Shameless Words from Shameless Geeks

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Happy Birthday Mom

The 13 Story

I’m getting a little sick of Russian criminals putting password reapers on my site. They are almost as bad as the diapered 15-year-old script kiddies out there. Usually, I just delete them, but I’m beginning to get annoyed.

To the guy below who put up the reaper… Piss off and hope to God I don’t use the url’s that you so brilliantly put in the post.

To everyone else… I castrated the script so that it is harmless. It originally had a field to enter your password with a submit button next to it. Of course you know where that password would go… you can see the url’s in the post.

I say we give the guy a hand. 10 or 20 million random usernames and passwords should keep him busy for a while.

For the record: posts protected with a password are not permitted on this site. If you see one, don’t enter your password. It won’t be long before I get around to dealing with the post.

UPDATE:

Yeah, well the scumbag did it again. Had to delete the post. What I said about the post below being the culprit isn’t true anymore… that’s a valid one from a friend.

Kinda makes you wonder how miserable someone has to be to try to make a living by being a shithead. I guess we should pity the low-life. Useless people don’t deserve anything else.

Texas must of changed me, I am about to ban my daughter from video games. Never thought I would have to do it. Even worse I my wife and I where complaining about how video games are evil. I blame everything on game cheats. Game cheats have turned my daughter into a hopeless video game zombie.
Game cheats are the devils work, we must fight to ban them. They are driving our youth down a path of evil. We must stop them. So let us join hands and pray for GameFaqs soul.

In the words of the great shameless geek (as he sits in a chair on the other side of the room) “this is as bad as a bad 80’s Schwarzenegger movie".

And trust me, it’s bad (and hilarious).

Over at Readwriteweb they post an article about the partnership forming between Facebook and AOL. Perhaps if they hadn’t used the keywords “Facebook” and “login", this mess never would have happened…

But they did, and sure enough, the very first commenter is asking to be allowed to log in to Facebook. And by comment five users are getting furious that Readwriteweb Facebook will not let them log in. I haven’t read through all the comments, but my personal favorite so far is #24: “What have they done now. It’s not simple enough for me to figure out.”

Simple enough, indeed.

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The Story of the 13’s:

The story begins many years ago with a mother whose birthday is July 13th and a father who tried desperately not to forget it. I try to keep it alive every year as a tribute to both of them and all that they put up with as I was growing up.

Years ago, I visited Dad in his one-man body shop. I noticed that he had taken a windshield crayon and written the number 13 all over the place. There were 13’s all over the windows and the walls. Basically, you couldn’t look in any direction without seeing the number 13. When I asked him what it was all about, he replied “There’s no way I’m going to forget your mother’s birthday this year".

Scroll forward a couple of years. Dad passed away, and I told a friend all about the story. When July 13th rolled around, I walked into an office that was covered in 13’s. He had written the number 13 all over my whiteboard. He had taken a pad full of sticky notes and put 13’s all over the desk, all over the wall, in the desk drawers, and even inside the case of my PC. I was still finding them months later.

The end of the story is that I try to keep Dad’s work alive by posting a bunch of 13’s on my web site for Mom’s birthday. It’s my geeky, wise-guy way of telling her that I haven’t forgotten. It’s also my way of telling her that, wherever Dad is, he hasn’t forgotten either.

This year, I’m a day early because I have a very busy day planned for the 13th. I didn’t want to let the day slip by without some kind of mention.

Happy Birthday Mom.

I remember not long ago when owning a Gigabyte Hard Drive was a big deal. Now I own a terabyte hard drive and plan to buy another in a few weeks because I have already filled my first terabyte hard drive. DVD’s however have been stuck around a few Gigabyte but soon even that will change, thanks to this break thru that is no more. All that we have left is for the Terra byte data sticks to appear and Petabyte will be the new Gigabyte.

Video blanking redaction is a subject that can often send an experienced engineer into a recursive state of paniced hysteresis, but it isn’t really all that magical. All you need to remember is that is is based on a few simple pseudo-scientific principles. The entire process can be broken into three statistically irrelevent stages that are easily stumbled through on an Ohm by Ohm basis.

The first stage is the virtual mastication of astable signal domains. This can be accomplished using one of two perpendicularly obtuse methods. The first is the use of a Forward Projected Glandular Analysis (FPGA) chip to perforate any magnetic bubble anomalies that can occur as a result of the repressed injection of Esoteric System Distinctions (ESDs). If you don’t have access to an FPGA chip, the same ESDs can be obstructed by using a high-end micro-reluctor with a cross-compiled refactoring front end and a virtualization restricting back end. Once this step is complete, the retrograde registers should be exponentially masticated and ready for the next stage

The second stage involves the cross-correlated flagellation of system RAM using a soft-decision Viterbi insertion array. This is a simple matter of recursively applying a Heisenberg null generator to the resident parameters of the local BIOS structure and feeding the resultant petrified bits into an oscillating Reed-Solomon clock suppressor. The open pseudo-source for this should be readily available online in the video redaction aisle of your local hobby shop.

The final stage, known as planar reciprocal defecation, is where quantum electro-mechanical process redundancies are applied to the resident co-axial database in preparation for excretion. The simplest way to do this is using a repulsive monastic CODEC feeding a Fourier jitter enhancement driver. If all has gone well, your redundant retraction filter should now contain a logarithmically extended no-op.

That’s about it. Video blanking redaction should now be complete, and you can forward it to your repartitioning GUI. I hope I have explained this in an obtuse enough manner to answer any irrelevant questions.

–Shameless

It looks like our long running gag of Duke Nukem Forever has come to a sad end. Sadly, there will be no Duke Nukem Forever. The company that was producing the game finally ran out of money, shutdown and canceled Duke Nukem Forever. I am sadden by this but at least I did not preorder it.

Gaming has lost another great, David Arneson passed away a few days ago. David Arneson was the co-creator of D&D. I wish I could say something but the sadness over the loss of another gaming great has left me without words.

Well, it looks like the French said “no” to “three strikes”. Unfortunately, It looks like they will “pitch” it again later.

The interesting thing is that the vote was “poorly attended". Could it be that politicians were smart enough to stay away from an unpopular vote pushed by the entertainment industry? Vote in favor, lose the next election. Vote against, lose lots of campaign contributions AND the bully pulpit of the entertainment industry. It’s a no-win situation for them.

Again, we see the bloated and over-hyped numbers attributed to losses due to piracy. These are always based on the number of downloads observed, with a big multiplier for those that they think they missed. Most of the downloaders wouldn’t have purchased the pirated content anyway.

Your average person doesn’t mind paying a reasonable fee for entertainment. The amount people are willing to pay for a movie theater seat is proof of that. It’s just that, in an age of easy distribution, nobody wants to pay huge profits to a company whose only contribution is an outdated distribution network.

The New York Times today posted a good article about the new French system to stop piracy. This is the same system Steven Soderbergh proposed to congress and what the movie and record industry want in the USA. Hopefully this law will not pass in the USA, the privacy violations alone make me shudder.

I do not know why, but I really want to read Batman 116 from 1958. Lets see there is one of three ways, through finding it in a trade paperback (a collection of several comic books), by buying the issue on the secondary market or if I am really lucky at a store or convention. Oh poo, I am not lucky, the local store in town will not let me and there are no comic book conventions in Austin right now. Double whammy, there is no trade paperback that contains a copy of Batman 116. So on to the last option, to buy a copy from the secondary market. So off to Mile High Comics I go, ah there it is, no too bad it’s out of stock. Off to MyComicShop.com, ah too bad they are out too. Well there always EBay, hey look there it is in Spanish, no I do not want to read Brave and Bold 116, ah there it is two copies. Ah man this urge is going cost me a lot, one is 69.99 with 4 days left and the other copy is over Two hundred dollars. Logging into PayPal, darn it I am broke. Maybe I should not have bought the State Puff Marshmallow Man last week, man was he expensive. Did enjoy eating him and I even crossed streams.
Hold on what’s this you say there is a digital copy available? Hot dog, so how much? Free you say? Bonus, hold on here a moment, isn’t download comics off the Internet illegal. Why yes it is. As Nancy Regan told us say I am just going to have to say NO to your crack, excuse me digital comic book. But darn it, I really want to read Batman 116. So begins the trail down dark path that creates a Pirate.
Wait there is hope, to stop me from turn into one of those evil Pirate. DC Comics could create a way so I can legally buy digital copies of your books; all it takes is a little work. Marvel already lets me, why not you?

Ah Internet Piracy, the scourge that never goes away. Hollywood and music industry have been struggling with it for years. Yet no matter what they do it seems to never go away or even really decrease. When is the movie and music industry going learn the story of the sun and the wind? What is the story of the sun and wind, well it goes like this: One time the wind bet the sun he could get a guy walking down the road he could get him to take off his coat. So the wind blew and blew on the guy and all it did was to get to him button up tighter and tighter. Then the sun took his turn and he raised himself high in the air and with in seconds the coat was gone. The moral of the story is for the movie industry is stop attacking the pirates; they just get better at hiding from you. Instead create a system so we can access any movie at any time with out nasty DRM for an affordable price and no $15 a movie is not affordable. Guess what Hollywood, that system is already in place its called Netflix. To kill the vast majority of the movie pirate all Hollywood has do is make all the movies viewable not just the small list they currently have. Then again this Hollywood, they will continue to attack p2p like the wind. Hollywood when you wake up and become the sun make sure there is no DRM, Shameless hates DRM.

Wow… I think LeakeNova has a point there. There are several problems I see with the sudden shift in pricing:

1. Was there any advance warning to those who were signing contracts with TWC? I would hate to see people who signed up for unlimited bandwidth, paid for the in-home equipment, then got shafted by the new pricing structure. I also would see any attempt by TWC to fine people for breaking these contracts as a criminal offense. Bait and switch.

2. Does TWC intend to do anything for those who fall far short of their bandwidth cap? I doubt it. Rollover bits would be nice, but I doubt you will see those either. I’d love to be able to save up bandwidth for the November gaming season when all of the new Christmas games show up on Steam.

3. As usual, the punishment for going over your limit is SEVERE. Why does everything over the limit cost many times as much as everything under the limit? I could never get that. Does the over-the-limit bandwidth suddenly cost more for the company to transfer? NO. They are the same bits. It’s really either a punishment, or a way to force you into a more expensive plan. It’s almost like the provider considers themselves judge, jury and executioner. They will, however, tend to be lenient if you throw money at them.

Lucky for me, I’m not troubled by these problems… yet. I feel for you LeakeNova. I’d be annoyed too.

Lets hope, for all of our sake, that TWC does a face-to-floor dance because of this. i would hate this example to spread to my neighborhood.

BTW… I the rats and roaches agreed to start paying rent, as long as I guaranteed them unlimited network access. The basement is no longer available. Sorry.

Well after a very long disappearance I have returned to blogosphere. Why you ask? Simple to mock, okay complain, Time Warner Cable decision to charge for the amount we download. This decision is horrible for me. I watch streaming movies from Netflix daily, I download video games from Steam, and I use a ton of bandwidth when I work from home which I do pretty much everyday for at least 1-2 hours. Thanks to Time Warner Cables decision I will not be doing any of those things anymore, I can not afford the bill. To make matters worse, thanks to where I live the only high speed provider I have access to is Time Warner Cable. Austin is looking less grand everyday, shudder the thought I may be moving back to Virginia. Shameless is the basement still for rent?

I saw this article about employers using the web to disqualify candidates. There isn’t much depth there, but it shows a serious perception problem that a lot of people have.

I honestly think that the writer has a deep misunderstanding of the concept of rights and responsibilities. Yes, you have the right to say what you want, but it’s tied to the responsibility that you stand up for what you say. For example: if you put up a blog that makes constant threats against someone, shouldn’t you be held accountable for those threats? For a more relevant example: If you put up a blog that constantly criticizes Microsoft and threatens to steal code from them, doesn’t the beast of Redmond have a right to know this when you apply for a job there?

If you are arguing that a potential employer shouldn’t know about that nude picture of you that got taken over spring break, you are still wrong. It is your responsibility to make sure that pictures like that don’t get out into public. In the past, that kind of thing would get publicized by sleazy journalists. Nowadays, that kind of thing gets published straight to You Tube. Same problem, different media.

There are times when being investigated by an employer is actually doing you a service. If you are going for a job that requires a security clearance, you should expect to get screened. All they are really looking for is a reason why you would be denied the clearance that is critical to your ability to perform the job. If you are going for a job that requires you to be a public representative of a company, they need to make sure that you don’t have any secrets that could damage the company. If you are applying for a job with a political organization, you deserve to be investigated. In every one of these examples, the employer is looking for something that would have gotten you fired anyway… possibly after a great deal of public shame.

In general, I doubt that it is a common practice to investigate someone without a pressing reason. Having been on the employers end of this scenario in the past, I can tell you that investigating someone’s political opinions, spring break habits, sexual orientation, or any other irrelevant tidbit is prohibitively expensive. It requires time to dig these things up, and there just isn’t enough bang for the buck here to make investigations useful.

As a final point, why would you want to work for an employer who uses irrelevant information to determine whether or not you should be hired? Really… you are better off somewhere else anyway.

For those of you monitoring the activity on this site (yes, i mean both of you), you probably noticed the lack of posts for the past couple of months. I haven’t fallen off the face of the earth. Unfortunately, something in the blog options did.

After checking and rechecking the options over and over, the problem turned out to be a corrupt link in the database that kept me form logging on. The problem is fixed, and you should start to see posts more often.

I would apologize for the inconvenience, but I doubt that anyone noticed.

For now, I’ll keep the comments turned off. Most of them were links to porn sites anyway. God I hate spammers.

OK… so maybe it’s just another study that relies on “expert” opinion to derive it’s numbers. In order to avoid being a hypocrite, I have to say that I don’t believe the results any more than I believe the studies that tell me how bad video games are for development.

That being said, it’s nice that psychologists “opinions” are beginning to balance out. Someday, I’d like to see the end of opinion based studies. Until that magical day comes, I’ll settle for a world where the “opinions” balance out to a no-op.

Yup… thats right… Somebody in New England lost a whole lighthouse. I’d like to say something witty and funny here, but I can’t come up with anything better than somebody in New England lost a whole lighthouse. Boggles the mind, doesn’t it? I’d hate to use these people as babysitters.

It has just come to my attention that a man from New Zealand has been arrested for lobbing a hedgehog at a young boy. Not to worry folks. I have it on good authority that this was NOT our beloved Spiny Norman, only a distant relative of his. Please continue purchasing the Spiny Norman for President tee shirt advertised in the left column.

Well, now you can play games while you whiz! Thanks to a couple of ingenious Belgians, You can
Kill aliens or go skiing while you relieve yourself. There really isn’t much more to say about this… except that the rest of us are pissed that we didn’t think of it first. It really beats the heck out of those little plastic spinners that were once popular in the bottom of urinals.

Apparently, some genius at Qwest decided to tell workers to use urinal bags in an effort to cut down on the length of bathroom breaks. Qwest claims that the whole thing was a suggestion, not a policy. The workers reaction? Well, you probably guessed by now that they are really p*ssed.

It with a sad heart that I announce that Dungeons and Dragon creator Gary Gygax has passed away. It saddens me that he is gone but he will live forever in his creations. To Gary may all your rolls be 20s.

I’m testing a new way to get rid of comment spam. I’ll let all of you know how it goes.

I don’t know about you, but I’m just plain sick and tired of having to choose between crappy candidates in every election. At this stage of the process, we are usually looking at the list of possible nominees hoping that each party will present their best for the general election. They never do.

On the left side of the aisle, the front runner is Mrs. Clinton. Sorry Hill, I didn’t like you much when you were president the first time. The other side isn’t any better. Heck. we could end up with another “acting” president.

Back in my youth, (yes, we had elections that long ago) some of my classmates came up with a novel approach to calling attention to the fact that a school election was being rigged in favor of a teacher’s son. They ran Spiny Norman as a write-in candidate. Weren’t we all surprised when he won!

For those of you who don’t know Spiny, he first came to fame in 1970 on the long ago canceled Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Back then, his job was to hunt down the notorious Piranha Brothers, though only Dinsdale believed in his existence.

He has since retired from public service to take up a career in politics. Obviously, he is still dealing with piranhas.

So,in honor of those brave classmates, and in celebration of yet-another-crop-of-loser-candidates, I’d like to invite everyone to write Spiny Norman in as a candidate for President. Look forward to more news of Spiny and his prospects for election right here at Spiny Norman’s Election Headquarters. You can also click on the picture of Spiny on the left to buy Spiny Norman For President tee shirts.

