The Geekorium

Ruben of the Nerd proposed a quiz, as like the blogues of old.

This is mine attempt to answer the call.

? Question the first: Have you ever proposed a blog quiz, or sneezed while riding a unicycle?

No sir, I am a gentleman.

? Question the second: Sweet or savory?

Yes.

? Question the third: What are three legacy consumer tech devices you’d love to see brought back into the mainstream?

There are very few devices I miss that haven’t been superseded in every way by the phone I have in my pocket. Almost anything I’m nostalgic about - such as the portable Sony walkman I had as a teen - don’t make a lot of sense in the modern age.

I get that this isn’t what the question is about but I don’t really miss anything so much that I would want to go back.

That said, I miss the Commodore 64. It had a tactility I’ve tried to recapture with my clacky keyboards, and a simple aesthetic that’s come to embody that retro-future feel that was captured in many movies from my childhood. Drop an old C64 or Atari in a control room and you’ve got an instant “future destroyed by war” feel for your setting.

And that brings me to something I would like to see back in the mainstream: big switches and dials. I’d love to power on my microwave with the satisfying metallic click of a switch. I want the tactile satisfaction of the control board of the Death Star laser while I’m sitting in my Teams meetings. I wanna mute my mic with a big green button and share my screen with a toggle switch. My mouse is boring and keyboard shortcuts aren’t fun.

? Question the fourth: Do you have a lucky number, colour, or day of the week?

No. But a bright canary yellow makes me happy, and Friday is the day we get my favourite takeaway. Do those count?

? Question the fifth: Free space

852.9 GiB on one, and 52.6 GiB on the other. Around 50% on each.

? Question the sixth: What’s something you genuinely tried giving a go, but never grokked?

The secret is to never really try.

? Question the seventh: Do you have a favourite virtualisation tech?

I genuinely enjoy using modern containerisation. Podman, Docker, Toolbx, my Kinoite install. My experimentation with new technology above my skill level always used to leave me with a broken system, crawling back to a clean install of Windows. Containerising everything means my system has been stable and fun far longer than ever before, and lets me try out so much that would once have been a tangle of conflicting python versions and C libraries.

? Question the eighth: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever planted?

I’ll have to come back to this one. I can’t even think of a clever way to make this a question about something else.

? Question the ninth: What’s your favourite instrumental song? Or if you don’t have one, what’s your least favourite instrumental song? If you don’t have one, what’s your favourite instrumental song?

I’m sorry but I will not pick one.

Dance of the Knights by Prokofiev, particularly this version by PIANOlimonCELLO. Just a goddamn banger. It’s a shame PIANOlimonCELLO didn’t put much out.

War Photographer by Jason Forrest. This music video made by Joel Trussel featured on Channel Frederator (monthly cartoon anthologies during the 2010s), and the combination with the visuals made it an instant fave.

プーチ by The Kuricorder Quartet, it’s just such a lil bop. I found this group from their super cute version of The Imperial March which I adore. Which is a good place to say how much I love a good portion of John Williams movie music too.

I love chiptunes from the C64 and my childhood. I learned a lot of classical music this way, and the themes from Wizball are among my favourites, as well as the SID chip wizardry from Ben Daglish in Krakout.

In the same vein is the whole album Mekatsune by Thaehan. You’ll know immediately if it’s your kinda thing. If I had to pick one I’d say try Goblins.

I’m also a sucker for electro-swing. It’s not always strictly instrumental, but it feels like it is frequently even when some of the samples used include words. But the vibe is instrumental right? Faves include Caravan Palace, Swing Republic, wait I should move this out of this question into it’s own post. Hold please.

In the meantime, I like a lot of stuff by Skeewiff, and the track The Queen’s Croquet Ground from their Alice In Wonderland inspired album Skeewiff in Wonderland is as good as it gets.

I’ve just braindumped my coding playlists here. I hope there’s something new for you to enjoy in one of those.

? Question the last: Have you lied in any of these questions?

I was sitting up the whole time.

My mate Kat recently posted - on her new ƂʆϘϭ - about her Summer of Flops: going on a tear watching movies that were financial or critical failures. In the post she mentions a “Zine” she wrote about the topic months ago and handed out on real actual paper to real life humans.

