W00tstock 4.0 Has Come and Gone

The now-annual San Diego ComiCon variety-show companion, W00tstock, has come and gone. As with years past, I went from excited anticipation, to reveling in the warmth of being surrounded by "people like me", to a sudden post-holiday like depression.

I remember some of my friends trying to explain to me what their youthful Church-going experience was like, and I find myself now using the same phrases and adjectives when I try to explain W00tstock to others.  It is very difficult to describe to someone who doesn't get it, except you can say it's a place where you feel safe, everyone laughs at the same jokes you do, and you relish the chance to be surprised and amused in a world where that happens all too infrequently.

Thanks much to the key players who've make this great experience happen for multiple years now:

• http://w00tstock.net/
• http://www.paulandstorm.com/
• http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/
• http://www.adamsavage.com/

I can't even begin to list all the Luminaries of Geekdom who made appearances last night, but I will say that the surprise appearance of Molly Lewis during Marian Call's last song made my night.  I'd have sorely missed her if she'd not made an appearance!

Planning for next year's show must begin: NOW!

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Zombie Walk 2010

My week of Nerd-related activities got extended slightly when a friend let me know that there was a Zombie Walk going on with ComicCon this Saturday.

From ZombieWalk_2010-07-24

Needless to say, I had to drag the family along.  My costume was pretty rudimentary, but there were some really talented and dedicated folks there, including my favorite, the "50's Comic Book Zombie", who was kind enough to pose with me for the picture above.

The walk was organized by Zombie Walk San Diego, as a fundraiser and organ-donor signup event for Donate Life California.  By my estimate, there were somewhere between 500 and a 1000 Zombies who showed up.  Awesome!

More impressive than the sheer number of Zombies was that I was able to get Kimberley and Annika to come along.  Annika was a bit young for makeup, so she wore her "Zombie Snack" bib, while Kimberley was sporting possibly the most subtle costume in the walk, (but she was definitely in-costume):

From ZombieWalk_2010-07-24

Bonus Zombie points to anyone who "gets it".

I was honored to be asked to pose for many photos.  Lots of people thought the sign was great, but I can't take credit for the joke -Think Geek sells the shirt.  My really "big moment", though, was spotting the illustrious Patricia Tallman standing off the curb taking pictures of the shamble as it went by.  I only gave a subtle wave and mouthed "I love your work" as we went by, because the last thing the star of Tom Savini's remake of Night of the Living Dead needed was to be recognized on the street and surrounded by five hundred Zombie fans.  This would be equivalent to someone spotting Mark Hamil watching a parade of the 501st Legion going by.

We were too busy wrangling the stroller amid the shamble of Zombies to take many photos, but I managed a few good ones here, and a quick video snap of the Thriller breakout.

I have found quite a few other good collections of photos, though, so here are the best:
Flickr Set from Mike Rollerson
and another from Sebastian Jesperson
and one from SanDiego.com

Searching "Zombie Walk San Diego 2010" or "Zombie Walk ComicCom 2010" should net many more videos and pictures...
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W00tstock 2.4 has ended. It was awesome.

Well, I'm still reeling from my experience at W00tstock 2.4 last night.   I'll let the rest of the digirati cover all the juicy details, since I'm sure it was live-blogged, tweeted, and streamed to no end.  I love events like these, where I come away reminded that I am part of a greater, and growing, community of like-minded devotees of all things geek. 

My favorite specific bit from last night's show, though, was the sequence of events surrounding Wil Wheaton's retelling of his first experience with the Rocky Horror Picture Show. There was a cascade of funny that began with a heartfelt reminiscence of life as a teenager in 1980's LA. Then while recounting the gathering of some slightly burned white toast, onto the stage wanders Aaron Douglas, complete with BSG "Chief Tyrol" flight-suit costume, setting up Wheaton for the gag: "No, we asked for toast, not a toaster!", which of course slayed the audience as intended.

Funnier yet is what came next.  After Douglas stomps of stage yelling "Frak you, Wil Wheaton", our storyteller turns to the audience and says (in seemingly one breath): "So its pretty cool when you're friends with Aaron Douglas and you hear he's going to be at ComiCon so you call him up and ask him if he'll come to your show 'cause you have this idea for a bit that you think would be really funny!  Then he calls you back and asks 'Hey, what if I wore my flight suit? Would that be OK?', and you say 'That.... would... be... AWESOME!', then I went into my backyard and screamed to the heavens 'What did I do to deserve this bitchin' life?'".

It came across as completely genuine and reinforces everything else I've heard about Wil Wheaton and his view of this place in the world.  In any case, I laughed until my sides hurt.