Ok, so I’m a little late with the November search string post. So busy, so sorry, so what. This month is a little light on new material, so this should be short.

pflugerville furries
Once again, this one tops the list. After a careful search of all of my web pages, it turns out that the only place that this term appears is in the search strings articles. My monthly comments about this are what perpetuates the problem. That’s OK… It’s fun to pick on the terminally silly.

pflugerville furries are a fetish
pflugerville furries arent a fetish
Its nice to see that we appeal to the confused of all stripes (and spots, and pelts, and feathers… you get the point). How’s that for Fair and Balanced. Take That Fox! (oooh… furry tailed dog-like creature)

and also…
pflugerville texas gas log installation
Now THATS a fetish!

cheats naked sims unblur
how to unblur the sims nude
I’m really prouf of you folks. There were only 2 perverts who want to see naked pixels this month. Usually, we get a couple of dozen.

how to insert dual core into motherboard
Wow. Sounds like someone has a problem.Just remove the screws from the fan grate and… Well, better not go into that one again.

Most of the remaining queries were pretty sane. I’m not sure if the internet is getting smarter, or if the really stupid people are dying off after doing something stupid in meatspace (like microwaving their own heads).

Merriam-Webster Inc. has crowned w00t as word of the year. There is something that always bothered me about that word. It claims to be 1337, but it uses a “t” where it should use a “7″. I don’t want to put my fellow geeks down, but WTFO?

I guess the guy at Reuters who wrote the article didn’t do a very good job of checking his work. First of all, he mentioned that “t” is usually replaced by a “7″, then called it 133t. That sounds a little clueless to me.

I ran across this article about a woman from London who was fired from her job as an announcer for making up spoof messages. Any girl with a sense of humor like that is a keeper. Unfortunately, my wife won’t let me keep her. (I also have no idea whether there would be a jealous husband in the way, but I digress…).

Hi.

I’d like to bring back a monthly feature that leakenova used to post for me. In it, he addressed some of the search strings that he found in my traffic logs. Every one is a string that someone typed into a query box on a search engine, then selected a link to this web site from the list of links presented to them. In other words, every one of these queries brought someone to this sight.

It was a great feature. Unfortunately, leakenova has moved on to things that keep him too busy. Even if he had the time, the log utilities have been broken for a while. So… without further adieu, here goes nuthin!

man from nantucket stella - The Man from Nantucket is a favorite around here. You would think that people would have committed it to memory by now. I’m not sure what Stella has to do with the Man from Nantucket, unless she’s the centerfold he’s looking at while… well… you know.

roadkill university - I think that should really be The Roadkill Bar and Grille. Yum! How about a bag of scrambled possum tartar to go!.

geeky screen names - We have screen names like Geekman and Shameless Geek. I have no idea how that query would bring people here.

ninja pirate pflugerville - Yep… thats him… good old Geekman. He isn’t around here anymore, but you can reach him here at his comic book and gaming store.

sims 2 psp unblurred or sims 2 unblur code or sims cheat to unblur - Its surprising how many ways people can ask a dumb question. It’s also surprising how many horny 12 year olds are out there. No doubt that there will be just as many of these queries next month. I’m waiting for the day that some genius decides to clean off the blurry spot with some kind of acid and gets overcome by the fumes.

yoshi shows you how to use a soldering iron on your mods - That sounds like a good way to get your mods badly burned. You should only let trained personnel touch your mods with a soldering iron.

alternative psp games - Try San Francisco. (What?!?! You were expecting politically correct from someone who calls himself Shameless?)

dirty jokes i can get wetting so i can turn my page - Hunh? No matter how hard I try, I can’t come up with a comment that is funnier or dumber than the query. My only advice is to refer to the “man from nantucket” entry above.

do kmart have a psp - Yep. I tinks dey do! I tinks dey have a dvd too!

gimp dualcore - That would be any dual core running Windows. Please refer to the Microsoft web page for more info.

how to know if you are a geek - If you have to ask, then you are. Congratulations. Now you need to find out what kind of geek you are.

… and a few older ones that we missed …

pflugerville furries - OK… someone from Pflugerville explain this one to me. So far, all I can think about is a Texas fetish or a pet store. A quick browse of the web indicated the former.

cool - I bet the guy who queried “cool” never expected it to bring him to a place called ShamelessGeeks. I think someone at Google is drinking on the job.

a fatal error has occurred while playing tomb raider - Yeah. It was called the Eighties.

walk threw of medal of honor european assault for ps2 - The really bad thing is that I got more than one of the exact same query. Oh well… I guess this is a result of spell checkers.

Well, that about does it. I’ll try to turn this back into a regular feature. I’ve always been fascinated by the types of things that people type into a query box. I’m even more fascinated by the ones that bring them here to my humble abode. Cya next month!

Hello. It has been a long time since I posted, but here are the highlights from GenCon 2007:

Starcraft II was playable on the floor but will not be out until next year.
The Starcraft board game will be released in the next few weeks.

D&D 4th edition will be released this May. It will include an online component called the Dndinsider site. Dndinsider will be replacing both Dungeon Magazine and Dragon Magazine. The last issue of both magazines will be coming out next month.

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Here’s a new one. There are reports of sore muscles and joints that are attributed to gamers playing with their Wii too much. Luckily, nobody has gone blind yet

Wiiitis is much less serious than a StarCraft attack, which has been known to be fatal in at least one South Korean case.

For those of you who are parents: How often do you let your kids go unsupervised on the internet? How many have computers in their room (and are they capable of going online?)

I know we let Shameless on unsupervised (A bad move, we know. We’re sorry.), but does the same hold true for parents with kids less than 6 ft. tall?

I’m asking because I’m very worried that parents today are viewing their child’s ability to go online as a right rather than a privilege. So I figuured I’d ask a slightly-more-informed group.

Thank you and back to your regularly scheduled “Geek-don’t-have-kids-they-don’t-have-***!” (fill in your own blank =P)

*Places down Soapbox and jumps on top of it*

Blogger geeks beware! If you have the wrong interests listed on your livejournal account, you might be eligible for deletion without prior warning.

On May 29th, hundreds of livejournal users woke up to find either their personal journals, or community journals they were watching/members of, gone without any sort of warning. Letters sent to these members later claimed that their journals were deleted due to violation of the TOS. Later, more than one member of the LJ abuse team admitted that they were sent lists of journals with certain keywords that needed to be deleted. This was because, according to their legal team, listing certain activities could be seen as the promotion of those activities, and if LJ knew and didn’t respond then they would become legally liable. They were not allowed, however, to admit who came up with these lists. (More below - Cut for length and possibly offensive topics)

(more…)

Well after a few months of hard work I finally opened the Ninja Pirate in Pflugerville, Texas. Opening up a comic book/video game/game store has been a long dream of mine and well I finnially did it. The rode to opening was well a living nightmare, I think everything that could go wrong went wrong. Everything from not having a floor, to my electriction running off with my exit sign, getting the wrong mail key causing me to miss a rent payment, to fights I have had with the city of Pflugerville. At this point it was well worth it, I have enjoy most of the time I have spent in the shop and look forward to seeing my customers everyday. One ironic twist is my big seller is Anime and Anime goods. I don’t know if many of you know this but well I am not that big of a fan of Anime. The weird thing is everyday I do get to be bigger and bigger fan of it andI have started to actually enjoy some of it. Just don’t tell anyone, I am suppose to be the die hard anime hater of this group. So if you are ever in the Austin, Texas area and want to meet me I am at the Ninja Pirate. We are in Pflugerville, Texas right of I-35 (Well Branch, 1825) exit before Austin right next to the Pflugerville High School. Yes the high school where Friday night lights is filmed. Heck who knows I may shop may be on Friday Night Lights.

The best (and possibly the geekiest) use of robotics can be found at BeerLauncher.com. Using your engineering skills to create a fridge that tosses you a beer gets my vote as engineering genius. If I ever had the time to create a real Shameless Geek award, this guy would win it.

Be sure to watch the video. It proves that this is more than just an internet joke.

Sorry I haven’t put much up here in the past few months. I changed jobs over the summer, and ended up in everybody’s critical path. It doesn’t look like the pace will let up until June, so don’t expect to see much here for a while.

I have, however, done quite a bit of infrastructure work. I’ve changed server’s, recovered from a Linux library disaster, and re-installed the CoD2 and CS:Source servers.

I used to complain that I was bored. I don’t anymore.

Oh… One last thing… Hail Xeon!

Along with every government agency collecting a fee you get to buy Pocky at a discount.

Most of you have noticed that I stopped posting and ranting about video games a few months ago. Why? I have gone to the dark side and became cool? No, I am still a geek, it’s just I have been too busy and focused on opening my Video Game/Comic Book/Traditional Gaming Store. I have been so busy that I have only played three games in the past six months. So busy that I have not had time to stand in line for a Wii and still am Wii-less. I am also PS3-less but, like I told you all, that machine is a good door stop and nothing more.

On the news front for my store. The Ninja Pirate, my store name, is opening up in April in Pflugerville, Texas. I look forward to seeing you all there. I will try to in the future post about my adventures as I open a store but I can’t guarantee anything.

Well… it took a while, but I finally got ShamelessGeeks.com moved to a new server. Hopefully, I can keep this one a little bit more secure than the last one. I’ve already noticed a few changes that will probably help with security quite a bit.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting.

I just wanted to take this opportunity to wish you a Happy Thanksgiving. One of the things that I am most thankful for is those of you who take the time to read my blog. Both of you.

I don’t usually do this, but here is a plug for an old friend who is starting an online store:

If you are looking for some really geeky merchandise, check out Geek-Man’s website. Geek Man is a straight shooter, and probably the only guy in the world who is geekier than yours truly. You’re sure to find the perfect Christmas gift for that special geek in your life at www.geek-man.com

Intel announced the first quad-core processor today. The race to 4 cores is a big win for Intel’s engineering department, but it’s probably only big news to the server market. Still… it shows that chipzilla is back with an vengeance.

Intel won this battle by using the same trick they used on their first dual-core entry. Essentially, the quad is made of 2 dual-core chips stitched together. AMD is promising a fully redesigned quad sometime in 2007. AMD’s approach certainly appears to be better engineering, but only time will tell who is right. Till then, the only thing we know is who was first.

While 4 cores will help to beef up large multi-user systems and busy network servers, they really won’t help the average user for a few years to come. That’s because most of us use applications that don’t take much advantage of the extra CPU’s. Until programmers get used to the idea of parallelism and multi-threading, singles and duals will be a better bet for the home user. In the case of gamers, a dual can help a little bit, but games tend to run fastest on the highest-speed single available. Quad cores are just a waste of money and power for now.

I’m just posting something to let everyone know that I haven’t forgotten about the web site. For those who don’t know me, I recently started a new job. The work is great, but it is much more demanding than the old one. I simply haven’t had the chance to comment on any of the news. I haven’t even been able to post the little goodies that people send me via email. As soon as I am past the current crunch, I promise to post much more often.

On a related note, this is an open blog. All you need to do is sign up if you would like to post. Here’s your chance to comment on anything you want… as long as you have some kind of reasonable argument that the subject is somehow geek-related.

Hey, Dad, it’s your theme song. =P

White and Nerdy

(Hey, you said you wanted to see it. ^_~ See if you can catch all the geek references!)

Star Trek first appeared on the air Forty years ago today, man are Shatner and Nimoy getting old. Shameless, didn’t you watch the original Star Trek when you where a teenager?

Intel announced today that it is headed for a 10% layoff over the next year. Some of this will be accomplished through attrition and previously announced business actions (like sales of business units). Some, unfortunately, appear to be actual pink slips.

This looks to me like the fallout from the butt-kicking that Intel got from AMD over the past few years. If you are one of the poor unfortunates who gets a pink slip, here is a list of steps you can take that may result in a new job

Here is a story close to my heart. McDonalds will shrink the opening of the McFlurry ice cream containers in an attempt to save the lives of hedgehogs. Quite a humane thing for them to do. Nobody wants to see Spiny Norman get caught in a dessert cup.

The story is close to my heart because I was part of a crew who was on the “Spiny Norman for Student Senate President” committee when I was a senior in High School. I was neither mastermind nor ringleader, but I was always proud of the fact that he managed to win by a landslide… though that wasn’t the official position that the school took.

Some senior classes donate benches to the school. Some donate landscaping improvements. My class gave the school administration a pointless, single-fingered gesture when we found out that the only “acceptable” candidate they would allow just happened to be the son of a teacher. We got an imaginary write-in candidate elected. I think our donation was more memorable.

In a world of stupid contests (otherwise know as reality shows), here’s one that actually makes sense. the Mobile Phone Throwing Championship was held in Finland this weekend and was won by a man who managed to throw his communicator 292 feet. Thats impressive for raw distance, but I’d much rather see a contest that involves throwing the phone against a cinder block wall. The winner would either be the person who shattered the phone into the most pieces, or the one who made the pieces bounce the farthest from the wall.

Today, Pluto was stripped of it’s status as the ninth planet in the solar system and was demoted to a “dwarf planet". This was in response to a push to add three more small heavenly bodies to the list. Scientists opted to cut back to 8, rather than increase to 12.

No comment yet from Mickey’s dog about what he plans to do about the demotion… except that he’s going to Disney World.

The Internet sensation Snakes on a Plane hits theaters today. Do your self a favor and go see it. While you are at it, wear our new brand new 42 shirt and watch all the geeks in audience shout 7 times 9.

William Shatner is trying to stir up new interest in the Star Trek franchise by voicing his old Captain Kirk character for a bunch of new video games. Shatner probably doesn’t need the money this time around, so you gotta believe he’s doing it for the fans. Unfortunately, it will be a lot more difficult without Scotty.

James Doohan, Star Trek’s “Scotty", is scheduled to be posthumously launced into orbit in October. The announcement comes after delaying last year’s attempt to launch his remains. Seems like a fitting way to dispose of the body of someone who, despite being an actor, inspired many of this country’s top engineers, and probably helped to push the space program as well.

Slate has posted an article about the sad tragic death of collecting baseball cards. Sadly it is not just baseball cards that suffered a similar death, so have comics for about the exact same reasons. At their current state I don’t think both are going to be around in 20-30 years. So for all you guys polybagging, slabbing and boarding your comics and cards, stop it comics and baseball cards are worthless.

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Today was officially the last day of support for Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), and Windows Millennium Edition (ME). I have fond memories of 98 SE, but the others were pretty doggy. I’m really not sad to see any of them go.

Next on the list is XP SP1, which is scheduled to go away in October. XP SP2 support will not stop until 12 to 24 months after the early 2007 release of Windows Vista.

Researchers proved today in a study that Mushrooms can get you high. I think my old college roommate says it best, DUH!!!!

This ElReg story about Master Card’s re-branding efforts shows that we are not descended from apes, but from the useless third of the population of Golgafrincham. All hail Fintlewoodlewix! I dare you to read through the article without either giggling or snoring.

The New York Times has posted an article about the technology Google uses. The article makes me wonder when Google is going to take over the world.

Saturday’s Space Shuttle launch is still on, despite risk of foam flying off of the fuels tank. It’s a big risk that they are taking this time, knowing what happened to Atlantis just 3 years ago. Good luck boys and girls! You may need it this time.

The Gartner group released a survey yesterday showing that computers break down less often than they did two years ago. This applied to both laptops and desktops.

The one thing that I didn’t see mentioned in the survey is how often users break down. I suspect that the increase in spyware over the last few years has made the frequency of user breakdowns increase.

It looks like big, bad dictator Saddam had enough of his hunger strike after exactly one meal. Way to tough it out! I’m guessing that breaking the backbone of a country doesn’t require that you have one yourself.

Next time, instead of refusing to eat, maybe he should refuse to shower. We know he’s had adequate experience with that from his spider hole days.

Most of you don’t know this (even Shameless) but I work at a comic book shop. Yes, it’s a dark evil secret I have hid from all of you; but now like a good geek I am coming clean. I currently work at Thor’s Hammer in Austin, Texas as the “Magic” guy, but the reality is I do a lot more then just Magic. So if you are in the Austin, Texas drop by and say hi. I am there most of the week and always on Thursday and Friday night.
Now that I got that out of the way on to what I wanted to talk to you about. Earlier this week I told you if your a comic book fan you owe it to yourself to get Civil War 2. Well you better hurry, the darn book is selling as fast as hot cakes. Thor’s sold out in two days flat and they had a ton. In fact I think at this point it is sold out in Austin. Other shops in the country are also moving Civil War 2 fast too, it should achieve sell out by weeks end. One other hint, you don’t have buy Civil War 1 to enjoy Civil War 2.