Zines aren’t a thing any more! Yet here Kat is, acting like they never went out of fashion - like blogs didn’t kill them before Facebook killed blogs. She even graciously sent me one, despite the soaring postage prices.

Zines are so old school. I remember being part of a group who wanted to put out a zine at Uni. I think they were so old-school then that we wanted to do a “digital zine” on the university web hosting. That was my fist experience with HTML, and I think it sparked something. I wish I could find those old files now to share just how bad it was, although the writing and art that the people in the group contributed was really very good¹.

Before that zine I thought that while an art career was never in my future, at least I might learn how to create art and start making it some day. Like music, I thought it was a skill you could pick up through practice, and like music, I thought that once you had the skill, you’d want to do it.

But I never wanted to practice, and ended up convincing myself that I just am not into art (or music), and don’t have it in my bones. Which is sad.

But recently I’ve been hit by a couple of examples like Kat’s zine that have made me consider that I may have cut myself off from learning what art even is.

CJ the X is a youtuber and musician that has done a number of videos that exalt art to a place I’d never thought to place it. In their video about the 7 Deadly Art Sins they breaks down the many reasons one might fail to commit art, and how the sins rob you and the universe of something singular that only you can provide.

You are a nonfungible individual.

We are the original bored apes. The boredom is the pain of existence, the club is the collective unconscious, and the yacht is NFTs. Your specific perception of the universe and the potentialities that lie under your skin, your little imagination lightning rod that detects like the ghosts of hitherto unrealized dreams, it is not replaceable!

There’s not going to be another one of you. So if you’re not going to put in the work to make that idle fantasy that could have been real real, it will not exist.

— CJ the X, 7 Deadly Art Sins

CJ the X talks about art in these terms in all their videos and despite myself I find it inspiring, even though I barely know what it means to be inspired.

The most creative times in my life have been writing code and writing two full stories I’ve felt proud of. I can’t convince myself that code is art, although I’d be open to arguments if anyone cared to make one to me, but if I squint hard enough I could call those two peices of writing “art”. One was a stage play I did when I took some extra year 12 classes one semester. The play is lost now - I can’t find the print out or the file backups - but it earned me the only A I ever got in highschool.

The other is a series I posted here about a ‘lil guy who is a badass space adventurer who dies in the second chapter. The story was fun to write because I constrained myself to writing tiny micro-chapters with a specific structure, but the story spiralled out and I stuffed it full of the tropes and sci-fi story beats I love, and it’s absolutely the best thing I’ve ever done.

But I didn’t finish it and post the end anywhere. I wrote the ending, and there were only a few tiny chapters left, but I never typed them up and published them and I still can’t identify why I didn’t just put them out there into the world to be their own thing. The Deadly Art Sin of greed - hoarding the final scraps so the story could be mine and only mine and I wouldn’t have to ask why no one else was enjoying it like I was.

So I’ve spent some time building out my own journaling software so I can keep writing these little posts and trying to do a art again, and I will post the remaining chapters and you can yell at me on mastodon if I don’t put them up soon.

Another good friend Ruben wrote about writers using AI images to acompany their posts. I admit I’ve been tempted to see AI image generation as a way to overcome my own lack of artistic talent and if I’d been at all active in the last two years may have actually used some on my own site. But as he says:

But to the writers specifically who are dumping garbage in their vegetable crisper, I’d implore you to reconsider. You don’t need them! Eschewing (gesundheit) an image entirely is preferable. Heck, even a stick figure or a bunch of shapes thrown together in LibreOffice Draw would be more useful and charming than anything these slop machines are puking onto your site and stinking up the joint. You—and by extension, your words—deserve more.

— Ruben Schade, Press button, receive slop

That snapped something in my brain and I vowed I’d put a little dinky art of my own on posts from now on. It’s why my come-back post included a very bad drawing of me at my computer, and why I didn’t just destroy the picture immediately when I finished it, but actually posted it on the internet for everyone to see. I’m not proud of my art, but it’s my art. And it won’t ever be perfect but I have to learn how to keep making it and giving it to the world.

It starts here.

I read an article the other day that actually made me want to cry a little bit.

