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Escape Pod, for shame!

Mark — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:00:21 +0000

As a general rule, I love Escape Pod. The stories (and readers!) tend to be excellent, however this week must be the exception which proves the rule. Maybe it’s because I never got into the whole MMORPG thing but I found this week’s story to be a bad rewrite/adaption of Groundhog Day. The movie wasn’t all that great and Save Me Plz is even worse. At least in Groundhog Day Bill Murray’s character, Phil Connors, had to do all the work himself; in Save Me Plz, Devon forces Meg into doing all the work for him. Even worse she liked the world the way it was!

So I say shame on you Mr. Eley for bringing us this tripe and implore you to look for more stories like:

#005: Snow Day
#007: The Trouble With Death Traps
#013: The Once and Future Dentist
#020: The Burning Bush
#028: Your Corporate Network and the Forces of Darkness
#031: Robots and Falling Hearts
#034: Free Will, Baby
#038: L’Alchimista
#039: My Friend is a Lesbian Zombie
#042: Practical Villainy
#045: Are You Ready For the End of the World?
#047: Poet for Hire
#052: Single White Farmhouse
#054: Tk’tk’tk
#056: The Clockwork Atom Bomb
#061: I Look Forward To Remembering You
#064: Head of State
#070: Squonk the Dragon
#075: Nano Comes to Clifford Falls
#076: The Dinner Game
#078: The Shoulder of Giants
#082: Travels With My Cats
#100: Nightfall
#102: The Angle of My Dreams
#104: Lust for Learning
#110: Frankie the Spook
#123: Niels Bohr and the Sleeping Dane

Notes…

Why no, this post is not a blatant attempt at being named BofW and getting a free book from Escape Pod. What would ever give you that idea. *grin*
Ok, I could be fibbing when I made the above comment.
Alright I was fibbing and it is a blatant attempt at just that.
However I also wrote up this post to draw attention to what I feel are the very, very best of Escape Pod. Any sci-fi and/or fantasy fans not listening to Escape Pod should start and they should definitely start with the stories on this list!

Escape Pod, for shame! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

An article I wish I’d written…

Mark — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:20:14 +0000

Believe in yourself
Says Ferris: “Not that I condone fascism. Or any ‘isms’. ‘Isms’, in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an ‘ism’. He should believe in himself.”

Slow clap for the second most profound line of the movie.

Taken from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and the secret to life, found via By The Way….

An article I wish I’d written… © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

One Smart (sort-of) Doggie

Mark — Fri, 11 May 2007 20:59:11 +0000

I’m sitting at the computer typing, when the dog bumps up against my legs. I look down, and she’s sniffing the floor around my feet intently.

“What are you doing down there?”

“I’m looking for steak!” she says, wagging her tail hopefully.

“I’m pretty certain that there’s no steak down there,” I say. “I’ve never eaten steak at the computer, and I’ve certainly never dropped any on the floor.”

“You did in some universe,” she says, still sniffing.

I sigh. “I’m going to move the quantum physics books to a higher shelf, so you can’t reach them.”

Myself, I’ve never had a physics course in my life. I do however have some interest in the various sciences and I have cracked open the occasional science textbook for classes I’ve never been in. Pretty much every time, it makes my brain leak out my ears and causes me to wonder why I bother. Then today while waiting for a rather incredibly slow server to finish running my SQL update, I hit up SEB out of boredom and found his link to the article on Uncertain Principles. The article both made sense and made me smile, which lines up nicely with my idea of good teaching. So thanks to Les for pointing out Mr. Orzel’s excellent article and double thanks to Mr. Orzel for writing it.

One Smart (sort-of) Doggie © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Happy Easter!

Mark — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 18:45:16 +0000

BTW, the EB hates you!

Happy Easter! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Team Fortress 2!

Mark — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 19:01:30 +0000

I used to love playing video games and would waste entire days doing nothing else, but over the last couple of years I’ve started slipping away from that hobby. The expense of keeping my computer updated to handle the latest games combined with the pain I’d get in my wrists just kind of killed the fun. Particularly since I wasn’t seeing a lot of new games to keep up my interest. Well, if the game behind this trailer plays anywhere close to as good as it looks; then I’ll be back to burning the midnight oil to lay waste to the enemy. *grin*

You see, one of my all-time favorite video games was the original Team Fortress mod for Half-Life. The class choices, mayhem and fun were an unbeatable combination¹. Then as other mods were developed further; Valve announced they were going to go all out on making TF2. This was 5 years ago and was the last we heard from Valve about it. At least the last we heard until this month when they released the official trailer for TF2. The new character models are wicked cool and oddly enough something about the trailer reminds me of No One Lives Forever (another great video game).