Just in time for the movie comes the market-tie in product of all time, a sterling silver bar with a picture of Garfield on it.

Recently I updated my PC so that I could install the WinFX development SDK and I noticed a new download called Windows Genuine Advantage. At first I did not think much about it. In order to install WinFx, I had to download and install it. The only thing that annoyed me about it was that I was previously able to install WinFx without it. Odd and annoying, but not atypical Microsoft behavior. However, after reading this article about what Windows Genuine Advantage is and does, I am down right pissed.

Windows Genuine Advantage is an anti-piracy tool installed by Microsoft to check to see if the version of Windows installed on a PC is legit or not. If it is not, then Microsoft will nag you to death and deny you patches. The kicker, however, is that it sends status updates everyday to Microsoft and can receive commands to shutdown parts of a PC from Microsoft.

My big question is: why is Microsoft doing this? No pirate in his right mind is going install it. It seems like another anti-piracy tool that is designed to punish honest users. Maybe I am reading too much into this, but still… why did Microsoft not come clean about this application until users figured out it was up to, weeks after strong-arming every honest user into installing it?

I saw something somewhere online that mentioned that ask.com had released some search tools for blogs, so I decided to check it out for myself. What I found was pretty surprising, and I think it is (mostly) a pleasant surprise. I entered the phrase rise of legends in the Blogs and Feeds page, and was surprised to find that my little post about it appeared on the second page. In front of that, What I found was mostly a bunch of reviews by small, independent sites like this one. I only found one or two commercial sites who had the game for sale. I tried the same thing, but at the top level web searcher, and found 18 pages of entries… and none of them was mine. Most of those 18 pages were full of blurbs by the developers, ads for online game sales, and reviews by the same old tired reviewers that nobody trusts anymore.

Part of the problem is that Ask.com needs to do a lot more work on their searcher. I understand that the small readership of this site keeps it below the radar of most searchers, but I was surprised that page 19 of the results was about X-men: Legends, not Rise of Legends. The fact that something on a completely different topic was ahead of me in the rankings was tremendously annoying. Just to check up on this, I tried the same phrase on Google, and got 50 pages of results that were all on target.

It looks like the blog searcher does a pretty good job of sticking to blogs. The searcher could probably use a little more work to weed out the remaining advertising feeds, but it seems pretty good overall.

According to Reuters, Monster’s job index hit a record high of 167 in May which is an increase of 4 over April’s number. Excellent news for those in the midst of a job search.

Eventually, I’m hoping the demand in the high tech industry keeps growing until it reaches the levels of the late 90’s. It’s a pretty unlikely occurrence, but wouldn’t it be sweet? Does anyone remember when companies would give across-the-board increases to high tech workers so that they wouldn’t leave? Those were the days. *slap* *slap* Wake Up Dude!

Recently a British politician has admitted to having an affair with a male prostitute. The main reason he gave for the affair was because he was going bald. This has to be the best excuse I have ever heard from a politician why they had an affair.

The Scientologists announced they are about to open up a center that will allow people to enhance the traditional five senses and 57 other senses that Scietologists call perceptions. Some perceptions are things like: gravity control, balance, relative sizes, personal size, moisture, reality, compass direction, pain and perception of computation. Using high tech machines, the Scientologists plan to make it possible for people to train these 57 percedptions so that they appear to have super powers. All I got say to all this is: HAIL XENON!!!!

Christie’s Auction House and Paramount have team up to bring the biggest Star Trek auction ever this October. Items up for auction include over 1000+ items from the Original Star Trek, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and the movies. Some of the cooler items up for sale include: phasers from the shows, bottles of Chateau Picard, various Capitan’s’ chairs, Dr. McCoy’s uniform, Seven of Nine’s uniform, various ship models including the runabout from Deep Space Nine, the Starship Enterprise and Picard’s jumpsuit. The items I want most from the auction are goblets from Quark’s bar, the replica of Captain’s Kirk chair or the Star Fleet Command Building.
If you really want to see everything Christies is also offer a $500 limited edition box set with the two volume catalog or you could just order the catalog for the low price of 90 dollars. There will also be limited showings of the items at Star Trek conventions (and once comic book convention) in New York City, Las Vegas, Seattle, San Diego and LA. For more information and pictures Christies has setup a web site.

Submitted for your approval: How to turn you friends room into a hamster cage. I have to say that I have nothing but admiration for the perpetrators of this prank. Especially since they spent 2 years and a considerable amount of money to accomplish it. Hats off to them!

Wonderland has posted some pictures of the E3 booth babes, or at least what Wonderland thinks is a booth babe.

I guess you’ve all heard about New Jersey’s trouble coming up with a state slogan. I was born and raised there, so I guess I have earned the right to add my own suggestions for a slogan. Feel free to add your own to the list.

“What happens in New York gets buried in New Jersey”
“The medical waste scares away the sharks”
“Come dump on us”
“Visit the worlds largest mosquito sanctuary”
“Half of the state has the fresh scent of pine”
“Where organized crime goes to retire”
“Experience the challenge of toxic waste”
“Where you can gamble your house away without all of those distracting shows”

For all those Star Wars fan who want to see the movies as they where presented in the 1970s and 80s, Lucas has answered your prayers. Come this September you can buy on DVD the orginal 1970’s theater release of Star Wars. For most Star Wars fans this not a big deal, this release is for those two loud fanboys who could not stand the fact that Greedo shot first. The original theatrical versions will only be available from September 12 through December 31 2006.

It looks like there is a nasty exploit bug that has surfaced in Firefox 1.5.0.2, the latest version. Though it was first given a low risk rating, recent exploit code that can cause the browser to crash and execute arbitrary code has surfaced. The risk may be far worse than originally anticipated.

There is no fix yet. I’ll let you know when I see one.

Often video games have huge amounts of buzz behind them but recently I have heard a lot more buzz for a movie amongst the gaming circles. However the movie is not the new Final Fantasy film Advent Rising, it is “Snakes on a Plane”. The concept is fairly simple, Samuel L. Jackson is an FBI cop delivering an important witness to a mob trial. While in flight the mob dumps a crate of poisonous snakes in the plane. Mayhem ensues, lots of people get killed and Samuel L. Jackson is forced to battle a plane full of snakes. Hence the title “Snakes on a Plane". CNN has posted an article that sums up all the craziness about the movie. According to the article the movie even has a blog that gets more hits then us.

In Virginia they have this crazy hobby where a bunch of guys dress up as Union and Confederate soldiers and battle it out as though they where in the Civil War. We call it re-enacting and it is very popular in Virginia. It also is mocked like all good geek hobbies are by the less than understanding masses. The thing about re-enacters is that they do not just reenact the Civil War, they reenact every war. Scary to think somewhere out there is a bunch of guys clad in spandex re-enacting the Secret Wars… but hey, they do reenact every war.

Paramount Pictures has announced that it has tapped Lost creator John Abarams to co-write, direct and help produce the next Star Trek movie. Some of the other details leaked so far is that it will be a prequel to Original Star Trek, explore the origins of Kirk and Spock, and feature new actors playing the roles of Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy. It will also show how the three developed a long lasting friendship in Star Fleet Academy and on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.
The choice in Abrams is an interesting choice, he has a long track record of writing successful sci-fi like tv series. The only question is he up to the task of rebirth the now dead Trek franchise or is he going join the long list of recent failures. The juror is still out on this. Trek has a detail past but there is little of Kirk and Spock origins that is canon. Abrams should be fine as long as he sticks to a few key details. The only scaring me is that Abrams last great sci-fi movie the he wrote was Armageddon.
The only other question I have is what original cast will be appearing in the movie. With both Shanter and Nimoy in their 70’s this would most likely be the last time we would ever get to see them suit up as Kirk and Spock. Hopefully Abrams will include them and other Original Star Trek cast at least in a brief cameo.

Fox network has signed a deal that would put over half of it’s prome time lineup online as early as the moring after the show airs. No doubt that this will be a big blow to the DVR market. Why spend the money for the extra receiver and the DVR if you can just download the same thing for free tomorrow morning. Here’s a good idea for a software product: Design something that allows you to make a list of TV shows, then retrieves them for you when they appear online. Google Hollywood? Nice.

A recent survey shows that outsourcing delivers far less savings than promised. All of the promises of 60% cost reduction ended up being more like 15%. Still a reduction, but is it worth the reduction in efficiency caused by distance and cultural differences?

The Beast of Redmond is showing it’s human side again. Microsoft’s Coding4Fun page has a few suggestions for how to play an April Fool’s prank using a computer. Some of you may remember that ShamelessGeeks.com was the victim of a sick practical joke by the very same people last year. The whole thing caused a significant amount of psychological damage to both of me, and we hope it is never repeated.

ValiantFans have announced that their first Valiant Fan’s Con will be in New York, March 31 - April 2, 2006. Valiant comics was a comic book company/universe that came out in the late 80’s and sadly died a painful death in mid 90’s after Akklaim bought it. To comic fans it is best remember as the line that started the whole crazy speculation market of 90’s. Also for creating the concepts of the zero issues, gimmick covers and variant covers. It was also a main player, next to Image, that was blamed for the crash of comics in the late 90’s. To me the Valiant universe was one of the best developed and well written comic universe ever done. At least while Jim Shooter was there. After he left the bolts slowly feel off and the Valiant universe lost all its charm and tight continuity that made the universe worth reading.
Thankful because of the speculator market (in other words all those guys who bought a case of each issue) of the 90’s most Valiant issues can be picked up for peanuts, literally. The only hard stuff to find is the Pre-Unity books, which can still be bought for a couple bucks, and the end runs of few titles. I am only 100 issue short of collecting every Valiant book ever published and it is mostly end run stuff. So if you have a few issues to sell drop me a line and I will ship you my want list.
My favorite character from the Valiant universe was Magnus the Robot Fighter. Magnus was created back in the 60’s by Gold Key and Russ Manning as a Tarzan in the future. Jim Shooter revived him in the 80’s in the Valiant line and took him in a new direction that sort made him a warrior king caught in an universe that no longer accepted him . Other favorites of mine where: Rai, Bloodshot, Eternal Warrior, Archer and Armstrong, Timewalker, X-O Manowar and the Harbingers. Rai was the defender of Japan, in Magnus timeframe, who’s ancestor was Bloodshot and who’s Nantes blood he shared. Bloodshot was an ex-mafia warrior who gained super powers when he injected with Nanted by some evil people, who he swore revenge against. Eternal Warrior, Armstrong and Timewalker where all immortal brothers who helped defend the earth from evil people and alien invaders. Archer was Armstrong’s sidekick who would go on to found the Archers, who where a peace keeping group in Magnus timeframe. In addition to be immortal, Timewalker was a time traveler who journeyed from time frame to time frame, having many adventures. X-O Manowar who was a Viking warrior who stole a battle armor from his enslavers the spider aliens. The spider aliens where also the main bad guys in most of the other Valiant books. Lastly the Harbingers where a group of super power individuals who had escape from the clutches of Harbinger, the evil villain who also created Bloodshot. Two of the members where also the parents of Magnus the Robot Fighter. In other words anything that happened in the Valiant universe mattered and had impact no matter when it occurred.
Some of the Valiant creators, writers and artists announced for this year Valiant Fan Convention include: Rodney Ramos, Howard Simpson, Sean Chen, Anthony Castrillo, Mike Bair, Mike Leeke (sat. only, who I have meet and no we are not related.), Yvel Guichet, Hannibal King, Louis Small Jr., Winston Blakely, Jim Calafiore, Michael Cavallaro, Jorge Gonzalez, Jeff Gomez,Chrysoula Artemis-Gomez, Andrew Wendel, Dennis Calero (aka Atomic paintbrush), Walt Simonson (tent), Mike McGuire, Rafael Kayanan, Kevin Kobasic, Stu Suchit, Serge-Frederic Clermont, Simon Erich, Phyllis Novin, Darren Sanchez (sun. only), Joe Albelo, Omar Banmally, Alex Glass, Valerie Dorazio, Savark Dicupe, Mark McKenna, Lee Stacy, Evan Skolnick, Eric Hope, Anthony Inciarrano, Yvonne DeSoto, and John Cebollero. ValiantFans.com will also premier a new X-O lithograph illustrated by X-O Manowar co-creator, Bob Layton. Hopefully there will also be lots of panels and plenty of Valiant goodies for sale, most likely at a ridiculous markup.

Ever wonder what Homer would look like in real life? You can now find out thanks to YouTube and Sky One in Britain . Who have posted a live action version of the Simpson’s opening on its site. If you can’t watch it don’t worry it will be opening of the Simpsons this Sunday. It is amazing how similar Homer and Shameless look.

Well, it was bound to happen. The Chinese have created a game that glorifies the Chinese Communist Party’s here Lei Feng. Though the idea of glorifying good deeds, hard work, and helping people might be a noble cause, it sounds like a snore to me. Then again, I never liked Harvest Moon either. Something about farming and sewing that make me think of watching boards warp.

I always like to play games that add excitement to my day. If I wanted to learn how to farm or sew, I’d move to the country and buy a thimble. I guess I’m just a decadent Capitalist at heart.

Bill Gates had some very unflattering things to say about MIT’s $100 laptop project. It sounds pretty mean-spirited to me. I’m sure that if the project were going to sell a new copy of Windows with each and every machine, he would be much nicer about it. Unfortunately, the copy of Windows alone would exceed the $100 budget. Please Bill, don’t put down a valiant attempt to do good. Jealousy makes you look ridiculous.

I thought I would never say this, but Pogs are back .

I don’t know if I should scream or laugh.

A new invention for the military. Sensors to help soldiers avoid messages from HQ asking what they would like for dinner and other REMF questions during a firefight.

A High School student in Pennsylvania has discovered that anthrax in a letter can be killed simply by ironing it. That’s right… all of the doctors and toxicology specialists working on the problem have no solution, but a High School student does. Classic.

Does this mean we can all peel the plastic sheets and duct tape off of our houses now?

Another week, another list of games coming out this week:

The Apprentice for the PC
Fight Night Round 3 for the Playstation 2, PSP, XBox and XBox 360
Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords for the PC
MS Saga: A New Dawn for the Playstation 2
Neverend for the PC
Sonic Riders for the Playstation 2, Gamecube and XBox
Super Monkey Ball Touch & Roll for the Nintendo DS
TOCA Race Driver 3 for the PC, XBox, Playstation 2
Tycoon City: New York for the PC

Decent selection this week, with again some odd games making the list like The Apprentice. I heard rumors about it but I thought it was joke. Guess not. Nothing really noteworthy, in other words no A-list games. My pick for this week is: Super Monkey Ball Touch & Roll. Loved Super Monkey Ball and this is the perfect game for the Nintendo DS. It should be winner if the designers actually put some effort into the game.

Move over 12-Step program! China now has a hospital ward for internet addicts, where they’re denied use of both the internet and phones for a 20-day period.

I doubt such a method would ever come to the US - geeks everywhere would decry it as “cruel and unusual punishment” under the Constitution. Too bad, because if it did I could send my parents there. XD

AnandTech is featuring an online tour of Newegg today. It’s nice to get a look at the second most likely place for my money to end up. If you are wondering about the MOST likely place for my money to end up, I’ll just respond by saying that I have already seen my Daughter’s college.

Sorry for the delay but I have been digging my computer of the snow dropped by the Blizzard of 2006. A lot coming out this week as the pace should start to pick up for the spring. Onto the list:

Age of Empires: The Age of Kings for the Nintendo DS
Drakengard 2 for the Playstation 2
Exit for the PSP
Full Auto for the XBox 360
Grandia III for the Playstation 2
Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure for the PC, XBox, and Playstation 2
Rugby 06 for the Playstation 2 and XBox
Star Wars: Empire at War for the PC
State of Emergency 2 for the Playstation 2

A lot of good stuff coming out this week. Onto the highlights:

Grandia III: Hopefully the translation work on this version of Grandia as the Working Design was. Previous installements where fairly good if you enjoy Japanese RPGs.

State of Emergency 2: With the ghost of 9/11 and GTA not hanging over this game hopefully the devolpers will devilver the anarchy fun fest they promised in State of Emergency 1.

Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure: After many delays finnally Marc Ecko’s little vantity project hits shelves. I played this at E3 and well found it to be a bore fest. Poorly designed and a total vantiy project. Marc you had no right to say what you said at last GDC.

Drakengard 2: Love to fly with Dragons? Love Square-Enix? Then you will love Drakengrad 2.