It’s an old Washington Post article from 2007 about violinist Joshua Bell, who as an experiment/stunt played for 43 minutes in a rush-hour train station for about 1000 people that passed through that morning. He was playing a $3.5 million dollar violin, and the best seats in his performance tonight will set you back $213.61, but on this day he played for free to anyone who stopped to listen. He played Chaconne by Bach, “considered one of the most difficult violin pieces to master”.

{{< youtube myXOrVv-fNk >}}

The sad part is that about five people in 1000 actually bothered to stop and listen. Roughly five people made time in their schedule to stop and pay attention to the fact that this was a master, playing a Stradivarius for free on the street. And I totally get it. One gent had to be at work in five minutes, so he let himself stay and listened for three. Another was a violinist himself and could tell that there was something special about this particular busker. Another was a woman who worked as a shoe-shiner - he was the only performer she didn’t complain about to management.

Actually, sadder still was the fact that every child who passed through wanted to stop and listen. And every parent they were with hustled them on without a glance at the violinist.

Saddest yet is that I know that if I had been there, I probably would have done the same. I like to think that I would have been the guy to at least spare a minute. Or maybe the one parent who didn’t drag his kid away from the amazing music that neither of us will hear the like of again. I’m afraid that I would miss it completely and be the guy who “had no memory that there had been a musician anywhere in sight”.

I knew after reading this that I wanted to be different. I want to notice things that others miss. My sister has a little side-blog where she captures something every day that she loves. I don’t want to copy that, and I want to capture more than just pictures, but it certainly inspiring. Then while I thought about it, my 31st birthday came and went, and my sister¹ got me the book above. It’s called How to be an Explorer of the World by Keri Smith. While it wouldn’t have been my first choice of book, as it doesn’t involve space battle or time travel, it fits the bill perfectly for maybe getting me out of my own little head. What I need is something to force me to see things I take for granted, and perhaps over time, I won’t need to be forced to do so.

So while the book is about taking notes and writing things down in the moment, I’m going to experiment and learn and explore and as I go, transcribe the things I do and learn and what-have-you onto the net, to share what I’m learning and doing and make myself do it. I will do it over on Explore with screenbeard on tumblr, and when I’m finished fold it back in here.

My first explore is up there now. Go to it.

I’ve been searching for a new theme, and nothing out there really said “me”. My other themes have been fairly modest and simple and this time I wanted something with big bold bright colours and some pop out graphics. Hopefully the comic book inspiration is evident and makes you feel a bit like you’re reading something equally as entertaining.

Isn’t it beautiful?

2011-11-15: I’ve noticed a lot of searches for “comic book theme wordpress” coming in. I haven’t made this theme available for download, as I like that it’s unique to The Geekorium, but I’ll happily make it available in the theme directory if there’s any demand for it. So if you’ve come here looking for a theme like this, let me know by commenting or +1’ing and I’ll look into getting it out there for people to use. You’d have to be patient though, it’s not ready to go as it is.

About this theme

This theme is a two column, fluid wordpress theme. It supports threaded comments, the WP-Footnotes Plugin and the Author Exposed Plugin out of the box. It supports the Wordpress image/caption combo, but I prefer using my own style:

This is a clever caption

So it supports this too.

Credits and Thanks

Colour Scheme

The colour scheme is based on one of the “Pop Art” palates from the Adobe Suite.

Layout

Firstly I’d like to thank Andy Taylor for his astonishing and excellent CSS Grid. The grid resizes fluidly from a 1140px width down to iPhone size and took almost no effort to implement. Go ahead and try it!

Fonts

Kilogram is the chunky title graphic you see up there. Hetilica Bold gave the pop-out graphics a bit of a comic hand-lettered feel. Quicksand is the stylish little rounded font that peppers the site. Code Bold by Fontfabric is the font in the post headings and main menu. Beyond that, I’m using the default typography of the CSS Grid I mentioned earlier! All embedded fonts are free for use and distribution as far as I’ve been able to determine. If you disagree, please let me know so I can investigate further.

Graphics

All pop-out graphics used are from a Vectorstock set by Kraska. Thank you Kraska - they’re beautiful.

