Online rules. This is the biggest selling point for me because I could never get MobileMe to apply rules when using it through the web. Server-based rules are a major upgrade for MobileMe. Better late then never.

Formatting toolbar. Another feature that should have been there from the beginning. Why Apple didn’t do this from the beginning is beyond me.

Other features include an SSL connection, improved performance, a widescreen display and one-click archiving.

It’s clear that Apple wants to woo people away from Gmail. There are even rumors that MobileMe may go free soon. Still, I’ve been a user of MobileMe since it was called iTools and enjoy using it much more than Gmail. What I’d like, though, is the ability to have a second email account without having to pay $50.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, delomni, mac, mail, MobileMe

Remember the days before USB and Firewire? Be lucky if you haven’t had to deal with serial cables, gender benders, parallel cables, 9-pin, 25-pin, din connectors, SCSI, SCSI2, and all the proprietary junk we all had to deal with before Apple stood up and told the world that they’re using only USB in their iMacs from that point forward. Since then, we’ve all enjoyed the standardizations of one cable type for most of our devices. Firewire is still mainly used for higher-end devices like HD video camers and audio devices.

USB has started its third generation with USB 3, boasting speeds of around 3 Gbits/sec., roughly three times faster than USB 2. Although USB 3 devices and ports have started to appear in consumer electronics, it’s not as widespread as USB 2 is today.

While USB 3 is good for most consumers, there is room for something even faster. With HD video being the biggest push for higher device speeds, it was clear that USB 3 wasn’t going to be enough, so Intel stepped up and developed Light Peak. Light Peak’s speeds are quite impressive, starting at 10 Gbits/sec. and can scale to an impressive 100 Gbits/sec. It’s able to achieve this by using an optical cable, similar to the ones used in DVD players. Electricity is converted to light on the serving end, and converted back into electricity on the receiving end. Not only are its speeds impressive, but cable length is no longer limited as much as electrical-based cables are. The video below shows a 30m cable running two HD video streams, and being split by another device.

Doing a little math, this is what 10 Gbits/sec. can give you:

1.25GByes/sec.

Transfer a Blu-Ray movie in 20 seconds

Transfer a 15-minute HD video in 1 second

Back up your 160 GB iPod in 128 seconds

Transfer pictures from a 2 GB SD card in 1.6 seconds

Transfer an MP3 in .24 seconds

Light Peak is definitely a technology to keep an eye on. Intel says that they’ll be shipping Light Peak this year to consumers, so I’m sure by 2011 you’ll see some pretty impressive devices being released. Will this replace HDMI? it’s uncertain, but I’m sure it’ll make for a badass Home Theater PC.

© June Sixth Productions for Geekistry: It's all geek to us, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 10gb/sec., delomni, intel, light peak, lightpeak, tech horizon, usb3