Age of Empires: The Age of Kings: This one has been getting a lot of hype, I am on the fence about it. It looks like a fun game but I am unsure if it will translate well to the small scale. Still before the stylus only a looney would even think about releasing a RTS for a handheld.

Full Auto: After a long drought owners of the XBox 360 gets another game. Isn’t odd how there has been more XBox game released then XBox 360 games released since the XBox 360 came out.

My pick for this week is: Grandia III. Loved the first one, loved the second one and hopefully will love the third one.

Here is one for the books. Big Planet Comics, a local comic shop to me here in DC is suing its rival, Big Monkey Comics, for trademark infringement. Joel Pollock, owner of Big Planet Comics, feels consumers will be confuse Big Monkey for Big Planet Comics. Scipio Garling response to the lawsuit was: “For my part, I just want to assure the public that there is nothing that could interest me LESS than emulating the overall feel and impression of Big Planet Comics. Please do not confuse it with Big Monkey Comics.” Then asked his readers if they could tell the difference between a picture of planet and monkey.

Exploding Ink patented by Qinetiq. This is a step up from the exploding cigar prank.

Recently I found the online site Instocktrades.com, which sells graphic novels and trade paperbacks at 30%-50% off. With free postage on orders over $50. Which is a better offer then Amazon.com. This site’s deal sound to good to be true, so I gave them out a try to see if they where legit.

I have to say they are 100% legit. I went to their site and order several graphic novels and couple trade paperbacks that had been planning to read. It was fairly easy to find what I wanted. Provided it is still in print (if you are looking for out of print stuff try mycomicshop.com or ebay). The only complaint I have about the site is there is a lot of broken links to pictures of covers. I also would have liked more synopsis and user feedback information about the various books.

The order went fairly smooth. I ordered on a Sunday and Tuesday morning they sent me an email telling the order had shipped with a tracking number. The order arrived five business days later, which is not bad for free shipping. They do offer faster shipping if you can not wait five days for your books.

The order was packaged fairly well with lots of peanuts and the order itself was in a plastic bag with backing board. The only issue I had with the order was that one of the books was damaged. Luckily, Instocktrades.com has a good replacement policy in place. I simply emailed them and they sent me a replacement out right away.

I definitely plan to use Instocktrades.com in the future and would recommend it if you are looking for a low cost source on the latest graphic novels and trade paperbacks. They also offer a comic book subscription service, which a lot of people rave about. I can not say one way or the other if it is any good since I have never used it. I still enjoy going to my Local Comic Book Shop on Wednesday to much too use an online comic book subscription service. If you do use their comic book subscription service please post here if it is any good or bad.

Slate has posted an article about Stephen King’s latest book the Celll. Which is about zombie cell phone users. I know cell phones are annoying but when did they become Eeeevillll?

It appears that looking for a job online has just gotten tougher. There are new federal regulations governing how a company must conduct it’s online job search that will have a dramatic affect on all of your job hunting. I would suggest that every Geek looking for a job read up on the new regs, and incorporate them into your job search. Thank the federal govt. and the cheap lawyers of the world for this one.

Meanwhile, I think it’s a good time for me to go back and finish GeekHall.

It looks like scientists have found a lost world in Indonesia that is full of previously unknown species.

Still no sign of Marshall, Will, Holly, or the sleestak.

If I was ever going to prank American Idol it would go something like this

I think I know what is happening to all of those manhole covers disappearing in Indianapolis. Thats right… It’s the Larry Niven Fan club collecting them and covering them in chocolate.

Just what is this incredibly obscure reference? Check the category for a clue. If you laughed at the joke because you understood it immediately, then you need to put down that book and get a life. If you can’t figure it out within 5 minutes, you have no right to call yourself a geek.

The 2005 Razzie Award nominee list has been announced. This year, it looks like we Geeks have a little bit of a dilemna… there are 2 equally bad Sci-Fi performances that are up for the category of worst actor.

The first is Tom Cruise for his not-so-great performance in “War of the Worlds". In it, the producers found a reasonable way to update an H.G. Welles classic to match modern science. Unfortunately, they turned the lead role over to Mr. Cruise to be butchered. Tom’s performance was pretty bad, but I’ve seen him do worse.

The second is Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s performance in “Doom", which I think should have been renamed “Duum". Dwayne looked more like a “the sack of pebbles” than “The Rock” in this one. I’ll never forgive them for what they did to the story… although I’ll probably buy the DVD anyway. (I know, I know. It doesn’t make sense).

I personally don’t have a favorite in this race. Whoever it is, I’ll end up laughing at them both. As for the other nominees, I didn’t see the movies, so I won’t offer any opinion. I’ll just say that it looks like a “Who’s Who” of bad acting.

In case you haven’t noticed (I’m sure you did), ShamelessGeeks has fallen into a deep rut. Posts have been primarily from one person with one viewpoint and very little time to express it. I would like you (yes, you) to help me change that.

I guess that I never properly expressed the community-oriented nature of this site. It is supposed to be about Geeks posting and submitting stories of Geek interest, with other Geeks tossing in opinions on the topic. Ideally, it would have the technical posts of an Ars Technica, the reviews of a Tom’s Hardware or Firing Squad, and the front page blog of a Slashdot.

In the case of ShamelessGeeks, I wanted all of these features to be user supported and contributed, without any fees or obligations. The big difference is that this site is a moderated community site, and I’ll even help a little with article formatting and grammar. The moderation keeps the filthy-mouthed ranters from soiling the content, and the grammar assistance makes things easier to read.

BTW… I love a good rant. As long as you don’t go overboard and say something that can get me sued, have at it! I also love to see smartass comments. Give me all of those that you have!

If you would like to submit an article or a review, use the brushed-aluminum buttons on the far left of the site. If you would like to post any news articles, just sign up for the blog using the blog menu (directly to the right of the brushed-aluminum buttons). If you would like to comment on an article, just add your comment. The email address required by the comment script isn’t checked, so use a fake one if you wish to remain anonymous.

I’m currently trying to recruit new contributors for this site. If you have anything that you want to say, here is your chance. There is no pay, there are only a few rules, and you probably won’t become famous here… but the roar of the virtual crowd can be it’s own reward

– COJones

A bit more then last week but not as much as this time last year. Onto the list of games coming out this week:

25 to Life for XBox, Playstation 2 and XBox
Ape Escape Academy for the PSP
Ape Escape 3 for the Playstation 2
MVP 06 NCAA Baseball for the XBox, Playstation 2
MX vs. ATV Unleashed for the PC
Samurai Showdown V for the XBox (delayed from last week)
Zooo for the Gameboy Advance

Again not a lot coming out this week, however we have a couple of note.

Ape Escape 3 and Ape Escape Academy: For all you Escape lovers out there, all two of you, you get not one but two Ape Escape games. Ape Escape 3 is a platformer. While Ape Escape Academy is a collection of mini games. Ape Escape is played out so don’t expect much from either

25 to Life: Finally a game that lets you play cops and robbers online. Get ready for loud over cries about this game.

My game of the week is: 25 to Life. I have been waiting forever since Battlefield 1942 came out for a good multiplayer cops and robber game. Finally some one did it and it looks like it is fun from what I have heard. For all my readers in the Washington DC area, I have a gaming buy tip for you. The Toy R Us in Tyson Corner is shutting down and is offer video games at 20% off the list price. You are not going find a bargain like that for a long time again. I picked up a bunch of games today but they had tons and tons of games still on the shelves. Include some must haves like Killer 7 and the Bible Game.

In another bone head move, that disregards our first amendment rights, Congress has passed a bill that makes it against the law to annoy someone via the Internet. This bill would make flaming against the law. I guess also trolling is now banned.

A Michigan man has been charged with intentionally sickening 3 people with a handshake while in court. Funny… I thought that the only way to get sick in court was to shake hands with a lawyer

It warmed my heart today to see an article about King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp recording sounds for Windows Vista. Is this a signal that Windows Vista will be geared toward a more adult crowd? It would be a welcome change from the targeting of XP (which I have been known to refer to as BarneyOS). Hopefully, they’ll get rid of that annoying little mongrel that slows down searches too!

This isn’t totally unexpected, but Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith has won the People’s Choice award for best film. A lot of die-hard fans of the “original” trilogy have found ways to disparage this film, but I thought is was very good. I rate it as second best of all 6 films, right behind The Empire Strikes Back. Unlike Lester Haines, who wrote the article for TheRegister, I don’t believe that Episodes I - III are bad just because Episode V was so good.

Of course, this is only my opinion, and I welcome those who disagree to post their views.

Michigan Law Abuse Watch (M-LAW) has released it’s list of the wackiest warning labels. Though the site appears to be nothing more than an attempt to publicize an upcoming book, it might be worth checking out.

Unfortunately, my favorites were not in the running. You have to be a real geek to consider “Intel Inside” and “Microsoft Certified” as valid warning labels. Oh well, maybe next year.

It has been a long time since I answer reader mail. Excuse me search strings since we do not get any reader mail. Except for that lady who wanted to know about fake Nintendo games. And the Stubbs the Zombie PR person. But the rest of you readers could not be bothered. So again I left answer what you guys searched for that lead you to this site. Still it would be nice to get some reader mail. So send me some to leakenova at yahoo com. Better yet just post something.

On to your questions:

wsyp video?
If you mean the We Share Your Pain video from Microsoft? Go here for that. For some odd reason I do not think Microsoft really shares your pain.

home shooting involving children?
Great another thing to blame on video games. I blame Barney for all violence.

tamagotchi secert code?
Give it up. You know you are going starve your pet to death once you discover Nintendogs.

gamestop trade-in value for gauntlet?
50 cents

harvest moon: a wonderful life special edition heart cutscenes?
Here is a little hint on how to see them, buy the game. Next!

ps2 tony hawk american wasteland glitch unable to finish mission?
Save your money and buy Tony Hawk Underground or Tony Hawk 4.

secret codes for marvel nemesis?
You had to go and point out that I have failed in my mission to save you from crappy games. For the love of god stop buying crap.

what is the cost of empireearth2 in kmart?
$50.00 like it is at ever other shop.

smurfageddon?
You mean UNICEF video that showed just how sick every boys childhood fantasy of watching a village of Smurfs being nuked is? And enjoyable too.

the last development in marxism?
They discovered a little thing called capitalism. You can now buy coffee mugs and T-shirts on their web site.

any xbox 360s available in sulphur springs texas?
I saw a few at this place called EBay.

be able to unblur the sims?
Go buy a Barbie doll you perv.

dave chappelle addicted to starcraft?
I thought it was his World of Warcraft addiction that set him into Rehab.

how to unblur naked people in the sims 2 for psp?
You perv just do not give up. Once you unblur them the Sims look like freakish Barbie dolls.

meijers bratz dance mat?
Why do you torment me like this with your constant requests for crappy games. Would you rather see a video of me watching a William Shanter poetry reading? Is that enough torment for you?

sims 2 gamecube unblur?
Good lord Jack do you give up. I keep telling you once they are unblurred they look like Barbie dolls.

sudoku electronic handheld game touch screen?
Good idea, I think Mastiff is working on one for the Nintendo DS. If not I am sure by years end someone will make a Sudoko game for the Nintendo DS. Just don’t tell my wife.

12 days of Christmas and yugioh?
Why does this sound like a real bad idea?

dog laughter mp3?
No clue, but I am sure you can find it in Nintendogs.

sims university how to unblur graphics?
Give it up you prev. Never mind the code is ……

cheats for sims 2 gamecube nude unblur?
Okay you win. Here is the code: “Call or email Jack Thompson and ask him.”

boycott gun activision?
Simple don’t buy the game. Better yet buy it used if you still want to play the game. This way you don’t give your money to Activision.

cod2 hacks?
You have serious balls asking us that question. COD 2 really needs a punk buster.

david freeman acp?
I think this will answer all your questions about David Freeman. His vintage collection of computers is one of the biggest and coolest on this earth.

rayman 64 tv commercial?
Finnally a question about a good game. No clue but I am sure the guys vga muesum could help you out.

2005’s goriest game?
2004’s was easy it was BloodRayne 2 hands down. This year it is a little tougher. I would have to go with Resident Evil 4.

zoo tycoon ds clues to deleting animals?
Turn your stylus upside down and rub the top screen of your DS for a minute. If that does not work, jump up and down doing the hokey pokey while singing into the DS microphone I am a little tea pot. If all else fails go to Gamefaqs.

best character dead or alive 4?
The one that kicks real high.

cod2 wall hacks?
Oh shameless I think we have found your cheater.

do the ducks lay eggs on harvest moon a wonderful life special?
Do bears take dumps in the woods?

do you need to swap discs for dynasty warriors 5:xtreme legends?
If you are having a problem any Dynasty Warrior game. Return it and get another Dynasty Warrior game. Any version is fine, they are all the same.

big torrent shameless?
Huh?

On that note, I hope that answered all your questions. Join us again in a few months when “We Answer the Search String.”

I just ran across this year’s list of banished words as dictated by tiny little Lake Superior State University. The one thing I noticed about these words is that none of them are from the world of high-tech! C’mon… If any sector of this country has overused terms that deserve to be banished, it is the tech sector. Probably the next worst bunch would be gamers (pwned anyone?).

OK… That does it… Time for a list of banned techie words to come out. If you have any nominations, tack them on to this post as comments, or send them to webmaster@shamelessgeeks.com. Let me know why you think the word or phrase deserves banishment, and let me know who you are if you want your name included in the credits for the entry.

Street Fighter: Alpha Generations

One of the newest movies of the Street Fighter series, Alpha Generations follows its predecessors in terms of content: violence, violence, and an abundance of testosterone. Definitely not my genre of choice – and this movie didn’t change my mind otherwise. Let’s just say that any anime that has as much grunting and moaning as it has dialogue does not pass my litmus test – I do not want to shell out $20+ for a DVD of nothing but males sounding like they have The World’s Largest case of constipation.

Now let’s get to the breakdown, shall we:

Menu: (4/5) Rather simplistic as far as menus go, but it serves its purpose quite nicely. The special features section is rather skimpy (only two features) and in the sound menu it’s hard to tell if you actually managed to change what you wanted (in my case, language) – there are no markers denoting either current or default selections. Definitely wasn’t designed user friendly. Kudos to the designers for not including any of those annoying, flashy animations that most American movie companies tend to include.

Plot: (1/5) Ever heard of PWP – Plot, What Plot? Maybe it makes sense to those who have actually followed the Street Fighter series – one of which I am not – but both the plot itself, and its execution, leave a lot to be desired. The basic premise is this: Guy kills master. Guy kills fellow student. Student of fellow student, a.k.a the Protagonist, debates revenge but after getting kicked around (literally) decides it isn’t worth it. Guy fights Protagonist. During fight, Protagonist suddenly has The Hero’s Epiphany. Protagonist defeats overpowered Guy. Guy has The Villain’s Epiphany, transforms from bloodthirsty villain to not-quite-so-bloodthirsty villain with a new goal in life, beat the Protagonist (wasn’t he doing that already?).
To top things off, the classic rehashed plot is executed rather poorly, demonstrating, once again, that CAPCOM is about as capable of suspense as they are capable of filling in plot-holes. For the record, suspense means I’m slightly confused but intrigued and waiting for more. What it does not mean, however, is that I’m sitting back, scratching my head in confusion, and hoping to God that it would all make sense later – something CAPCOM doesn’t quite understand. If you find yourself thoroughly lost within the first five minutes, don’t worry, they’re simply flashbacks that are pivotal to the entire plot – they’ll make sense later.
Of course, given that the director, Ikuo Kuwana, was an animator in Neon Genesis Evangelion, the confusing beginning might have a second explanation. Despite such, the confusion with Eva was done with style – its quite a feat to reproduce, a bar that the staff of this movie couldn’t quite reach.

Music: (3/5) The music was actually not that bad. There were a few places where I was listening to the music and ignoring the movie – not quite sure if that’s more telling of the music or plot. However, a few good pieces does not an OST make – if it’s ever brought over to the US, I doubt I’ll buy it.

Characters: (1/5) Cliches ring true – the best fighter in the entire movie is a perverted old man. He’s also the best character there, too – everyone else died too soon, came in too late, or were rather weak in characterization to begin with. It’s rather hard to make the audience feel a lot toward the characters in a movie, but it was rather obvious that CAPCOM was relying less on good characterization, and more on the affection viewers might have acquired through the rest of the Street Fighter series. Either that, or they tried making them interesting and flopped spectacularly – I’m not sure which is worse, enthusiasm without talent or talent without caring.