There was much more awesome, including a brief Astronomy lecture and sneak-peak at a new upcoming Discovery Channel show from "Bad Astronomer" Phil Plait, surprise cameos from a variety of other geek celebs, and I even got to spend a couple of minutes chatting with Mythbuster Grant Imahara whom I haven't spoken with since we were competitors at a Battlebots event a million years ago.  All in all, a great night, and I can't wait for W00tstock 3.x!

EDIT: 
Addendum: I can't believe I forgot to mention this.  So security was stupid.  Like really stupid.  The show started like an hour late because they were doing thorough pat-downs and bag-checks which doesn't sound bad until you remember that 1/2 the crowd came straight from ComiCon and had those massive Swag-bags.  It took FOREVER to process the line.  Worst still, they confiscated my Leatherman Squirt S4, because it was a "weapon".  OK, they didn't confiscate it so much as take it and put it into a plastic bin without any sort of claim ticket whereupon it was gone after the show, even though we had to leave a few minutes before the end.  Oh well, I think the a-hole guard now has a beatup, dull Leatherman on his keychain.  Maybe letting people know before you tear their tickets that there's a "no re-entry" policy, eh?  My car was just around the block.  Moreover, if you're looking for "weapons", maybe you should pat me down a little better, 'cause the farkup rent-a-cops missed my 3.5" Ritter RSK Mini-mk1, which is razor sharp and probably better at the "murdering other nerds" they seemed to be so concerned about.  Obviously I didn't volunteer that one, since I wasn't about to hand over $100+ cutlery.  OK, rant-over, W00tstock was still awesome!  Besides, now I have an excuse to purchase the new Leatherman Squirt PS4 instead!! Read More...

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Its like a grail quest, only -- not.

Well, the end of March 2008 marks the end of a quest of proportions both epic and trivial. You see, since sometime in the summer of 2001 or 2002, I've been trying to find a copy of a movie called "American Cuisine".

That summer, on a weekend when I was home alone, I saw this simple flick on one of the random movie channels that you get with a big cable package. Its not "the Lord of the Rings" or anything, but its a movie that falls into a genre that my wife and I enjoy very much - "Food Porn" movies. Any movie where food or cooking plays a significant role is destined to be a classic in our household. No surprise really, since we're serious foodies and we watch more FoodTV than any four other networks combined, SpeedTV included.

Just a few of our favorites: "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman", (and its remake "Tortilla Soup"), "Chocolat", "Soul Food", "Big Night", "Like Water for Chocolate", and the recently added "Ratatouille". Even movies with tangential food themes or scenes of food porn like "The Last Supper" and "Goodfellas" are a treat.

So imagine my frustration when I saw, by myself, a cute little French-Food-themed romantic comedy starring one of our favorite actors, Jason Lee. Remember this was pre-TiVo (at least in our household). It turns out this movie was seemingly never released for the US market, and is exceedingly hard to find even abroad. I have been trying to get a copy of this movie to share with my wife since that summer day. Yep, nearly six or seven years. This movie isn't just not-released for America, but its also apparently out of print even in the markets it was intended for. The closest I've ever come is a German market disc on sale for $29. I didn't want it quite that badly.

Anyhow, a periodic search on eBay finally revealed my salvation. A Region 2, PAL-encoded, poor transfer of the movie with Polish subtitles, but salvation nonetheless. Fortunately my completely bitchin' Oppo DVD player is region free and PAL-to-NTSC converting, and the original English 5.1 audio is intact (the film was recorded in both English and French by the original cast). The upside of this movie being so hard to find is that apparently almost nobody else was looking for it. For 1.20 GBP, plus 4.20GBP shipping ($8.35 total, with today's craptastic US Dollar) I beat out one other bidder and this particular celluloid unicorn is now part of my collection. Huzzah!

Now the real question, will Kimberley actually like the movie? Read More...

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Automated Parking Garage

OK, here's one I haven't seen before. On our way to a meeting in Irvine,

some coworkers and I stopped at the Spectrum for lunch. Upon entering the parking garage, we saw this: (please excuse the image burn, the bright-ass display was too much for my wee camera phone). Here's the thing I found fascinating: The numbers would jump up and down pretty quickly, in a clearly non-human manner. In other words, this system is automated, with the number of spaces determined by computer. Others in the car were guessing sensors in the garage, but I'm betting its based on the feed from the various security camera domes I saw. The simplest thing would just be to have the computer try to "count" cars entering and leaving the various levels, in order to keep a running total of the cars. I imagine that trying to visually inspect each space (via machine vision) to determine if a car is actually parked there is unnesessarily complicated. There was too much math for me to get very far in the computer/machine vision classes I tried to take in school, but from what I know about it, this seems like an interesting and straightforward, if not altogether easy, piece of tech. A brief search for info from Daktronics (the name on the sign), reveals little about the source of the data, only the nature of the display system. Read More...