Just wow! I cannot think of any better description of how cool this trailer looks. Go on, hit the link and watch it yourself!

¹ At least I’ve always thought so, but others have preferred that POS called Counter-Strike.

Team Fortress 2! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Wooosh!

Mark — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 05:18:27 +0000

Just so some other poor slob doesn’t have to be the last person on the Internet to post a link to it.…

Those crazy cats at EepyBird.com took 101 liters of Diet Coke & 523 Mentos and rather than throwing some sort of god-awful party with it; they came up with a much more original idea. With those humble ingredients, they recreated the famous Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas, NV. Oh and as a quick warning to anybody tempted to drink the leftovers of such an experment; DON’T. From the reactions of the EepyBird guys, I’d say it makes motor oil taste good. :)

Wooosh! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Are you a hoopy frood, like me?

Mark — Thu, 25 May 2006 15:45:14 +0000

If so, you better have your towel with you today! As today, is Towel Day.

For those not familiar, Douglas Adams was one of the funniest writers of our time. He wrote a wonderful series of radio plays which were converted in a a series of books and a TV show and later into a really awful movie. This was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In this, Mr. Adams wrote:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have. Partly it has great practical
value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

After Mr. Adams’s death some lunatics decided to create Towel Day as a tribute to his genius. I only heard about it this year (about a week ago to be more precise) and decided to join in on the fun. And the fact that I’m telecommuting to work today had absolutely nothing to do with that decision. *grin*

Are you a hoopy frood, like me? © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

New Cameras

Mark — Mon, 22 May 2006 23:30:31 +0000

Like many computer geeks with a passion for photography (and a limited budget) I’ve been lusting for a DSLR camera. Don’t get me wrong, I really like my little Canon Powershot. I just want the ability to use multiple lenses again. Like I could when I was taking photography courses back in college and used my Pentax K1000 SE. That’s a 100% manual, 35mm, SLR. And that thing is rock solid. Heck, my high school art teacher recommended that camera because even a whole school of high school students taking photography classes wasn’t able to destroy them. And with only 1 item in the camera being battery powered (the light meter) you don’t have to worry about running out of juice when you’re taking a photo. Plus it’s total lack of auto-anything forces you to learn how a camera works, which should teach you to take better pictures. The thing is I’m getting older and cannot focus the all manual camera quick enough to get the shots I want. Not to mention, I’m cheap and would rather have digital snaps which I then choose which ones are worth printing out vs. shooting a roll and hoping I got something that the photolab won’t screw up in the processing.

Then today, I’m catching on my the news in my RSS reader when I come across this article from Engadget. Apparently, Pentax is coming out with a new line of DSLR cameras this summer. And the extra kicker is Each camera remains compatible with Pentax K-mount lenses. How sweet is that? I mean I don’t have greatest of lenses for my old Pentax but I love my 17mm lens and to be able to slap that baby on a DSLR? Schweet. :D

Inquire Within

Mark — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 03:31:54 +0000

During a recent business trip, I found out some co-workers and friends of mine had put together a comedic short film. The film tells the story of a young woman with some relationship troubles going to a professional philosopher to find the answer. I thought it was pretty funny. And as there is a copy of it over at Google Video, which will autogenerate the HTML code necessary to embed the video on my own site; I figured I’d add it here. Click the more link below to watch the video.

Sickday Links

Mark — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 03:52:47 +0000

I’ve been home sick the last couple of days and today while I felt mostly felt fine; I was running a bit of a temp. I couldn’t sleep so to entertain myself; I surfed the web and found this links which amused me.

Bento | Gmaps:Google Maps with English translations showing eating/dining options in Tokyo, Japan
Motherload: A flash based game where you drive a mining pod on Mars digging for ore. Sounds silly but it’s strangely addictive; I clicked it intending to play for just a few minutes and ended up spending hours on it today. Then again, part of that could have been the cold medicine.
MythBusters | Lost Experiments: The Discovery channel has put online short video segments from the MythBusters TV show where we get to see never before released footage. :D Very cool!