Ending: (2/5) The best part about the ending was the elation that it was all over. No, seriously. The ending fell just about as flat as the rest of the series. I have to cut them some slack, though – Alpha Generations is the prequel to Street Fighter Alpha, and its always harder to write a movie when the ending has already been predetermined.

Subtitles: (2/5)Which came first – the subtitle or the dialogue? The most logical answer would be neither, they would come together. The wonderful timers of SF:AG didn’t necessarily agree with this philosophy, but neither could they agree on the right answer between eachother. So, obviously, they had a very long and involved turf war, including deadly ammunition such as nerf darts and rubber bands. The losses suffered by the post-it notes became so great that the two sides decided to hold a truce: for 80% of the movie, the dialogue and subtitles would appear together and the other 20% of screentime was split in half, with either the dialogue or subtitles coming before the other.
But, seriously, the lack of thoroughness appalls me. One quick run-through of the movie would have caught the timing mistakes,

Total: (13/30 –or– 2.17/5) All in all, Street Fighter: Alpha Generations made me ponder the wisdom of accepting a job without knowing the exact details. A lover of anime I am, but even I have my own personal preference. I would recommend this movie to those who are already fans of Street Fighter, and to those who are big fans of action/adventure and fighting anime, such as Dragon Ball Z. I wouldn’t, however, recommend this anime to lovers of other genres, like comedy, or those that feel characterization and plot are essential.

But, as I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of fighting-based anime. If you feel you must see it for yourself, go right ahead. However, I would strongly caution renting it or watching the copy of someone else to avoid investing both time and money into this movie. Trust me, you’ll probably thank me later.

Gamespot has posted the first interview with Victor Ireland since he announced that he has closed Working Design. Victor may have killed Working Design by being gamer first but he did change gaming for the better. Before Working Design it was a novel concept for a game to have good grammar or for that matter words spelled correctly. We have Victor and the Working Design crew for thankfully ending that trend in RPGs. Hopefully someone will pick up the work he did on Goemon and force Sony to publish it here in the states. In this age of sequelitis we need more companies like Working Design making games for gamers.

You heard it from me here, a few months ago, and now experts agree: politicians are bad for your health.

Well, okay, not that (though I’m sure they do). Instead, one MIT professor has weighed in on the “video game violence provokes real-life violence” debate and his conclusions are, well, basically what any geek who could proudly claim an IQ of 140 because he scored 70 twice on an IQ test would have thought up of. (Cheers to you, Shameless!)

Reality Bytes, so have a lame pun!

The only points I could contend with are 7 and 8. My opinion (and the research I’ve seen) completely differs from 7 and while I agree with point 8, at the same time his evidence is..well…

Lets just say that I think I know which studies he’s talking about, and if it really is the Bobo doll studies he’s talking about, then he quite frankly missed the entire point. The point of that study was the modeling of behavior, and to see from which source (reallife, action media, cartoons) children were more likely to demonstrate a learned behavior of violence from - hence the bobo dolls. That study, btw, found that children were more likely to mimc behavior from the three sources in this order: real-life adults, real-life adults on tv, then cartoons.

Gee, a lighthearted post turned into psycho-babble. I’m quite sure shamless is now sorry that he might, indeed, be getting what he paid for. XD

The United States Postal Service and DC comic announced this week that the USPS plans to launch next year a series of stamps that feature the super heroes and comic covers from the DC Universe. The vast majority of the stamps feature the well known DC superheroes, that is the heroes from the TV cartoon the Superfriends, like: Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman, Hawkman and Batman. The other heroes feature where a bit of a surprise to me that they where include over some others and where: Green Arrow, Supergirl and Plastic Man. For each hero featured in the stamp they will get two stamps: one being an action shot of them and the other a comic cover staring them. Some of the cover are fairly famous like Batman 1 for Batman but some like the Flash cover are not so famous. The USPS also announced that they plan to launch a line of stamps feature characters from Marvel Comics in 2007. So for all of those who wanted a stamp featuring Spiderman you are going to have to wait a year.

I picked this up online: the USPTO has granted a patent for a Space vehicle propelled by the pressure of inflationary vacuum state. One would think that the gravitic drive (which is what this looks like… I’m not a physicist) would belong to someone like Asimov, if anyone.

I can remember waaaaay back in ‘98 when I was dealing with a patent and it was tough to convince the examiners that we had the idea “reduced to practice” without a working model. This ‘invention’ can’t even be tested until technology advances a few dozen years. It just shows how low the USPTO has sunk.

Kevin Smith announced today on his site that he has finished shooting on Clerks 2: Passion of the Clerks. In addition to the shooting he has already finished editing an hour and 15 minutes worth of the movie. Hopefully by months end Kevin will have it done and in the can. Then out to theaters early next year.

CNN accidently flashed an ‘X’ over Dick Cheyney’s face today. They quickly explained the situation as a glitch in one of their systems. Still no word on which Democrat was in charge of the system

New Scientist Breaking News - $100-laptop created for world’s poorest countries plus you get a workout at no extra cost.

James Doohan’s last wish of having his remains placed in orbit will have to wait a little while longer. The Falcon 1, which is the commercial space ship that is supposed to take him and 200 others into Earth’s orbit, is unlikely to be ready for it’s scheduled launch on December 6th. It looks like Scotty will have to wait until at least February to go to his final resting place.

I never thought I’d post something to the Humor and Windows/Microsoft categories at the same time. Well, you have to give them a lot of credit this time. Contrary to their Beast of Redmond persona, they have released what may be the funniest high-tech video of all time. It explains the new WSYP (We Share Your Pain) program, where you get to share the pain of a system crash with the programmer responsible for it. Enjoy.

Microsoft’s WSYP Video

Urban Outfitters is selling a Christmas tree just like the pathetic one in It is a Charlie Brown Christmas. It is the perfect yule tree for every geek out there. You do not need to even decorate it.

Slate has posted an article about the London adventures of a book collector. The first one sums up why the author collects books and the first shop he visted in London. His summary of why he collects books is the same reason I collect Video games and comic books. For the thrill of the hunt and joy of enjoying a great comic book or video game.

Well, it looks like the oh-so-wonderful lawyers of the MPAA are at it again. They are suing a 67 year old Grandpa because he couldn’t pay the $4000 extortion bill his grandson ran up by downloading movies. Now they think it’s OK to demand that a man, who committed no crime, pay an extortion fee that he can’t afford, or risk an even bigger one.

… and they call me Shameless.

Much as I hate to plug Tom’s Hardware since their conversion to the dark side, their Holiday Buying Guide is a yearly tradition. Kinda like the Geek equivalent of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. As usual, I have trouble looking at the actual products being described. Luckily, there are a few pages that don’t have Theresa on them, so I was able to read some of it.

Oh well. George Takei, Mr. Sulu from the original Star Trek series, has beamed himself out of the closet. It’s really his business what his preference is, but it does explain a few things about the TV series. For one, it explains why everytime the Enterprise visited Earth, they went by way of Uranus.

OK. A little obvious, but someone had to say it.

The only thing that bothers me a little about the announcement is the timing. I notice that it is suspiciously coincident with the only engagement he has listed on his homepage. I realize that he didn’t just decide to become gay, since he has been living with a partner for 18 years, but it looks like the decision to announce may be a publicity stunt for his current play.

It seems that there was a pleasant smell wafting through New York yesterday. The odor was compared to maple syrup or freshly baked cake. Nobody was able to prove that the odor was hamful, and nobody could could identify the source. About the only thing certain about the incident is that New Yorkers will complain about anything… even something that smells pleasant.

Well, the Doom movie was finally released to a flood of hype. Having played every version of the game on, or soon after it’s release date, There was no doubt about whether I would see the movie. I went in realizing that a movie about a lone marine rampaging through a space station would not have enough content to hold anyone’s interest, so I expected that the writers would have to find a way to add additional marines. What I didn’t expect was that they would rip out the original story, which was just a thin excuse to set up the carnage, and replace it with something far, far worse.

I’m not sure who they were aiming this movie at. Those who never played the game will find little to no redeeming value in the movie. The thought of scientists transforming themselves into demons as part of a science experiment is so over-used that it is pathetic. Non-gamers will be perfectly justfied calling this “Night of the Living Dorks” (apologies to George Romero). Fans of the game will dislike the stupid way they changed the plot. The ‘demons from hell’ plotline has been replaced by ‘dorks with an extra chromosome’. Game fans will have no problem calling this movie DUUM. Jeez.

The action promised by the game was almost absent from the movie. As far as I could see, the marines pumped more ammo into piles of dead bodies than they shot at demons. They wasted so much time in a lame attempt to explain the existence of the vile creatures that they didn’t bother to show more than a few of them in action.

In some ways, the movie was better than I expected. I went in thinking that the FPS sequence would be extremely stupid. I thought it would be annoying to gamers and incomprehensible to non-gamers. It was was actually the best part… I especially liked the scene where the zombie planted an axe in his own head. Unfortunately, it was also brief. It fell short of giving the true feel of the game, but at least it was entertaining.

In most ways, this movie was just plain bad. The special effects were pretty good, but not at the caliber of a good sci-fi movie. The horror scenes didn’t spare the sensibilities of the audience… just like the game. However… dialog, acting and plot were far more likely to make you retch that the buckets of blood sloshed around the set.

Just a random thought, but why is Id Software giving more hype to Doom the Movie than to Quake 4 the game?

Computer collector David Freeman, owner of the ACP Computer Superstore and Freeman PC Museum, is offering up his compelete collect of vintage computers. Some of the gems in his collection include: an Apple Lisa, a version of every Commodore ever made, an Apple IIgs Woz, and lots of super rare vintage computers. In addition to that Freeman is also offering up a huge collection of video game consoles and Pong machines in a separate auction. Highlights in that auction include: the first electronic game from WACO, a Magnavox Odyssey, Coleco Telestar, Intelvision III and a stack of the Coleco mini arcade machines. Right now the Computer auction is over 11K and the console is only $1100. The console one is steal at 2000K. I have most of the consoles he lists and I have personally spent 10,000+ collecting them. On a sad note I may also have to sell my collection of console games soon due to some unplanned finacial difficulties. Anyone interested in a video game collection with over 30+ consoles, 3,000+ games, and lots of video game artifacts for only 20K?

Yesterday DC comics finally kicked off the mini series Infinite Crisis. Infinite Crisis is DC’s latest attempt to reboot itself and return it back into an easy to understand continuity. For the non comic book readers out there, DC comics has a long history of doing this with series like “Crisis on Infinite Earths” and “Zero Hour".
Newsarama.com sat down with DC Vice President Dan DiDio and shed some light on what “Infinite Crisis” is about and its ramifications. Personally I think Infinite Crisis is just another mess that will force another reboot in 10-15 years.

In a few years it’ll be all over the news - Psychologists Prove Violent Games Cause Violence.

And psychologists all over the world will laugh as the media once again demonstrates their inability to read between the lines (or even read, for that matter). (more…)

Japan seems to be waking up to the fact that geeks are a powerful force. Of course, everyone reading this site already knows this.

One thing that they failed to recognize is that many of us fit into several of their “geek” categories. How many geeks do you know who are comic book lovers as well as tireless gamers? How many Anime geeks are into video games? I was also a little annoyed with their liberal use of the disparaging term “obsession". Where I come from, that term should be replaced by “enthusiasm".

Oh well… At least they were clever enough to recognize that geeks can be a formidable force, even if they are still tainted by bigotry.

Huge comic book fan and actor Nicholas Cage has named his child Kal-El. Kal-El, for those of you of who do not know, it is the birth name of Superman. Clark Kent, the name you may know Superman better as, is the name his adoptive parents Ma and Pa Kent gave him after he crashed on Earth. I love these posts. You get a little neat news and a factoid at the same time.

According to Wikipedia, Gabe and noted Sci-Fi author Harlan Ellison got in a bit of a verbal altercation this weekend at Fools Cap VII. According to Gabe, Harlan Ellison started it when he refused to wear a jester cap by responding with a less then polite comment. So far Harlan has not responded but his website board is alive with commentary about the fight including posts from Gabe and the con chair of Fools Cap VII.

Blue’s News has posted a bunch of links to the new Call of Duty 2 demo. I’ll be downloading this one ASAP.

Sorry for the delay but I had some personal things to take care of Friday. Onto the list of new upcoming releases for this week:

Animaniacs: The Great Edgar Hunt for the Gamecube: The newest latest greatest budget Animaniac game now for the Gamecube.

Armored Core: Nine Breaker for the Playstation 2: The next game in one of the longest running mech games also maybe one of the last in the series.

Battleground Europe: World War II Online for the PC: A blast, excuse me, failure from the past returns to the PC. WWII Online was one of the first MMORPG and it flopped big time due to the buggy code and the fact that there is a little game called Battlefield: 1942 and Call of Duty that does the same thing for free.

Battle of Britain II: Wings of Victory for the PC: Relive World War II air combat action for the hundredth time with this WWII flying simulator.

Burnout Legends for the PSP: Burnout 3 was the sleeper hit of last year with all the neat Takedown action. This year Burnout returns to small screen with more Takedown action and maybe one of the first game to justify buying the PSP.

Burnout Revenge for the XBox and Playstation 2: Take what I said above and add now with more takedown action for the big screen.

Cabela’s Outdoor Adventures 2006 for the XBox and Playstation 2: I can understand why people would want a new football, soccer, baseball game or hockey game ever year. But why the hell do they want a new hunting game ever year?

Dynasty Warriors 5 for the XBox: Save your money and buy Dynasty Warrior 4 it’s basically the same game.

Evil Dead: Regeneration for the XBox and Playstation 2: Bruce Campbell has been one busy boy lately with his new movie and comic book “The Man with the Screaming Brian” but somehow he found time in his busy schedule to voice Ash in this newest Evil Dead game. If that is not a good enough reason to run out and buy this game then the low budget price of $20.00 should make this a must buy.

EverQuest: Depths of Darkhollow for the PC: For the 10 die hards who refuse to play World of Warcraft or EQII comes the 100th expansion for EverQuest.

EverQuest II: Desert of Flames for the PC: For the other 15 non World of Warcraft addicts comes the latest expansion for EQII.

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children UMD for the PSP: Okay I know this is not a game but for some odd reason all the anime fanboys have drooling to get their grubby paws on it. Then again maybe it is a game since all Final Fantasy is one giant cut scene with a few button presses.

GripShift for the PSP: Some things like Peanut Butter and Chocolate belong together other things like cats and dogs do not. GripShift sets to prove that just maybe driving and puzzle games belong together or not.

Lego Bionicle: Maze of Shadows for the Nintendo DS: For our two 12 year old male readers they released another game for you, enjoy.

MediEvil Resurrection for PSP: Take a cult classic for the Playstation toss in um nothing. Port it to PSP and you get MediEvil Resurrection. If you really, really want to play MediEvil you can get the Playstation game and a PSOne for the same price as the PSP version of the game.

NHRA Championship Drag Racing for the Playstation 2: Okay this was one game I thought would never make the delay list but it has for the 3 week running.

Scooby-Doo! Unmasked for the XBox, Gamecube, Playstation 2, and Gameboy Advance: The next groovy installment in the popular kid franchise Scooby-Doo. Hopefully this time they pull the mask of the Mystery Van and reveal what really happens inside the mystery van when the cameras are not looking.

Tecmo Classic Arcade for the XBox: A collection of bunch of Tecmo Arcade games that I have never heard of and hold your applause: Temco Bowl. Okay actually I did misspeak it will also have Rygar and Swimmer.

The Sims 2 Nightlife for the PC: The next expansion for Sims 2. This time you can take Ken and Barbie out on the town.

World Series of Poker for the Playstation 2, XBox and PSP: Here is your chance to go all in at Harrah’s Rio Casino during WSOP without having to lay down $10,000 for that pleasure.

A lot of games this week. Making this weeks pick a real tough one but I am going for the classic since I wasted a lot of college free time playing it. The game of the week is: Temco Bowl and couple of other forgotten Tecmo Arcade games.

Shameless has posted a list of video games that will never be released that he gathered from several of the worlds foremost experts on gaming. Ok… So they were really just a few of his gaming buddies, but it’s still a good list. This one will find a permanent home on the Shameless page.

Website Simply Fired was holding an Internet contest for the most offbeat reason for being fired. The winner was a guy who ate two pieces of someone else’s pizza and was fired a month later when the pizza owner complained. Other runners up include a guy who could not drive, moving men who had a sword fight with a customers adult toys and a guy who trapped a PETA person in a cage as they attempted to “rescue” a $2000 cockatoo.