Comments

Thank you to Chris Coyier for his “Custom Comments HTML Output” that helped me get the comments looking just the way I wanted them (now hidden by Disqus…)

Everyone else

There are a million tutorials out there that I use every time I make a new theme that I don’t even remember the next day. Thank you all.

Disclaimer

I’ve done my best to cover all my bases, but I can’t guarantee I’ve missed something. If you find something wonky, let me know and I’ll sort it out.

Updates

2011-03-19 Fixed some issues in IE 7-8:

1. Picked some fonts from the basic windows kit to display instead of the custom fonts. IE8 can use @font-face, but needs separate .eot files to make them display, when most come naturally in ttf/otf format. Typical Microsoft. As punishment, you get a smattering of Comic Sans MS instead of Hetilica.

2. Fixed the display of pictures. Apparently IE needs a width on the figure element or it disappears the whole thing. I’ve given images a default width of 100% to fix this.

Removed a closing tag that shouldn’t have been there.

As much as I miss the genius of Jim Henson, I realised the other day that I will miss something else just as much as Jim’s Muppet characters. I will miss the insane and brilliant pieces of comedy gold he used to create with Frank Oz.

Frank Oz is nowadays probably best known for being the voice of Yoda, but he’s also a respected and talented film director. He’s still entertaining, long after Jim Henson’s death and I hope he continues to do so for a long time to come.

But what the world has lost since Jim’s death is not only a talented puppeteer and performer, but some classic comedic pairings of his characters with those of Frank Oz. I cry a little inside when I realise that there will be nothing new created by these two fabulous men working together.

Let me give you some examples. First up the most obvious pair:

{{< youtube g0P5FzSe3qw >}}

This is the only video in this collection that I’ll forgive you for not watching in full. It’s a scene from my least favourite of the Muppet movies (Muppets take Manhattan¹) showing the “wedding” between Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog, probably the most memorable Muppet pairing of all time (even if it’s not one of my favourites). Though an unlikely pair, Jim and Frank made the pig’s flamboyant declarations of love and the frog’s seeming indifference oddly engaging and has created a love affair that is still going strong.

The next classic pair were Kermit and Fozzie Bear:

{{< youtube eH2coWVi9Vg >}}

As well as some terrific running gags throughout the Muppet Show, this odd couple were the backbone of the first two major Muppet movies - as travelling companions in the first and as brothers² in the Great Muppet Caper³. I think their relationship is part of what made Muppet Treasure Island feel like old-school Muppets.

Rowlf and Fozzie:

{{< youtube fYiWWdzDYMs >}}

These guys had some great musical moments together (check out I got rhythm on YouTube for another classic bit). Frank rarely got to show off his musical talent, playing the fool in a lot of songs or singing shrilly in his Miss Piggy voice. It made for some great comedy moments though.

Sam the American Eagle and Rowlf:

{{< youtube ueuA-9pqRok >}}

Sam is one of the most hilarious characters to come from the Muppets, and can instantly make any other character funnier, just by being the worlds most over the top straight man. Once again, it’s almost like Frank is playing up a lack of musical talent, and it’s brilliant.

Moving briefly to some Sesame Street pairings, and the most obvious (and maybe even more famous than any of the above) is the classic duo of Bert and Ernie. With Jim playing the prankster and Frank the straight man, there was no situation too simple to be made into a hilarious farce - and even kids could get it.

{{< youtube 51ZhEjB_KvU >}}

I’m just not emotionally secure enough to do this Ernie.

And some rarer but no less fantastic pairings came when Kermit⁴ ran into the Cookie Monster:

{{< youtube shbgRyColvE >}}

or Grover:

{{< youtube vQj2_Zmq1-o >}}

These two men made comedic character pairings to rival some of the greatest in history: think Laurel & Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Aykroyd and Belushi, French and Saunders, Fry and Laurie, The Mighty Boosh, or Lano and Woodley.⁵ All things must come to an end I guess. The loss of Jim Henson alone was a dreadful blow, but the loss of the joyful playful scenes that these two men could create together make the loss that much harder to accept.