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OK, So I'm a TV Addict

Its official, I'm definitely a TV Addict. Now, I should clarify, I don't watch nearly as much TV as a lot of people, I like to say I watch "Better" TV. I'm one of those TiVo evangelists that can't imagine life before my DVR.

Kimberley and I both get so frustrated watching TV at someone else's house. Every time a commercial comes on, we both reach for the remote to try to fast forward past it... The other telltale sign of a TiVo user is that we don't usually know when anything is actually Aired on TV. Is Law & Order on Thursday nights? What time is Stargate on? Dunno, the TiVo takes care of it. So, we watch just the shows we like, and we never channel surf, or watch commercials.

But I'm defninitely an addict. And here's how I know:

I spent the better part of my Thanksgiving weekend (chunk of Saturday and all of Sunday) running conduit around the outside of my house to bring two new Satellite feeds and a phoneline into the "Media Niche" in the livingroom.

For those who don't know, Satellite requires an individual cable from each decoder box to the multiswitch, you can't split the signal like you can with cable. My house, like most, is pre-wired for Cable, which means a single line of Coax runs from each room back to the distribution point at the side of the house. Our DirecTiVo (a.k.a. "The Direct TV with TiVo Brand DVR") has two tuners built in, meaning that it can record two things at once IF you can feed it with two lines from the Satellite.

In a rare peek into TV programming schedules, I read on the TiVo Community Forum that "Alias" is moving to Wednesday nights, opposite "The West Wing". Well, now that's actually something we care about, since these are two of only a select few shows we watch that are actually in primetime on one of the big networks, which means no re-airings to allow a single-tuner TiVo to sort out the conflicts. (Wherever possible, TiVo will normally sort out conflicting airings of shows by selecting alternate airings. For most cable channels, this is a no-brainer since most shows air 3-4 times in a week, but that's not the case for "Network" stuff.)

So obviously we need to get the 2nd tuner up and running before Alias resumes in January! So that was the motivation. So I spent a day, with 4 trips to Home Depot, running conduit from the SE Corner of the house (Distribution point and Satellite dish) around to the North wall, plumbing it through into the interior wall, and wiring everything up.

The other motivation was that my Media Niche doesn't have a phone line. Currently the standalone TiVo there uses HomePlug bridges to connect to the rest of the LAN, and I'll continue to use those when we swap that TiVo upstairs. For reasons passing understanding, DirecTV hasn't enabled the networking capability of the DirecTiVo, therefore I need an actual phoneline. The current use of the HomePlug bridges prevent using the usual PhoneJack-over-powerline adaptors. But since I was already running two RG6 lines, adding a length of Cat3 phone cable only cost me another $5.94 in cable and a few more minutes of effort to hook it up.

As a career Electrical Engineer, I probably shouldn't be surprised when a newly wired phone jack or cable actually works, but there's always a little sense of elation when it does.

Since I had to pull all the equipment out of the niche to cut the drywall holes, etc., it was also an excellent opportunity to re-wire the rear surround speakers (absent since we installed hardwood floors last year) and rebuilt the wiring harnesses somewhat. (A few changes since the original wiring looms were made 4+ years ago.) I also finally got around to installing the UPS for the TiVo (now I can record right through a power outage, although the real reason is to protect the drive from power spikes and brownouts).

All in all, a VERY satisfying weekend spent on our home media architecture. All so we can watch better TV!

Still to come: The pre-existing (now unneeded) cable run in the media niche will be retasked to distribute signal back upstairs (so we can watch and control the downstairs TiVo output from the bedroom!) and also run an HCNA network! (HPNA over Coax, using some trick adaptors I scored a few months ago.) Read More...

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New Laptop...

Forgot to mention, here's the laptop I just ordered:

Fujitsu Lifebook P1120

My original Pentium 133 Lifebook worked so well, for so long, that I really wanted to give Fujitsu a look when I was shopping for a new sub-notebook. When I found out about the P1000 series, it was love at first sight.

I wanted the smallest true-PC I could get my hands on. (i.e. it has to be able to run regular Windows software, not bastardized HPC or Palmtop stuff). The P1120 is 2.2 lbs, and roughly the size of a VHS tape. The keyboard is slightly smaller than other subnotebooks, but the genious of this machine is that the "Quickpoint" interface (the little Eraser-head pointer stick that everyone hates) is supplemented by the fact that the entire display is a touchscreen! Yep, with a stylus or your finger you can interact directly with the screen. I messed around with it for a few minutes at Frys before deciding that this was pretty friggen cool.

Due to previous experience with Frys, I'd never buy anything else from them, though. I was ready to purchase directly from Fujitsu when I found a forum dedicated to the P-series machines and found a bloke selling exactly what I wanted for several hundred less. The unit is still under factory warranty, and has two batteries, and all the fixin's.

The escrow transaction is in-process and it should be here in a couple of days! More info when it arrives! Read More...

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