According to this AP news article, Nazi saboteurs designed bombs disguised as very personal articles including chocolate bars. If the bombs had actually been deployed, they would have been the first German food items that did more damage on the way in than on the way out. Their big mistake was targeting the Brits with it. If you are accustomed to eating traditional British food, a bomb in a chocolate bar probably wouldn’t even knock your teeth out of line.

Well… my doctor always tried to tell me that chocolate can kill you.

Rob Liefeld has joined forces with EBay vendor The Cargo Hold to sell all the original interior artwork to Teen Titans 27. All the proceeds generated from the sell of the artwork will go to Hurricane Katrina relief. The Cargo Hold has also put up for auction rare variant covers of various comic books to further generate revenue for Hurricane Katrina relief. Whether you hate him or love him it is good to see that at least Rob Liefeld has a heart.

AP has published a list of Katrina-related web links. In this list you will find links to various types of organizations from the Louisiana Governors office to the Red Cross. If you are in one of the area’s affected by Katrina, you may want to check this stuff out.

I’ve submitted a story about the trials I encountered while building my dual-core system. I’m now the proud owner of a computer that is quite a bit faster than I need (there are even those who think it is faster than I deserve). I’ve gone into some detail about my hardware choices and some of the logic (or lack thereof) that went into the decisions. I also have a report on some of the glitches I found in the system when I took it on its maiden voyage to a LAN party. I’ve shied away from the posting of performance numbers because they require too much work, and you can find them at a million other sites.

If you are interested in a tale of heartbreak and triumph, a classic tome for the ages, or a heartwarming story of a boy and his dog, go find a chick-fic site. If you are interested in getting a geeks tour of dual core, check out the story.

Comic book blog Comics Are Good has recently posted an article explaining the comic book/gaming hierarchy. Basically it boils down to this: Indie comic book fans look down on Superhero fans who look down on roleplayers who look down on Magic player who all look down on furries. The author forgot to add Manga fans who rank below Indie fans but who look down on the Superhero fans and the Roleplayers who look down at the live action roleplayers particularly of the Vampire vien who still look down at Magic Players. Confused yet? Here the chart with my additions:
Indie Comic Fans look down at Manga Fans who look down at Superhero fans who look down at Roleplayers who look down at Live Action Roleplayers who look down at Live Action Vampire Roleplayers who look down at Magic: The Gathering players who all look down at Furries.
I guess I am the super geek since I read Indie Comics and Superhero comics, play role playing games and Magic the Gathering. Then again I hate Manga, deny ever playing Live Action Roleplaying games and only have pity for Furries.

You have read the review and now take the quiz. Shameless Geeks and Gamer Graffix are teaming up to give one lucky reader a chance to win five Gamer Graffix skins for the console of their choice. In order to win you must answer one simple question: What job did Shameless recently apply for? (hint it is in the comments of something to do with Google and the moon)
Send your entries to: contest@shamelessgeeks.com. All entries are due by Sept 10, 2005 at 11PM Eastern Standard time. The winner will be chosen from all correct (or close enough) entries and announced on Sept 12, 2005

The drought is over, get ready for lots and lots of games coming out each week over the next few months. On to the first part of a very long list:

187 Ride or Die for the Playstation 2 and XBox: Gritty Urban game meets gritty street racer without the really cool cars.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike for the Nintendo DS: The classic Gameboy RTS Advance Wars moves onto DS, the perfect platform for it.

Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance for the Playstation 2 and XBox: Battle your way through the mean streets as a fugitive from the law seeking revenge.

Big Mutha Truckers 2 for the PC, XBox and Playstation 2: Part two of the budget Redneck truck racing game.

Inuyasha: Feudal Combat for the Playstation 2: Another fighting game based on a popular anime series.

Juka and the Monophonic Menace for the Gameboy: Action adventure game with lots of mini games and monsters.

Metal Slug 4 & 5 for the XBox: The classic arcade shooter is delayed for another week. If you really want this game the Playstation 2 version has been out for a few months. For all you collector types this is a must own.

Namco Museum Battle Collection for the PSP: The standard collection of classic Namco that has appeared on ever platform since they started the Namco Museum back on the PS One.

Nibiru: Age of Secrets for the PC: Adventure game that combines the cold war with Nazis and Mayans.

Nintendogs for the DS: This game took Japan by storm and pushed the DS to the top of the charts in Japan. From what game play I seen the game is just another virtual pet on that you cruel little fanboys will just kill in the end when you neglect it.

Pac ‘n Roll for the DS: Guide Pac-man through 3D mazes using the stylus.

Pump It Up: Exceed for the XBox and Playstation 2: Another Dance Dance Revolution clone.

The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction for the XBox, Gamecube and Playstation 2: Hulk smash!!!!

The King of Fighters 2002 & 2003 for the XBox: Collection of two classic arcade fighting games that is appearing on the XBox six months after it appeared on the Playstation 2.

World Series of Poker for the XBox and Playstation 2: Another poker game based on the newest spectator sport in America.

That it for this week and my pick for the week is: Nintendogs. Any game that allows your virtual pet to hump other virtual pets is a must buy in my book.

Scientists in Singapore have developed a urine powered battery that is cheap and easy to manufacture. The intended use is in low-cost disease analysis systems that would use the urine being tested as the power source. Now thats what I call using your head!

Maybe I can take advantage of this kind of thing. If I drink enough beer, I can generate enough urine to light a small city! … and it is a much better use of the energy than trying to spin that little spinner in the men’s room urinal.

A panic broke out today at Richmond Speedway when residents of Henrico attempted to purchase $50 4-year old iBooks that the county school system was selling off. People were so desperate to purchase the iBooks that they wet themselves, smacked each over the head with lawn chairs, and in one case tried to drive a car through the crowd. I guess they love iBooks in Henrico county because I sure wouldn’t riot over something that outdated.

Self proclaimed Uber Geek Daniel Guermeur is marketing a blank keyboard for geeks. That’s nice, but I dispute his claim to being an ‘Uber Geek’. First of all, anyone who calls himself ‘Uber Geek’, isn’t. That would be a paradox. In addition, ‘Uber’ should only be used in conjunction with the word ‘Dork’. Lastly, he’s probably a ‘Major’ Geek, but you have to be a lot more shameless to get any farther than that. Anyone who had an idea in 1989 and is just now bringing it to market is just not shameless enough.

To his credit, it looks like he chose the right keyboard to model, and the blank keys are certainly geeky enough to win him an honorable mention. Conclusion: the product looks good, but the ‘Uber Geek’ title is an offensive marketing ploy.

If I may, I would like to publicly thank one of your members, Cleake, for sharing his knowledge and helping me with some questions on Game boy games.
I am a mom that knows enough about computers to go bye and work with them, but zero about games.
I was navigating the Internet looking for an answer on pirate Taiwanese games, so I could answer a question on the games I am trying to sell, when I found your website. I thought I should venture to write and perhaps I may get an answer from these group of people that know so much about the world of computers.
Mr. Cleake gave me not only the answer I needed to be honest when selling my games but an array of explanations to very unusual things written in the boxes of these Japanese Version games. Now, everything makes so much sense, for a while I thought I was breaking the law by owning such games. As I told him, I have learned more about this subject in 3 days that in all my life and for once I feel I know more about a subject in game boy games (pirate copies) than my kids. Thanks again for having these website. Regular people like me may not understand most of what you guys/girls are saying in your website but it is very reassuring to know that you guys are willing to help us. Thanks Mr. Cleake again.
Ari

Recently C|Net wrote an article that Google felt went a little to published to much personal information about Google CEO. So in response to the article Google has deiced to ban it employees from talking to C|Net reporters for a year. I guess Google is starting to developed a bit of an ego.

AMD has finally announced a reasonably priced X2 as well as several other price adjustments. Hooray! Now I can look into the prospect of buying a new dual-core desktop.

Since we never get any mail from our loyal readers, the only way way we can answer your questions is to answer the search strings. Hence our monthly column “Answering the Search Strings". It is that time of the month so onto the questions.

rockstar games: san andreas lawsuit?
I believe some Grandma in New York is suing over the damage the game did to her 14 year old grandson. A better question would be: why is Grandma buying a game rated for 17 and older for a 14 year old?

star wars question who is the baddest villain in star wars knig?
Jar-Jar Binks, think about it… he was there at every key moment that lead to Anakin turning into Darth Vader.

ddr in ebgames stores in Montreal:
I wish we could answer your question but have you ever seen a fat guy play DDR? It is not a pretty sight.

crack protection scheme knights of honor?
Why do you guys keep asking us for hacks for games that stink?

an error occurred downloading the attachment forza motorsport?
Finally a question about a good game, I just wish I could help you but I have no clue why the error occurred.

All online yugioh card gaming tournaments for kids 9-13?
Excuse me as I call the FBI.

abit fatality sli overheating issues?
The easiest way to cure overheating issue with Fatality is to get some duct tape for his mouth, that should take care of all the hot air.

jack thompson gamefaqs.com pwned by 14 year old?
I did not know Jack Thompson owned Gamefaqs. I thought he owned a fictional Gamefaqs that have the magic codes that show full nudity in Sims 2.

bittorrent spamalot?
Spamalot is a live musical, good luck on downloading that. If you figure how I suggest you patent it.

Attack of the Show is looking for a few good Male geeks to guest host and possible Host the show. Auditions start this Sunday in LA, with more auditions to follow in San Fransisco and New York in August. Looks like it is time for a road trip.

I have noticed a recent trend in Comic book blogs like absorbascon of the Gay comic book bloggers who are pointing out just how gay comics are. Granted some are obvious like Black Condor. Others are not like this one where blog sososilverage’s points to a video of Spiderman dancing around that make you wonder about Spidey. The scariest one pointed out had to be that Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen may just like to wear womens clothes. This little fact ruined every boy hood dream I had of growing up and becoming a journalist so I could work with Superman like Jimmy does. Thanks guys.

Last month there were no TV shows exploring the inner workings of the tattoo industry, now there are two to choose from. Luckily, for all of you who can only watch one, Slate has posted a side by side comparison of Inked on A&E and Miami Ink on TLC. This comparison should help make your tattoo watching decisions easier. Personally I liked Miami Ink more because the owners are just big geeks like us.

It is with a sad heart that Shamelessgeeks reports the passing of James Doohan. Doohan was best know as Scotty, chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise. He passed away at 5:30 this morning at his home in Redmond, Washington with his wife at his side. The cause of death was listed as pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease. He was 85.

Now that Jeff Smith has finished “Bone” he started work on the video game version of “Bone” with Telltale Games. “Bone” is a high fantasy comic book adventures of three cartoon characters set in a mythical world with dragons and rat creatures. Smith and Telltale games plans to release each chapter of the series as a stand alone point and click game, like the old Lucasart’s games. They plan to make each chapter downloadable starting in September and the game will stick strictly to the plot of the book. The only major difference between the story in the game and the comic book is that more dialog will be added.
Smith is also working hard on a colorized version of the comic book series that will be released by Scholastic Books’ Graphix imprint. You can also get the complete Bone collection in one giant soft back book at stores right now.

NASA has delayed the Space Shuttle’s return to flight again. This time, they are saying the the launch will be no earlier than next Tuesday. It’s beginning to sound like their PR is caught in an endless loop. Oh well, after 2.5 years off, whats another few days?

Say it ain’t so! According to AP, being a nerd, Geek, or dork has become cool. It isn’t the first time this kind of thing has happened. For a brief time in the 80’s, the success of Microsoft made Bill Gates (arguably a geek) the coolest guy in the world. Once people got tired of him, Geeks went back to being geeks.

Even when it is no longer cool to be a Geek, we’ll still be around to give Geeks a place to speak out. I’ve been a Geek for all of my 43 years, and I don’t intend to change anytime soon.

Well, somebody has destroyed everything that it means to be a geek. According to this Reuters story, The White Collar Slacker’s Handbook is full of high-tech secrets for fooling your boss into thinking that you are working. Now that the secrets are out, everyone will know how to spot the signs of a slacking Geek! It seems as though a lot of Geeks are going to have to learn how to work for a living all over again. Then again… Is the average boss smart enough to understand any of these tactics? Maybe not.

Rally sent me this mini-review of Falcon 4 and gave me permission to post it. For future reference, it will find a permanent home at http://www.shamelessgeeks.com/submissions/rally/falcon4_mini_review.shtml

I have gotten a little time to try out the newest version of the Falcon 4 game. It is very well done, with a high degree of polish. The printed manual is actually fun to read. It has just the right amount of detail to make it useful, while covering everything you need to get started. The online manual is much more detailed, being 700 pages, and I haven’t gotten through much of it. The approach is to describe how the systems work in a simple manner, so that you learn about the real plane at the same time learning what you need to play the game. There are 20+ training missions, an instant action and the campaign. I’ve tried some instant action, and was able to do OK with little prior knowledge. There is co-operative multiplayer, which I think will be the strong point of the game as far as we are concerned. The campaign also supports this, so I’m excited about the possibilities. The game only requires the CD for installation. A refreshing change from C&C Generals and Empire Earth 2! The difficulty (realism) is settable from easy to realistic, so you can jump in with a little reading and enjoy the game. For $30, I think it was money well spent.

– Rally

New York Times has posted an article about the Junxion Box (registration required) which allows people to create WiFi hotspots using cellular modem cards. The Junxion Box is fairly popular amongst the Hollywood and Rock and Roll sets since it allows the users to maintain a constant WiFi Internet connections on the road and in their touring vehicles for all their devices instead of one. The highlight of the article was where Willie Nelson confesses he is a computer geek at heart.

Oh yeah… Researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that there may be a way to reverse the effects of Alzheimers. I just wish I remembered what it was. I’ll be here for 2 shows a night for the rest of the month. Don’t forget to tip your waitress.

I ran into a post on /. that pointed out the upcoming NerdTV on PBS. All I can say is “It’s about time!". According to the info page at that pointer, the show will be available for download on a weekly basis, and can be redistributed using a CCL (Creative Commons License). You better believe that I’ll be looking at this as soon as it debuts on Sept. 6th.

Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird have all been patched to remove some previously undisclosed bugs. Though the vulnerabilities are listed as non-critical, users are still advised to update to the new versions to fix stability issues. Currently, the Firefox update is available. All of the updates (when released) should be posted on www.mozilla.org.

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No. Thats not a headline from 2003. Space Shuttle Discovery’s thermal tiles were damaged today when a window cover fell off and struck a bulge in the ship. Even though NASA says that they can fix it before the launch, you gotta feel sorry for the Astronauts. If I were one of those guys, I’d be cleaning the yellow stains off of my space suit about now.

According to an AP feed, American workers waste an average of 2 hours of each workday. If you are reading this from work, you are engaged in the most common way of wasting time: personal internet use. Believe me, I won’t tell anyone you were here

The article points to Missouri as the worst state for slacking, with an average of 3 hours and 12 minutes lost. That’s only possible if Washington DC wasn’t eligible.

TheRegister.com has this report on the London transit bombings and their effect on transportation and communications systems. I know all of our readers join with me in sending our condolences to the British people.

On another note.. Can someone explain to me how the online letter can talk about compassion and mercy in the first paragraph, then claim to have murdered the innocent in the second? I guess logic is entirely beyond the comprehension of extremists.

Japanese eating superstar Takeru Kobayashi has retained the title hot dog eating world champion, and the mustard belt that goes with it. At the annual July 4th hot dog eating contest at Coney Island, New York, he ate 49 hot dogs and buns in 12 minutes. Kobayashi narrowly out-paced American female Sonya Thomas, who managed to down 37 hot dogs to come in second place. I have never met Kobayashi but I lost to Sonya Thomas in the local qualifier for this year’s hot dog eating contest and can verify her eating prowess. She downed 30 hot dogs at the qualifier and was an unstoppable eating monster. Her eating abilities must be enhanced by all the practice she gets testing the cooking at the Burger King she manages in Northern Virginia.

Anandtech has posted an interesting comparison of dual-core Intel CPU’s vs. dual-core AMD CPU’s. It’s interesting to note that, after a few years of getting hammered by AMD on price/performance, Intel may be catching up. That’s will become important to me when I start building a new system in August. Since my usage of the system is almost evenly split between Windows and Linux, I’m glad that someone finally did one of these head-to-head comparisons.

Just for your enjoyment: here’s am AP article about the upcoming Redneck Games. The recent tendency of rednecks to “come out of the closet” and celebrate their country roots has made me consider starting shamelessrednecks.com (which whois tells me is available). I abandoned the idea when I realized that there aren’t enough of them with ‘puters. Heck, I kin insult dem dang people till da cows come home an dey’d never knowit

Anyone who runs a web site called ShamelessGeeks.com will always have respect for people who make fun of their own stereotype. I tip my propeller beanie to you.