Of course I don’t mean to detract from the other brilliant pairings that the Muppet show produced. Statler and Waldorf come to mind as another well known pair (voiced by Jim and both Jerry Nelson and Richard Hunt). Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker are the other two that spring to mind. Their sketches are just as fun, but I believe that Jim and Frank had a spark of something greater in their performances.

I’ll leave you with one other pair that might be less obvious, but is one of the defining partnerships of the Muppet Show - and is firmly entrenched in public consciousness. The pairing of Jim Henson’s head and characteristic voice, and Frank Oz’s out-of-control hands for the Swedish Chef:

{{< youtube UerBCXHKJ5s >}}

To James,

I’ve not actually met you in “real life” yet, and much of what I know of you I have only learned through your blorgs, twoots and videos of you getting slapped… which seems to be more often than regular folk.

Regardless: Happy Birthday.

I’m glad you’re having a good year. I hope you don’t grow up as soon as you think you should. We should meet sometime soon.

When I started First Waves I wanted to keep my readers up to date with Google Wave news and keep on top of changes and updates as they happen. However, looking around the net I soon found many sites that already do a great job of keeping up with Wave news, and I hate the idea of rehashing the same stuff my readers could get at any number of excellent sites. So instead I have started to concentrate on larger news and “future direction” stuff here at First Waves, and I hope my readers are OK with the focus.

But I realise that many people do want up-to-the minute Wave information, so I’m going to lay out the sites and people I follow, and if you’re a hardcore Wave nut, you might like to follow them too. These people all have my utmost respect and admiration for their writing and dedication to Wave. I’ve included these sites in a Google Reader bundle called Best Google Wave Sites. If you trust my judgement, you can use the bundle to subscribe to all twenty-two feeds in just a couple of clicks! If you’d like to know more about the sites though, read on!

Wave Users - Hints and Tips

First and foremost, you cannot go past the Official Google Wave Blog - written by Googlers with news information and tips. If you only subscribe to one other site (ahem), this should be it. It’s kind of a no-brainer though so lets move on to some less obvious sites.

The Shiny Wave by David Cook takes a look at useful waves, gadgets and bots as well as the latest important technological developments that could impact Google Wave. Once a month he profiles the work of a talented Wave developer, and generally keeps a close eye on the Wave development community.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave Alright, this isn’t a site to follow so much as a book, but it’s written by the enormously talented Gina Trapani with Adam Pash. The site includes the entire book for you to read for free, or you can get it in PDF or full colour print versions for a very small fee. If you’re just getting started in Google Wave, there really is no other site you need to get your head around it.

Google Wave Information by Pooja Srinivas (a Googler) is a compilation of Wave guides Pooja has written. The focus is on brand new users who might find something like the Complete Guide (above) too complicated. It also covers some unusual and fun use cases for Wave.

Waving At You by Russell Tripp is where Russell puts all his tips and information on Google Wave to “ease the learning curve” as he puts it. Waving At You and Russell’s Twitter account are where I found a lot of my favourite Wave resources. His tips are simple, but always excellent.

Waverz uses waves themselves to create the articles. Using the wavearchive@appspot.com bot, an archived html copy of a wave is made (at http://archive.waverz.com). You can then embed this archive in a page using some simple javascript (or php or python on the back end). Beyond this technical marvel though is an insightful site written by a number of Wavers including one of my fave wavers Jon Blossom and Dragon Silicon, who’s work I’ve only just discovered while writing this article.

Google Wave Possibilities by Tim Brown is another excellent source of Wave news. Tim is a “Wave Watcher”

• a group of Wave helpers - and for good reason. His site is full of helpful information (like how to get started with particular bots), and Google Wave news.

Wave on Business is focussed on how businesses might use Google Wave. The site incorporates presentations, use case scenarios and information on collaboration.

Google Wave Book by Andrés Ferraté is a companion site to the books Getting Started with Google Wave and Google Wave: Up and Running. It is more than just a catalogue for the books though, and contains insightful posts with tips and ideas.

Riding the Wave by Prasun Nair has Wave news, but mixes in some news about other communications technology such as telephones. The posts cover Wave news and information on its future direction.

Google Wave Info. The latest news and information about Google Wave by an anonymous author. Some useful information.

