division6 » Geek

What happens when your PVR runs out of good TV

Armand — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:48:55 +0000

…you end up watching crap like this. I mean, if people thought that the IT Crowd was woeful for its take on geek culture… well, this makes the IT Crowd look like it deserves multiple awards. How does crap like that get picked up? For a full season, no less?

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Star Wars pop

Armand — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 13:56:47 +0000

I mis-heard something Tom said last night and thought it might make a great pop song. Sadly someone had already beat me to it.

Don’t blame it on the sublight
don’t blame it on the nav guide
don’t blame it on the fuel line
blame it on the Wookiee

Geekily brilliant, and better than I could have done.

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Busy weekend: remember to dance

Armand — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:04:05 +0000

I’ve had a busy weekend. Indie, chilling, birthday dinner, movie (Dreamgirls, bad), walk (Hampstead Heath, good), hot choc, supper, online shopping (damnit), and, erm, now to bed. But first, via Ze, I bring you ‘G’.

Share and enjoy. (Erm, you draw a stick figure, name it and it dances. That’s mine.)

Apologies to all the people who read this blog and find it overwhelmingly full of tech/geek posts at the moment. I will write more eclectically (and regularly) in the coming months. Has been a ludicrous January, but now that I am back up to being broadbanded up at home and have a clearer picture of what’s coming up things should be more predictable.

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IE7 has serious memory leak issues

Armand — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:08:10 +0000

I mean, bad, bad, bad memory leak issues. FF used to be bad – I’d leave it on for a few hours and it’d suck up 150MB of system RAM and need to be killed. FF2 seems to be much better than that – still some memory bloating, but relatively stable and I can generally close it before I have to kill it.

IE7 just pumped 350MB of RAM into Windows Live Messenger (don’t ask me how, but it was clearly IE that was the issue because when I killed that… well, problem solved).

Come on, MS. I like you guys better than you deserve. IE7 is beginning to feel like a piece of badly designed bloatware. And if you guys have inked some kind of deal with Intel to make me upgrade my PC just so I can cope with IE7, you’ve got another thing coming. I’ll just go FF all the way, baby, and deal with the consequences on Outlook Web Access and my Sharepoint websites.

I can’t believe I installed this piece of £”*$&£($& £$(*…

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Weird Al renaissance?

Armand — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 08:10:06 +0000

“The only question I found hard / Was do I like Kirk, or do I like Picard?”

Heh. Not genius, or anything, but quite entertaining, and apparently good on the ol’ social media front. Al has over 200,000 friends on his myspace!

Via Micropersuasion.

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We’re big on myspace: The Public Betas

Armand — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:32:53 +0000

Ok, so Tom was around today and helped finish a second song for the Public Betas. Also gave me the motivation to fix the bridge on the other song and now they’re both up on the band’s myspace page. Sorry if it sounds a bit amateurish – a professional musician/sound engineer I’m not. But it’s fun, and hopefully funny. You can listen to the first two songs – the Firefox Love Song and Transparent Emotion (the Google Talk Presence Information Song) on Myspace.

The band is me (all instruments and some vocals), Tom and Chris (songwriting expertise and geek knowledge), Mazmo (vocals on the Firefox love song and hopefully more in the future) and Pob has helped out (general whiz on all production and musical things ever). Mazmo and Pob are The Minutes Music, so you should check that out — they sound well good.

Enjoy! And add us as friends on myspace if you’re that way inclined! Chris, we need to work on music videos. Think: youtube sensation.

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Hero vs. Anti-Hero

Armand — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:44:12 +0000

Chris pointed me to this review of an early Star Trek: TNG episode. It’s very, very funny, and actually seems to be written by Will Wheaton, who played [[Wesley Crusher]]. But it highlights a choice that the writers made about Wesley: that they were going to make him a very straight-laced hero. Which is the polite way of saying, a complete and utter loser. Which is a polite way of saying all the worse things viewers thought about the character.

I suggested that [[Lobo]] might have made a more appropriate character base for the character – no-nonsense, tough guy, who swears a lot and lives by his own rules. And not even them. Lives by no rules at all. What a crazy cat he would be.

If only it were that simple. I am glad that this decade has seen a slight rejection of the traditional conventions of heroism – there’s a bit more darkness in the heroes lighting up the screen and stage. From Harry Potter to Ghost Rider to Spidey and back again – few have the tedious do-goodishness of Wesley.

[tags]startrek, comics, lobo, wesley, writing, heroes[/tags]

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The Public Betas

Armand — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 15:50:57 +0000

Yesterday I initiated a new concept for Saturday night entertainment (well, new for me anyway) – Chris and Tom came around for a few beers and some collaborative creative development.

What, prithee (underused word), is collaborative creative development? Well, apparently its when friends sit around drinking and discussing ideas for, in this case, a song. Chris and Tom being some of the erm, more technologically literate of my friends, this ended up having a moment of epiphany involving Family Guy, and open-source internet browsing. And so the Public Betas were born.

I’ll upload the output once we’re done with the post-production work (and possibly after I’ve found someone else willing to record the vocals), and Chris is working on the music video and myspace page. ‘The FireFox love song’ – coming soon to all good record stores…

We’ll be an internet sensation any minute now.

It was a very entertaining (and different) evening. The latter portion of the evening, once my fingers were too sore to pick up another guitar and we’d lost interest in the song, was spent looking up cool stuff on YouTube, the whys of the mentos/diet coke reaction, and discussing why the ‘sudo make me a sandwich’ webcomic is funny. It was entertaining…

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Joss Whedon rules

Armand — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 11:19:33 +0000

Sorry, still in full geek mode. This comes via Arvind via SFGate – Joss Whedon being recognised for his work in writing strong, female characters and therefore doing his bit for ‘Equality Now.’

Its an absolutely amazing speech. Unbelievably moving without being trite; unbelievably articulate without seeming scripted. Incredibly humble, but simply… incredible.

Some bits that moved me in particular…

Recognising somebody else’s power does not diminish your own

And

Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this Earth as men and women.

Legend.

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Geek dinner

Armand — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 07:04:53 +0000

I’m going to my first ever Geek Dinner tonight; it’s with [[Chris Anderson]] of ‘Wired’ fame – he’s got a theory called ‘[[The Long Tail]]’ about how, in and amongst other things, markets and media are evolving from a few mass media, products and services into — thanks to a largely Internet powered world — a mass of niche media, markets etc. There’s a great, and very confusing, quote from Amazon in the Wikipedia article about The Long Tail which might serve to give a practical example of what that means.

I think the Geek Dinners are a great concept, and they seem very popular (at time of writing, there are 72 comments to rsvp, despite the fact that its on a Friday night) — so if anyone has an interest in the topic that’s reading this, please do come along and keep me company. I’ll be the one in the corner who doesn’t know anyone ;).

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Addicted to eBay

Armand — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 07:16:33 +0000

This always happens when I’m busy and have tonnes of things I should be doing… A Sky Digital box that died under the weight of ages (7 years of heavy use!) led to my researching and purchasing a replacement on eBay, or face the prospect of having my wonderful Tivo box lie fallow and cause me to miss critical episodes of Smallville and the like…

And now, I find myself dipping in and out of eBay far more often than I want to – after all, I don’t really need a Fender Telecaster, or a Media Centre PC, or a PDA… Why am I so materially bound? ;)

Ah well. Did resist making bids on any stupid items but instead bought another set of [[Peter Hamilton]] books… which I can in some way justify as a productive purchase, and which the Indian part of me is pleased with for the discount I got by finding them on Amazon marketplace (it’s the Greg Mandel series).

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