According to this CNN article, the the undersea cable connecting Pakistan to the Internet has developed some issues that has lead to Pakistan’s main internet connection crashing down. I guess that explains why we lost our five readers from Pakistan.

The US Supreme Court was obviously in a big-business friendly mood when they made a ruling that Internet file sharing providers may be sued for encouraging copyright infringement. This is likely to bring a flurry of lawsuits against P2P companies throughout the Internet. In an industry that is almost entirely dependent on using lawsuits to protect it’s monopoly, you can bet that they will be all over this decision.

The entertainment industry is one of the last holdouts of the 50’s, with it’s exclusive contracts and a legally enforced monopoly. Despite their complaints about how P2P rips-off artists, they are really just protecting cushy executives who are primarily sleazy promoters. Considering that a scant 5% of the cost of a CD is given to an artist, maybe they should be a little more honest with us. Maybe they should tell us what percentage of this money is used to fund lawsuits, advertising, and the white powder that they chop on the mirror.

Sorry I was late posting this but all of Shameless Geeks staff has been away on vacation without Internet access this weekend. So better late then sorry here is the belated games of the week:

Advent Rising for the PC: Sadly the XBox version did not live up to expectations but maybe the delay gave Majestco time to clean up the frame rate issue.

Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana for the Playstation 2: Atlus next Strategy RPG game and this installment is part of the long running Atelier series. That is long running in Japan.

Bejeweled 2 for the PC: The next Bejeweled game all gussied up in 3D.

Dead to Rights: Reckoning for the PSP: Gritty cop fights the bad guys on the mean streets of Grant City.

Fantastic Four for the XBox, Playstation 2, Gamecube, Gameboy Advance and PC: If you go by the track record of the previous Fantastic Four game or movie (yes there was one before this summers blockbuster) this game (and movie) should go down in the books as the greatest Fantastic Four game ever. However that is not that hard to do.

Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition for the PSP: Rockstar’s street racing game moves off the console on the to PSP.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Gundam vs. Zeta Gundam for the Playstation 2: The next game based on the Gundam anime series. A must buy for all you Gundam fanboys, for the rest of you…save your money.

Realms of Illusion for the PC: Budget puzzle adventure game.

Riviera: The Promised Land for the Gameboy Advance: Fight demons in this RPG for the Gameboy Advance.

Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory for the Nintendo DS: The handheld version of the great spy series Splinter Cell.

My pick for this week: Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana. I have weakness for Atlus’s RPGs.

It is that time of the month, time to answer the search strings, since we do not get any reader mail. On to your search string questions:

1) man from Nantucket?
Shameless finally told me what “man from Nantucket” means. You guys are are bunch of dirty old men.

2) god of war hang pirated?
While Jaffe (designer of God of War) did include undead in the game, I don’t think he had any undead pirates in it. I guess I will have to play it again just to make sure there are none.

3) brain damage from a nitendo ds?
Not sure if the Nintendo DS gave you brain damage or not, but next time you play your Nintendo (not nitendo) DS you may want to wear a tin foil hat. This way at least you will be protected from the evil brain damaging waves caused by your nitendo ds.

4) does putting a psp in a microwave fix dead pixels?
I understand your pain about PSP’s dead pixels, but sticking a PSP in a microwave will only get you added to the Darwin Awards.

5) fatal1ty gets pwned?
(big smile)Yes he did.

6) is psp worth it ?
Wow you guys keep asking this question and the answer is NO. I just got one and discovered that there are no good games for it and none coming out any time soon. To make it even more of a no, I went to buy a memory stick and discovered I could buy an IPod for the price of one memory stick. If you really want a handheld, save your money and buy a DS, several games and an IPod.

7)rann thanagar torrent?
When did BitTorrent add downloadable comic books in print form?

8) reality show idea?
Lots, but you Hollywood types would never understand them.

9)resume producer (xbox or playstation or gameboy)?
Okay, seeing as none of them have a keyboard or a word processor you may have trouble there. You might want add PC to your search.

10) star wars airsickness bags?
While flying to E3 this year, I did enjoy puking on Jar-Jar Binks.

11) 3d realms rumors?
Secretly, 3D Realms has been trying to take over the world while claiming to be working on “Duke Nukem Forever".

12) a geeks resume?
See Shameless over in the employment section. It is the geekiest resume I have ever seen.

13)advent rising reviews xplay?
If it is anything more then two, XPlay has sold out. Never mind they are just going to give it the same 3 out of 5 that they give all games.

14) alien hominid ps2 gamecube differences?
Different controller maybe, but other than that, I was too busy dodging FBI bullets to notice any differences.

Slate has posted a review of the Broadway play Spamalot done by a huge Mighty Python fan. Be warned the reviewer felt Spamalot did not capture the spirit of Mighty Python and gave it a poor review because of that. I can not say if Spamalot does or does not capture the spirit of Mighty Python. This is because I have not seen Spamalot and will have to default to the author of the review on this issue.

The New Times has posted an article about “V for Vendetta” the next movie from the Wachowski Brothers. (registration required) “V for Vendetta” is based on the Alan Moore comic book that came out in 1998 and is set in the year 2020 in England.
In “V for Vendetta” England is ruled by a totalitarian government styled after the Nazis and various right wing governments. The story follows the story of one woman who rises up against the British government with the aid of the masked hero V. Alan Moore wrote “V for Vendetta” as a response to the growth of the right wing in England during the rein of Marget Thatcher in the 80s and what I always assume he felt would happen to England if that movement was left unchecked.
The Wachowski Brothers on the other hand have come up with a different interpretation of the what “V for Vendetta” was about and have taken the movie into a different direction. They are focusing more on the morality of using violence to fight oppression and how far would you go to fight oppression. The book was fairly open ended as to what Alan Moore was trying to say but I think the Wachowski Brothers have missed the main points. I believe Moore also shares this view since he has public stated he wants nothing to do with the “V for Vendetta” movie.

Mark your calenders! TODAY is the day that science has FInally revealed the key elements for male dominion over the SUBTLER, SUPPLER sex.

I present for you a dramatic foursome provided to huMANity on this singular day - June 20, 2005 - by none other than LiveScience.com:

• Bigger Brains Make Smarter People,
• Brain Areas Shut Off During Female Orgasm,
• Human Embryo Cloned From Immature Eggs, and
• Grapefruit May Make Women Seem Younger.

This far surpasses Einstein’s Measly Miracle Year. Heck, that was a mere three items in a whole YEAR.

It is time then for us - well, around 50% of us - to rejoice! My WIFE will soon be surprised to find Parfum de Pamplemousse on her bedside stand. This will get my heart a-thumping. I might even work a little at it, leading to a shut down of her worrying BRAIN, making IT smaller, thus HER STUPIDer. I have my doubts about that grapefruit trick working on her EGGs, so I may need to find some other, younger, small-brained crop to reap if I wanna replace my LIVER some day. Heh heh heh.

Ah, with all technologies there comes a cost. Say I find me a HEARTY 20-year-old and apply the GiFT (GrapeFruit Technology, TM). Will she or won’t she have eggs for my later Liver Replacement Therapy? SOMEONE’s gotta do the science. If I must, I MUST! It’s In the Name of Science!

According to this article, McDonalds is planing to make it possible in a few select restaurants to burn cds and access the Internet via a WiFi connection. All I got a say is I am loving it, now I can have a Big Mac instead of drinking an overpriced coffee when I want to do some free WiFi web surfing.

LA Times has posted an article about online poker playing robots and an upcoming robot poker championship. With the growth of online poker has come an explosion of people cheating with robots designed to play online poker. Most of these robots are written by bored programmers and most of the robots stink at poker. That is because poker is game that is built around faking out a person to get them to do the wrong thing. This fairly easily done to poker playing robots once a person has figured out robots program.
The online poker companies are obviously against the robots (they not against robots, in fact they have bunch of them spamming the web as I speak) but still I find it laughable that it is an issue. Then again losing to a poker robot must stink.
All this makes me wonder when someone is going to paint a picture of Robots playing poker.

Yesterday, Intel Corporation dedicated an exhibit to Robert Noyce, one of their co-founders and a co-inventor of the integrated circuit. Robert Noyce has also been dubbed “the Father of Silicon Valley” by some, and is given credit for a large share of the boom of the computer industry. No matter how you view the company that he helped found, you must admit that his work had a profound effect on most modern geeks.

An upcoming government study asserts that cell phone use and other similar distractions are the number 1 cause of accidents and near-misses. It’s also good to see in this study that someone has figured out that hands-free sets do next to nothing to alleviate the problem. I’ve been saying for years that the distraction is the problem, not the holding of the phone. If driving with one hand were dangerous, wouldn’t standard shift cars be illegal by now? Just remember… it isn’t the phone, it’s the phone call.

I downloaded and installed both the i386 and the x86_64 versions of Fedora Core 4 yesterday as a prelude to testing it on several machines. Let me tell you that I’m certainly not impressed by the quality of this release. This is the first time I have ever had to abandon an install and revert to a previous version.

Let me start by saying that I understand that Fedora has essentially been an experimental proving ground for Red Hat… until now that is… I don’t think anyone is quite sure what it is anymore. I also understand that I’m not paying them for it. Be that as it may, I think they need to take a closer look at their product. I expect bugs, but I don’t expect to see a version that is essentially the same as the previous, except with more flaws.

Here’s my experience.

First Machine: an old Dell SmartStep 250N. Installation seemed to go OK on this machine, but once it booted up, I found that I couldn’t get some of my favorite software to run, most notably Thunderbird. I also noticed some strange graphics effects with KDE (which the Fedora crowd seems to despise anyway). Beyond that, it had pretty much the same versions of everything that I had been running for months. Disappointment, but only a small setback.

Second machine: Intel 865G system with 2.8G P4 and 512MB RAM. This one was a disaster. I was able to boot from the CD, but when I tried to run any of the installs, it would forget where it put the RAM Disk and panic the kernel. Couldn’t find any online help for this either. I ended up reverting to FC3. This was a huge disappointment because I had been waiting to install a new disk for the last 2 months, thinking that I could kill 2 birds with one stone when the next Fedora release cane out. This one was irritating.

Third machine: A64 3200+ with 1G RAM. This one seemed to go OK once I got a good burn of the DVD. Haven’t tested this one as much as the others, but it crashed once in it’s first 15 minutes of run time. Note that this machine probably hasn’t crashed once this year, even when running Windows.

I really don’t see any advantage to installing FC4. At this pont, it looks like installing FC3 and running “yum -y update” will get you the same features and a more stable system. My next install would have been on my LAMP server, but I think I might stick with FC2 on that one for now. Color me disappointed.

Slate has posted an article about the proper techniques of spitting wine into a bucket, and the author’s struggles to master it. Wine tasting may not sound like a geeky hobby, but after reading the article it has all the hallmarks of one. It has obsessions that border on the unhealthy, long debates on pointless subjects, and a pastime that most normal people think os as really weird. I also find it funny that two guys would lock themselves in a room and spend hours trying to perfect spitting in a bucket.

Better late than never? I’ve finally moved some of Leakenova’s E3 posts to the gamers’ page. check out the permanent versions of:
Hands On with Metroid: Prime Hunters for the DS
Review of Gamer Graffix
Hands On with Delta Force: Blackhawk Down
Hands On with Battlefield 2 for XBox

A post at the NewScientist.com reports on the up swing of urban gaming. This is for those Geeks who want to get some exercise.

The New York Times is reporting that the Universal and Fox have agreed to a deal with Microsoft to make the movie version of Halo.(registration required) The script for the Halo movie and the deal to acquire the rights was delivered by Master Chief wearing deliveryman on Monday to the studios. Most studios passed on it due to Microsoft excessive demands. Some of those demands include $10 Million dollars upfront, 60 first class tickets for Microsoft execs to attend the premiere and no merchandise rights. In the final deal Microsoft did not get all of the things they demand but close enough for them to be happy. The one sticking point that may end this deal is the rights over creative control. Microsoft wants a lot and studios do not want give much. Gee I wonder why Microsoft is demanding so much creative control?

Milestone Zero has posted the next installment of Carinval of Games on his site. Lets see if this round can lead to another massive geek fight like the last one did. For all of you that came to this site via Carnival of Games, welcome, fell free to read and comment on anything and if you really want to post something. Just make sure it something a geek would like.

At Wizards Philly last weekend DC comic Representative Dan Didio revealed that at the conclusion of the upcoming mini-series Infinite Crisis, the entire DC Universe will reset. Most comic book fans know this, however the little tidbit that made it news was that all the current DC comic books starting February (around the time of issue #5 of Infite Crisis) will be set “One Year Later…” relative to what was seen in their February issues. DC then plans to tell the events that occurred during that one year in flashbacks and through the remainder of Infite Crisis mini-series. Also all the comic books will experience major changes that when they make the “the one year later…” leap. No word was given what they will be but they will be major changes that will send shockwaves through out comic book fans.
Two comic post in a day yup it’s Wednesday and I just got a huge stack of new comics and I feel like talking about comics.

Normally we do not talk about comic books (even though it’s the geekiest of geekiest hobbies) but the current RANN/THANAGAR WAR mini series from DC Comics is really good and worth a read.
DC comics has a long tradition of telling wide spanning space epics, but in recent years has moved away from that. DC plans to bring back the cosmic side of the DC universe with the Rann/Thanagar war. Basically the store main plot is the planet Thanagar (homeplanet of Hawkman) was destroyed when the planet Rann was teleported next to Thanagar and changed its orbit. The bird like inhabits where forced to relocate on Rann. An evil (is there such thing as a good cult) cult Thanagarians, who where also behind Thanagars destruction, start a war with the inhabits of Rann to bring back the evil cosmic entity they worship. Thanks to a WWWI style of alliances a war spreads across the galaxy.
The Rann/Thanagar War mini-series is selling out fast at most comic books shop, but thankful DC is reprinting. It is a great read if you are looking for an epic sci-fi war and must buy for all comic book fans.

According to some scientists, although populations are getting older, people have more time remaining. I’m hoping this means that I can postpone my mid-life crisis indefinitely. If I can delay it forever, will that make me immortal? Will I be allowed back into Chuck E. Cheese? Will I eventually go all of the way back to an embryonic stage?

I believe the part about people acting younger. In fact, I have watched grown men devolve to a state of childhood with no more to trigger the event than seeing a nice sports car drive by.

Monty Python’s Spamalot won best musical at last night’s Tony Awards. Spamalot also won the Tonies for best director (Mike Nichols) and best featured actress (Sara Ramirez for Lady in the Lake). Now for something complete different….

The new Star Wars airsickness bags on Virgin Atlantic flights are just the latest in a long string of Star Wars exploits. At least one thing about this one… If it makes you sick, you still have a use for it.

… and you thought the worst part of Episode III was the acting.

If you think we have it bad, try being a gamer in Britain. The British have always gotten the shaft when it comes to new consoles and handhelds but Sony is taking it to whole new levels with the PSP. Normally when a console comes out in America before the Brits can get it, all they had to do was import it from America or Canada. Well Sony did not like the fact that Brits where doing this with the PSP and has sent out ‘cease and desist’ letters to all the major and minor video game importers.
The thing is, however, Sony forgot to tell their employees not to import PSPs. They have been importing like mad men with their Sony company credit cards. Why do I have feelings this whole “import ban” is so a couple Sony guys can look cool, by being the only guys on the block with a PSP?
The ban is bad enough, but things look like they are going to get worse for PSP loving Brits. The PSP launch date of Sept 1, 2005 may be delayed. This is all thanks two things: Sony’s failure to register the key PSP technologies, trademarks and software correctly, And a pending trademark fight with AMD over the UMD trademark, which AMD feels is too close to their name.
This all leaves me wondering if Sony loves the British?

A report at NewScientist.com tells of a “Self-wiring supercomputer” being built at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. Now if only they can invent a machine to take care of Shameless Geeks that does not require constant attention, so that they can move out of their parents house.

Pretty boy Ashton Kutcher and WB are running Geek and Beauty, a new reality series where seven geeky males are each teamed up with beautiful women. The teams of geek+beauty are then suppose to work together to solve tasks that test their intellects, fashion savvy, dancing skills and social skills for a $250,000 prize. The show is being heralded as a “social experiment” but it sounds more like the popular people making fun of us geeks.

Because the cops were on his tail! Apparently, the police in Ridgecrest CA are giving tickets to chickens who cross the road, ending a tradition that has been in existence for centuries, and eliminating all of the humor from the lives of 4 year old children.