Wave Developers

These sites are run by Wave developers for Wave developers and contain a mix of the technical and informative. If you would like to dive in to the nuts and bolts of Google Wave, these are a few of the best!

The Google Wave Developer Blog is the official blog for Google Wave developers. It’s full of tips and guides and helpful information for developers who are just starting out with Wave and for Wave gurus too.

Google Wave Samples Gallery is the go-to place for new robots and gadgets as they come out. Primarily a teaching resource, the extensions here are tagged with how well they will teach you the concepts behind developing for Google Wave. An excellent source of useful bots too!

On Top of the Wave by Kiwibcn is a site run by a team of developers to showcase their experiences developing for Google Wave. One of their most popular posts is how to Develop your first wave robot in Java and clearly demonstrates their knowledge and their ability to teach.

Wave.to by @waveDOTto is the home of the developers of the excellent Mr-Ray extension, plus many more. These guys clearly know their stuff, and they are passionate about sharing it with the developer community and the public.

With Waves are a team of four developers who have created a number of popular extensions including Amazon and eBay bots that insert product listings into waves when you mention them. They have also released their Extension Generator that they use internally to build their own robots. That’s generous!

Mastering Wave by Daniel Graversen follows the process of developing for Google Wave, as well as highlighting important Wave news and tips. This site is one of the first Wave sites I subscribed to.

Process Wave is written by seven software engineering students, and follows their process of developing from Invity, a group management bot, to a collaborative modelling tool integrating the open source ORYX software into Wave.

Go Wave hasn’t been updated for little while now, but has some good information about Robots, Gadgets and Embedding.

Google Wave Sites by Region

The following Wave sites are written for specific communities and are often in another language. This should not be a problem. I speak nothing but English, but thanks to modern internet translation software have no trouble reading and participating in these sites. If you subscribe to these sites in Google Reader you can use the built in translation function and you should have no troubles whatsoever.

Spanish

WAVEsfera by David Alviz. David was an enthusiastic commenter here on First Waves, so I followed him back to WAVEsfera and discovered his site was in Spanish. Realising I was missing out on some excellent tutorials and news I subscribed as soon as I remembered that Google Reader does instant translation! I’m glad I did

• David updates almost twice daily (!) and is an endless font of knowledge and excitement over Wave. Without David, I’d probably be missing out on all the other excellent non-English wave resources below.

German

Google Wave Surfer by Thomas Friebel has news and information with particular focus on the Wave experience and how it is changing over time. The site also includes a forum for users to share their wave experiences.

Wave Inside by Sascha Ahlers has shorter updates than Google Wave Surfer, but they are no less informative. A good resource for quick news.

French

Google Wave France is maintained by three authors who explore Wave use cases and report updates and changes as they happen.

Russian

Google Wave Russia by Vadim Barsukov has some in-depth articles from Q&A sessions with Lars “Google Wave” Rassmussen. Some of the content appears to be English articles translated to Russian, but there is some original content too.

Everything else

Of course, this list is not meant to be complete. There are authors I’ve not met, site’s I’ve not found and tweets I’ve not seen. There are sites like Smarterware or Read Write Web that often cover Wave news, but aren’t dedicated to covering Wave. As I come across articles like this, I’ll add them to my “Further Wave Reading” list over on the left. I also re-tweet interesting Wave articles from @firstwaves on Twitter. If you really want to be in the loop, follow my Twitter list of Wave Geniuses too!

I’ve also left off a lot of good resources and people that can be found on Google Wave itself, as that will take another post entirely. <a href=“https://wave.google.com/wave/wavethis?t=Contact+from+First+Waves&r=nunn.joshua@googlewave.com” title=“Contact Josh via Google Wave”>Ping me if you’d like to chat, and I’m sure I can help you find some great people, and useful resources.

If you know of some great Google Wave resources I haven’t covered, please let me know in the comments below!

Tehe

This tickled my fancy. Over on First Waves I’ve got a post ready to go about Google Wave competitors, and one of the ones I mentioned was Sharepoint. Amusingly, the spelling suggestion for it was chokepoint…

Which apparently is a geography term, but sounds kind of ridiculous.

Well I though it was amusing anyway.

Unfortunately I have two movies that spring to mind when I was given this suggestion:

Review the worst movie you’ve seen this year.

