Archive for the 'Geek Banter' Category
First of all.. WOW! This is by far, the most awesome item ever covered from the desk of Awesome.
What you are looking at is a 5 foot by 10 foot lego recreation of the battle at Hoth, from Empire Strikes Back. Created by the extremely taleneted [ Mark Borlase’s ], the entire display consists of nearly 60,000 pieces and has cool features such as 50 real lights and a remote controlled mechanism that deploys troops from the AT-ATs. The entire creation took over 4 years in the making and consumed about $3000 (that’s a lot of white bricks!). This creation won the recent Star Wars building challenge and was featured in the official LEGO Magazine. Mark, you are AMAZING, and seeing this makes me teary..
Here are a couple of pics from the Mark’s flickr page, but there are a ton of SUPER cool pics, so go look at them : [ Mark's Flickr Page ]
The interior of the hoth base, complete with the Millenium Falcon, and X-Wing hanger.
The seriously awesome outside of this includes a snow speeder that is in process of taking out an AT-AT.
Another amazing aspect of this creation is the side view of the mountain that has windows into the medical bay, the command center, and even the hallway that Han strolls down…
Any lego creation is pretty cool, and something of this magnitude is especially amazing, BUT, what makes this truly awesome is the amount of detail all the way down to the footprints in the snow that Luke leaves in the snow running toward the base. (seen in the first pic).
Mark, you are AWESOME!
Unless you aren’t a geek, or live in a cave playing WoW, you know that Majel Barrett Roddenberry passed away on December 18,2008. This was an especially sad day for all geeks, and especially the trekker/trekkies of us. Having the distinction of having been apart of every single Star Trek series and movie, she really was what helped define an era of science fiction.
Married to Gene Roddenberry, and labeled the “first lady of Star Trek”, Majel helped to launch the series as the number one officer of the Enterprise serving under Chirstopher Pike. Later in a different role, she played the ever vigilant Nurse Chapel, who never could quite get over her love of Spock. Also as the ever famous voice of “the computer”, she not only helped direct hundreds of crew members to the right hallway, but supplied millions of geeks with a complete set of sounds to make their own computers a little more futuristic.
Majel Barrett, an actress under her own right, started her career in the 50’s with roles in such popular shows as “Leave it to Beaver,” “Bonanza” and “The Lucy Show”. She will however always be remembered as the exuberiant and often misunderstood Luwaxana Troy.
I enjoyed a comment made by Wil Wheaton on his blog when asked to recount a story about her :
“Since we got the news yesterday, a lot of people have asked me if I can tell a story as a way to remember her. I’ve dug around in the attic of my mind for hours, and the best I can do is: We always had fun when we were working on Next Generation, but when Majel was on the set, it was a party. “
Majel Barrett Roddenberry died, at the age of 76, of leukemia at her home in Bel Air with her son. She will be missed, but never forgotten.
I picked up some flameless (LED), battery (CR2032) powered tea light candles today and I have to say I am pretty impressed! I took some pictures of the whole ordeal, check em out below.
Flameless candles in the package.
Tea light holder.
Flameless tea lights in action!
All-in-all I definitely like the effect these create, they are supposed to last 60 hours per battery and there is absolutely 0% chance of burning your house down. Hands down these are a win-win.
- Nicholas
Microsoft update story continues. More interesting is the fact that Firefox may have huge vulnerability. Toshiba debuts 512 GB SSD at CES. Probably very expensive. Expert expects 25-percent penetration by 2011. Sim City on the iPhone. NASA may give shuttles away from free. Graphite memory coming? Top ten over-hyped products from VNUnet. Sponsored by Budget.com/tech.
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iPhones at Wal-Mart? Pink Slips for Christmas at Yahoo? The 40th Anniversary of the Mouse. Obama Zunes In. And finally American Math Education: 2+2=Dumb! All this and more on your Tech5 Top5 Countdown.
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CNet speculating about Steve Jobs and his missing keynote. Yahoo’s year to forget. Microsoft patches IE. Firefox needs a patch too. Sprint offers 3G 4G wireless modem for laptop. French nix iPhone monopoly. More MFST guys quit. $99 Walmart iPhone a hoax? Apple Mac update is killing Macs. NAND flash now hits 1 million cycles. US should spend $44 billion on broadband. Brainshare conference killed. WDC does big layoff. Luxury mobile phone may get EU tax.
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If you read this blog at all, you know that we heavily favor Apple over Windows, but that doesn’t necessarily make us “fanboys”, and the recent news that Apple will no longer be a MacWorld participant has us disappointed, but even more then that, the last minute announcement that Steve Jobs will not even bother with the Keynote this year is a just a big slap in the face.
MacWorld is, historically, the place that all the mac lovers show up to to find out what latest and greatest products Apple will be giving us for the year. The buzz that MacWorld generates for Apple has been huge in the past, but Apple now feels that they have a no need to make an appearance.
Why? In its own release apple said:
Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.
All of this makes sense, and as a mac fan, I can completely understand the decision. In fact, I myself wasn’t even planning to attend this year, even though I have faithfully attended over the years. Last years MacWorld was a severe dissapointment, being nothing more then a collection of small time application developers and iPhone accessories. What made it worse was that several of the accessory dealers weren’t even selling. The general feel from most of the exhibitors was “You can look, touch, and love, but you can’t buy it, at least not here.”
The biggest problem I have with this announcement is that Steve Jobs is pulling out even this year. The keynote has been a high point of the MacWorld event since day one, and the opportunity to “interface” with Steve Jobs, and find out from the man, what is in store for the year. This year we get Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. Who? Exactly.
Even more frustrating is that this announcement was made on December 16. Less then a month from MacWorld. Will MacWorld expo be refunding the cost of the Keynote passes to people who have no interest in a jobless keynote? Doubtful.
In the end, I don’t disagree with the decision to ditch the expo scenes, but c’mon Steve, give us one last hoorah and a last “one more thing”.
I attended a private conference recently led by Larry Smarr who is the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2). The underlying theme of his presentation was that data communication is moving closer and closer towards a utility service, much like electricity. By creating a worldwide infrastructure of supercomputers (high-performance linux clusters running rocks) with dedicated fiber pipes (moving towards 1TB/sec) and massive amounts of redundant, reliable storage we can essentially eliminate distance.
Another major topic that he covered involved the concept of the visual interface being the largest bottleneck in computing. In the last 10 years our computing/network power has increased exponentially, by the thousands, however the number pixels we have has remained essentially the same. The majority of users are still using the same size monitor today that they used 10 years ago. 15″-17″, 10 years ago it was a CRT, today its an LCD, either way you still have the same number of pixels to work with. His point was that while we can process and store incredible amounts of data, we can’t possibly display it effectively using a single display. He showed pictures of his office and of others in which has implemented his design and to give you some idea what we are talking about here his office featured 20 Dual CPU nodes (roughly 1/4teraflop) with 20×24″ lcd’s which spanned one of his entire walls. Using this type of configuration you can process, store and display incredibly detailed and complex data effectively.
In summary, he said that it wasn’t until 1950 that the last few big companies in America stopped trying to produce their own power and linked up to the power grid. He believes that the same thing needs to and is going to happen for data communication and we will be moving closer and closer towards that initiative.
Stay Tuned.
- Nicholas
Bad news for Apple. Steve will not give keynote in 2009.Company may drop show in 2010. Apple Mac and iPhone sales slipping too. The App store is still a problem. Australia allows people to use Facebook to serve liens. Chip industry in the toilet and it is getting worse. How can this happen? Dell falling behind. Experts think they will start acquisitions. IBM ranks as most trusted tech provider. New Palm OS may be Linux..
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