The first is The Ugly Truth with Whatserface and That Bloke who always seem to be in these awful movies. Normally I would have steered clear of something like this¹, but occasionally I have to watch a romantic comedy so that my wife will keep watching SciFi with me.

Bleh

What a dreadful movie. I’m not sure there’s much to be said beyond that.

The second was Surrogates with Bruce Willis. I had heard it wasn’t fantastic, but the idea behind it intrigued me: what if everyone lived their lives virtually through robot simulacrum²?

Bruce Willis: Bored.

The movie’s conceit is ridiculous in execution though, with almost the entire world having chosen to live in little pods that feed sensory input from their virtual bodies back to them. I cannot imagine anyone but the elite and a select few ever going for it. The movie world is one where doctors no longer espouse the benefits of sunlight or fresh air, where muscles don’t atrophy from under-use, and the technology is so good that no one misses reality.

Except Bruce Willis of course.

He has that same sort of bemused look he has in every film. Except in this one it doesn’t suit. I also recently re-watched 12 Monkeys and the man can act, but when the script is bad, he just spends the entire film with a little half-smirk like he knows something the director doesn’t. Well his character hates his virtual life for some reason. He’s a cop put on the trail of a man with technology to kill someone through the surrogate. There’s all sorts of interesting questions that this raises³, but none of them are really explored or adequately covered.

Which is the essence of this film really. The premise is interesting, but the execution is flawed. About half way in the movie starts showing all its cards until there are no surprises by the end. None of the characters are “real”, so you don’t care about them in any way. The technology is so magical you just cannot believe any of it.

The final indication that this was not a good film came about 2 minutes after Bruce Willis saved the entire planet⁴ and my wife woke up. Oh how I envied her.

Cheers Zombie_Plan. Hope it was good for you too…

I have that “Suggestions” button up there on the right because I’m hoping that people might make my never ending search for interesting stuff to write about easier. Before today my only suggestion has been (literally) “….”, which I’m not sure what to do with. I thought it a stretch to drag a post out of an ellipsis and a period.

Then today I got GOLD.

“mate your a wanker”

Not a suggestion as such. It’s entirely possible that the chap¹ misread the tab to read “Statements”, and just decided to put his 2 cents in.

I do have a comment area under each post so if it’s a particular thing I’ve said, you could leave a specific comment. Failing that, you could contact me directly and say hello. Perhaps after a chat you might come to realise that I’m not such a bad guy.

I can infer a couple of things about my eloquent visitor:

He spent 10 seconds on my site. Just long enough to write “mate your a wanker”, and pretty much nothing else as far as I can tell. I can’t see exactly how he found my site, which suggests he either bookmarked it to come back later to insult me specifically, or he came from a secure site such as Facebook or his email. What he’s doing seeing my site in his email I have no idea.

He’s from Manly, NSW but I’ve never been so don’t know what that says about him. I’ll steer clear of geographical stereotypes in this post :P. He gets a small pass from me for using Google Chrome (the browser of the gods), but he’s using Vista so he is a little backward. And if he ever comes back I’d like to know if his Vodafone plan is any good…

So that’s the post you get for your “suggestion”. I hope it satisfies. Anyone else who has an ACTUAL suggestion is very welcome to write something up there, and I’ll treat you with a lot more respect than I’ve treated this one.

Isn’t spam fun?

In honour of a couple of Wave extensions that allow wave-to-email collaboration, I thought I’d try something light-hearted instead of my usual wordy post. Mr-Ray is a bot/gadget combo from wave.to, that lets you add people to a wave by their email address, and they get sent a stripped back version of the wave that they can use to collaborate with you, without having to figure out and navigate the full-blown Wave interface. Embedded below is an example of the interface the email user sees. Please note, this isn’t the way the developers recommend using Mr-Ray - the address should be kept secret to avoid people posing as you. In this case, I KNOW it’s not me!

I’ve got a short holiday thanks to Easter, so I’ll leave this up until Wednesday to get to know my readers and give the non-wavers a chance to see a little bit how it works. I’ll check back regularly to reply so you come back too! If you’re already on wave and want to reply as you, contact me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and I’ll add you directly.

[ This used to be an embedded view of a Wave. Technology comes and goes and we lose even the archives of what we had. ]
Fullscreen Version

Updated: Added static view of the wave for reference.

Some updates:

Spurred on by the outpouring of comments and (!) blog posts after asking for feedback, I got stuck into a few posts here and on my other site. Thank you everyone who responded and wrote replies - it gave me some much needed confidence and meant the world to me. I was buoyed for days afterwards (and loved the commentfest that followed here and elsewhere).

I officially quit Twitter (with my joshnunn account at least). I was leaving it open ended so I could come back without looking like a fool, but now I’ll have to hang my head in shame if I DO return.

First Waves is going great-guns. tjb654 tweeted “Wave on Slow Cook” and was retweeted by Pamela Fox (one of the Wave API evangelists). So I got a bunch of new readers and some more Facebook Fans!

I began re-working my portfolio site. I couldn’t be bothered installing a test environment on my laptop, so I put it up and started editing it live. It took me a little longer than I expected to make it usable though, as the documentation for MODx¹ went down just as I started, so I couldn’t figure out how to build menus. Eventually I got something I’m happy with up just before…

Lifehacker (!!) linked to my site What the F is that about?! I suspect I’ve stepped into a mirror world where the Joshua Nunn of this world produces things that interest people and that they want to read. I kinda feel sorry for the poor schmuck who got sucked into my universe, but then I remember he probably goes around with a goatee, so it serves him right.

Tonight I published a massive post on First Waves. I suspect that because I’m massively proud of it, it won’t be read by anyone and I’ll realise that my mirror-self managed to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow and switch us back… bastard. Or I could be pleasantly surprised that I get some people reading it. I’ve paid for a Clicky account, so now I’ll know when YOU are reading this… unless you’re using a feed reader… or I’m not on my computer when you do… What was i saying? This point has descended into a Rubenerd-esq sort of ramble. My apologies.

I think a little wee just came out

Who else is excited about the new season of Doctor Who?

April 18th.

Doctor Who - Now with more… This Guy!

I always thought the advice to “live life like there’s no tomorrow” to be a bit odd. I guess people say it to convince others to take risks and try for things they might be scared to do, but I don’t get that from it.

If I was living like today was my last day, this is what I’d do:

1. Tell work I wasn’t coming in today. Or ever. Maybe tell someone my passwords so they can get to all the old InDesign documents and Word templates I’ve made so they don’t have to start from scratch.

2. Make sure my life insurance policy is sorted for Mil and Amm. Write down my email password so Mil can get into all my accounts.

3. Blog my final thoughts, for the interests of imparting my final wisdom to the world¹.

4. Play with Amelynne. Do everything she loves. Give her lots of tickles and cuddles, which I love.

5. Play with Mil. Ahem.

6. Invite everyone I know over for a party. Play the “I’m gonna die tomorrow” card to make sure they come. Cross those that don’t off my Christmas list.

7. Die. Or perish, or cease to be or whatever it is that makes it possible that I know I’m gonna die, and not be taken completely by surprise the way it should be.

None of those things, except maybe the ones with my girls are things that anyone should be doing every day. Giving out my work password would be asking for trouble, as would telling all my friends I was dying just to get them to come to a party². Maybe some of them would be good housekeeping, but I don’t think that anyone with a mortgage who’s leaving behind a family should live life like there’s no tomorrow.

Perhaps the only thing I’d regret might be that I haven’t got my name on anything “big”. You know, the kind of major contribution to society that gets you a wikipedia article.

Maybe that’s a better adage for today’s age… “Live life like you haven’t got a wikipedia article about you yet”. That sounds much more inspirational.

{{< youtube qybUFnY7Y8w >}}

I can’t think of a way they can possibly top this clip. Brilliantly shot in High Def, beautifully choreographed, and perfectly synchronised. If you liked their treadmill clip (symbolically shattered half way through) you’ll love how clever this is. It also knowingly nods to the Internet and Youtube crowd (did I see the mars rover? Something like the water bird that Homer uses to press the “any” key when he works from home? An OK Go concert rendered in Lego?).

What a joyful and exciting clip from a band that knows how to engage their audience. Bravo!