This is a dark, dark day for cornball humor. Life will be very boring if we can no longer wait in anticipation for a chicken to happily cluck it’s way across a major highway. One thing is for sure: The officer who wrote the ticket needs a sense-of-humor implant.

Thankfully, the charges were dismissed on a technicality.

Time Magazine has a good article about a new growing geek hobby of posting to Wikipedia and the whole growth of the WikiWiki movement. Wikipedia, for those who do not know about it yet, is the largest open source encyclopedia on earth. I love how academia challenges its validity instead of embracing it and making it better. A lot of the entries I have read seem to be very valid, dead on, and well written… all the trademarks of a successfully person in academia. It was also kinda funny to find out when doing a search for Leake on Wikipedia, that any Leake who has run for political office has died in office.

I was surfing around the website Something Awful that Attack of The Show on G4TechTV had recommend, when I cam across this picture. Whatever the gender of the person is, if the Jedi knights had more like “it” then maybe the clone troopers would not have wiped them out.

There is big controversy right now raging amongst gamers: Was the screen footage of Killzone 2 for the Playstation 3 in game or was it just a cut scene? Well someone managed to get their grubby paws on some “rumored” in-game footage. It is amazing how much the footage looks like Castle Wolfenstien 3D.

Since we never get any reader mail, I decided to answer the questions that you enter in search strings that some how ended up pointing to ShamelessGeeks.com (yes someone entered these in Google and somehow ended up on our site. In some cases more then once):

1) control center will not be fully operational until smartgart?
Okay Dr. Evil we will get to work on it right away. Anyways since when is an ATI graphics card so vital that it could bring a control center down?

2)drm key for leisure suite larry magna cum laude?
You are kidding me you want to pirate this piece of junk. People Leisure Suite Larry Magna Cum Laude blows serious chunks, it is not worth even stealing.

3) geeks e3?
You have to ask that question, the whole damm E3 is one giant geek fest. Everyone at E3 was a geek.

4) how to finish chapter 6 in paper Mario the thousand year door
Go to gamefaqs.com, I have no clue. I stopped playing Paper Mario 2 after the fifth level.

5) is psp worth it?
Yes, if you want to look damm sexy and get girls. Otherwise save your money and wait till the price drops.

6) man from nantucket?
Alright who posted about Nantucket. No, none one who posts on this site is from Nantucket. We are all from a place we like to call the sticks.

7) stella deus reviews by christians?
We are geeks people, not christians, get it straight.

8) are sony excited at the prospect of tomb raider on psp?
You are kidding me, some actual thinks Tomb Raider is a good game.

9) booboo the pig?
Yhea I am fat and have been called a pig. But I have never been called booboo.

10) evil rednecks?
I see you have meet my neighbors.

11) jack thomson attorney bully?
Some say, yes he is. The questions sounds like a great TV show title.

12) location to graffix shop for ds?
Maybe the gamer graffix guys will be polite enough to tell you where you can. Just go to Gamergraffix.com and ask for Guy.

13) nba legends 50s-90s?
What part of geek do you not understand? sports != geek.

14) pssst. hey kid wanna buy a letter q sesame street?
Okay, excuse me while I place a call to the police.

15) shameless geeks?
Yes we are and damm proud of it too.

The man with political bent
makes even the guiltless repent.
From poor men he’ll steal
and make rich men to feel
entitled to every cent!

Check out this story about a drug deal next to a squad car. I can’t really find a geek angle for this… except that I’ve never met a geek that stupid.

Today at E3 I had an appointment with Digital Blue the makers of the American Idol Camera, and boy was I totally wrong in thinking it was a stupid idea. The camera was a very good idea and rocks. The camera is totally wireless and comes with a very powerful suite of simple video editing tools. The tools allow you to add effects, transitions, graphics, cut up the footage and add canned footage to movie. Right now the software tools only allow you add canned footage, effects and graphics that came with the software but they plan to soon make able to upload your own stuff to the camera. The camera is built around the Intel video chips. This is because the company Digital Blue is spin off from Intel and has on staff several Intel hardware engineers. Digital Blue is also hard at work on a boy version of the camera that will be the first 100% wireless helmet cam.

Alright E3 is just wild. Yesterday it was running around in the dark. Today I am in the press room working on an interview with Magic the Gathering R&D and some guy next to me shoots out and purpose to his girlfriend in. All the journos heads pop up and then jump right back into work. I guess it is a new form of gophering. On the plus side the power stayed up the entire day.

Oh Boy. Shameless is ticked off again. This time at something Bill O’Reilly said about Star Wars fans. Check out his response in his open letter to Bill O’Reilly as we watch the battle of Shameless Geek vs. Shameless O’Reilly.

By the way. I sent a link to the post to O’Reilly himself. Anyone want to post the odds on whether he’ll reply?

The geeks at HP tried to get into the fashion game with Gwen Stefani branded camera. You can guess the tragic and funny results of this one. Maybe HP would be smarter to go back to making good electronic gadgets, like they did years ago.

I’ve posted two articles that I previously released for preview. The first is a new Shameless article titled What I Learned About Life from Video Games, and the second is a rewrite of the PowerNow posting from a few months ago.

The re-posting of PowerNow is in advance of my releasing a source code snippet that does real-time monitoring and control of Athlon-64’s running Fedora Core 3. Surprisingly, the code was not difficult at all, but the explainantion isn’t as easy.

In this article about the technologies that George Lucas helped pioneer, it is easy to get a sense of why he has become a Geek hero. I already knew quite a bit of what is in this article, but seeing it all in one place brings the man’s history into perspective. It’s always nice to see someone whose main ambition in life is to perfect his craft, not just to get rich.

Another goofy press release, this time it is from Mountain Dew. Kinda cool that they want to use me as Guinea pig to test their new Mountain Dew out, but how in world do I give press coverage to a soft drink. Does Mountain Dew want me to write a review or just mention I am drink Mountain Dew as I write my reviews?

	FROM MOUNTAIN DEW Welcome! We’re developing a new beverage here at Mountain Dew and we’re inviting you and a select group of other gaming experts to participate in a beta test. Right now, the working name for the product is Mountain Dew X [variant 516]. It’s not available to the general public, but we’re going to hook you up. We want to send you a beta version of the test product so that we can get your input on Mountain Dew X [variant 516]. You’ll be helping us optimize the product formula. Maybe you’ll even come up with a cool name for it. If you want to give us a hand, please follow the link below to the Dew website and find out how to receive your beta product. We know you’re slammed getting ready for E3, but it’ll only take a second. As you may have heard, Mountain Dew is the Official Soft Drink of E3. You’ll see us there! Thanks for your help. The Mountain Dew Team
censored
	Please do not punt this e-mail to anyone – you’ve been individually selected to receive this message. Please respond by 5-31-05

CNN posted a good article about two Department of Homeland Security gadgets to find money. One finds money by smelling the air around it, the other is an X-Ray scanner that filters on the metal elements found in money. Neat stuff.

I found this gem about Star Wars flops on the Forbes.com website. It is definitely worth checking out… and don’t forget to watch the slide show of the actual flops. It’s plenty of fun.

Monty Python’s Spamalot, the musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is leading the pack with 14 Tony nominations. The most noteworthy Tony nominations are best musical and acting nominations for Tim Curry and Hank Azaria. Monty Python had no comment on the Tony nominations but wanted to remind fans to catch Spamalot on Broadway while they still can.

Surprise! Surprise! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy topped the box office charts this weekend. That’s not much of a shocker to the Geeks of the world, but it wasn’t expected by Hollywood. I’m happy to have contributed to that feat.

If you think about it, there wasn’t much chance that Hitchhiker’s would flop. The movie is based on a Geek classic that many people, including me, wouldn’t dream of missing. I was going to show up at the theatre whether the critics panned it or praised it. Here’s another news flash: It will do really well as a DVD too. All that the movie had to do was make a reasonable showing to be considered a “must” for Douglas Adams fans. It did much better than that.

On a personal note: I liked the movie. I thought that the new parts (parts not in the book) were very well done, but was a little disappointed in how the familiar parts were presented. That’s probably because I’ve read the book several times, and there was no way that many of the things I love about it could be captured on film. I took Shinnite along, and she seemed to love it… but I’ll let her tell you firsthand.

An article on Slate recently made the claim that fans make better Star Wars films then the current ones made by Lucas. The article was mostly just basing the claim on the fan made Star Wars film Revelations. His claim does not hold up as well when you start watch some of the other fan made Star Wars films, most are much worse then anything Lucas has made. Still it was interesting to find out that Revelations special effects are on the same level as ILM special effects, yet Revelation’s special effects where all done using off the shelf products.

Okay, not something related to gaming. But, something definitely odd, peculiar, and what Shamless would think of when trapped inside during a power outage.

Standing Room Only

Quite frankly, I think this article speaks for itself.

Of course, it’ll probably anger 9 outta 10 christians, but I view that as an actual perk. ;P

The movie adaptation of the Sci-Fi opus “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” hits theaters tonight. The reviews for “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” have been mixed, with fans split. For those of you that could careless about reviews, get your towels ready, stick that thumb out and head on down to the local cinema. Just make sure you do not hitch a ride with any Vogon, their poetry alone will kill you.

Yeah, I’m talking about the journalist that wrote the “Girlfriend-Friendly” games that leaknova posted. Now, because this website doesn’t allow a little friendly “reply” button, I’ve decided to unleash my “wrath", so to speak, here. Now, being the daughter of the Shameless geek and the RPG/RTS/Console guru that I am, it will most likely be enjoyable.

But, before you do, as far as I’m concerned, Ctrl-Alt-Delete has provided the perfect comeback, even moreso for our female gamers.

(more…)

The Simpsons will achive the milestone of 350 episodes when this Sunday’s episode broadcasts. The creator of the Simpsons have no idea when Fox will stop broadcasting new Simpsons episodes. Currently the cast and crew of the Simpson is signed thru the 19th season, around the 400th episode.

The new Airbus A380 completed it’s maiden flight in France today in front of a 30,000 onlookers. Once it enters service, it will be the biggest passenger plane in history, capable of carrying 840. Now that’s a big plane.

At this weekend’s Star Wars Celebration III, George Lucas confirmed rumors of an upcoming Star Wars TV show. Meanwhile, he tried to dispel rumors of an additional movie trilogy, and added other tidbits about theme park rides. He even talked about plans for a new movie in my cousin Indiana’s series. And they call ME shameless.

In anticipation of Tuesday’s release of Empire Earth II, our own C O Jones has submitted a review of the EE2 demo. I promise that it will be converted into a review of the full release version ASAP. It will be interesting to see how much of it will have to change.

Update:
You can download the demo here.

CNN posted an article today that email makes you stupid. A British study found people that read email excessively at work suffer an IQ drop worse than smoking marijuana. So when is email madness coming to a theater near us?

I do not know if is this just plan crazy or scary, but some people some came up with an idea to outsource software development work to a boat 20 miles off California. Right now the idea is still in the working stages, but they hope soon to have the ship up and coding away. I do not know if their idea will work but it has some serious flaws. The biggest one is how they can have speed cycles. A night and day shift and close quarters does not speed up the development process. If that logic was correct the software industry would have adopted it long ago. I do not think the people creating the ship have a clue about software development.

Three MIT grad students recently got a paper accepted for presentation and publication for the Ninth World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. This normally would not be news but for one small detail, the paper was total gobbledygook. The three grad students created a program that creates professionally sounding but bogus nonsensical academic papers. These fake papers then where submitted to various academic conferences.
The students pulled of this prank not for fun, but instead to prove that a lot of academic conferences are fake. The students main point is that a lot of conferences are nothing more then money generating events for the organizer, resume padders for presenters, and a waste time and money for everyone else. The success of the students does kinda prove this point.
I only wish they had not revealed the prank till after doing the second part of the prank. The planned second part was to present the paper at the conference using a random generated presentation talk.

For those of us who are true geeks, I ran across an early review of the Hitchhiker’s movie by BBC. If you don’t know which movie I’m talking about, Why the heck are you visiting a Geek site?

The review is lukewarm to say the least. In my case, I’ll probably like the movie anyway. I have all of the paperbacks, the hardcover omnibus version, and the TV series on DVD, so you could say I’m a fan.

As TheRegister.com rightly points out, putting the punishment for recording a movie with a camcorder at parity with manslaughter is not a sane thing to do. The only thing we can really do about it is to make note of the bill’s sponsors and let them know what we think on election day. I would love to know how much it costs to persuade a “civil servant” to completely ignore the rights of constituents and allow them to be treated like this. We all know that P2P is against the law, but so is driving 5 MPH above the speed limit. No sane person wants either to lead to jail time.

Well, maybe not, but at least he has an email address. Funny to think that he will probably get tens of thousands of offers for cheap Viagra. Now that’s what I call “targeted advertising”

Qatar is looking to replace the boy camel racers with robots. The robot racer is still in the prototype stages but plans are in place to replace all racers by 2007. Qatar started looking into robots when it came under more and more under fire for using young boys as racers. The boys where often kidnapped and keep in fairly inhumane conditions. Qatar hopes the robots will end this practice.

Jim Hill Media has posted a review of the new Star Wars action figures from Revenge of the Sith. The new figures look light years better then what I had when I was kid. I just felt they are not as good looking as today’s action figures. Look at the head of Mace Windu does he look like a monkey or Mr. Jackson? There is no excuse for action figures to have that issue with the availability of digital face scanning technology.

Did Comcast have the right to supply RIAA (my favorite group of moguls with questionable honesty) with personal information about an alleged P2Per? Her lawyer says no, and it’s one of the few times you will catch me agreeing with a lawyer. It gets even worse when you find out that they gave the info to a collection agency.

This is an obvious case of extortion and violation of rights. Though file sharing is certainly against the law, there is absolutely no excuse for using a misdemeanor as an excuse for a serious breach of the constitution. Unfortunately, the music industry owns so many politicians that nothing will ever be done about it.

In yet another show of the complete uselessness of the USPTO, Microsoft has been granted a patent for a ” Method and system of providing emergency data” by the USPTO. So, If I read this right, You can now be held in violation of patent law if you implement an emergency database with similar features, or if you create one that is compatible. Thanks to TheRegister.com for pointing this one out.

Nice to know that your government is looking out for you by restricting your ability to find emergency services.

According to CNN Great Britain is looking for a new Q. A few weeks ago Britain started advertising for a new new chief executive officer of the Government Communications Centre, the position which Q held in the James Bond movies. If you plan to apply you better hurry, the job listing closes next Tuesday.

There really is a Dork Street in California, and it’s probably not the one you are thinking of. Not much else to say about this one, so just follow the link. Thanks to USATODAY for brightening my afternoon.

My score was 75 (mid-level geek) and if I can do that, then you should all get perfect scores! Ha! I’m talkin’ about you, Shameless. >_>

http://www.nerdtests.com/ft_cg.php

Apple computer will ship Tiger, its latest version of Mac OS X, to stores April 29th. The big new features being hyped is the Spotlight and Dashboard. Spotlight is an advance search tool designed to search through pictures, files, and email just like Google search tool does. Dashboard is basically a portal app to weather, sports, airplane schedules, and other info. Neither feature looks that impressive but I guess Apple marketing figures they are.

If I was a judge at this competition, I definitely would have voted for these guys. =P

The following is rated 42, for Geek. Not recommended for the rich, the successful, management, lawyers, or anyone that doesn’t know there was a gaming consol prior to the X-box or Dreamcast. In other words, if you aren’t a geek this isn’t for you.

And if you claim to be a geek yet cannont recognize these themes, then you’ve obviously been outside too long.

Editorial :
I hate to say this, but I was wrong. I believed that ATI had won the GPU wars, and that I would be sticking with them for a long time. Based on my recent adventures with a 9600 card, their inability to release a fully functional Linux driver, and the lackluster performance of all of their recent XP software, I believe that my next system will not have an ATI card in it.

Don’t take this as a knock on their GPU’s themselves. Those seem to be as competitive as ever. The problem is that I have lost my tolerance for ‘well designed’ technology that is unusable due to poor implementation. I have no idea what happened to ATI. Is it hubris caused by their success in recent years? Did someone steal all of their talent? Have they lost sight of long term goals in favor of short-term stock gains? Only time will tell.

I still have that hell-spawned PowerColor 9600 that I can’t return, and no amount of software is going to fix the power problems. However, I decided to download Catalyst 5.4 to see if they had at least improved their software. I installed the “new” version of the Linux driver, and the new XP driver that includes the control center. All I can say is… Don’t bother.

The “new” Linux driver is really no improvement over the old one. It still generates a Segmentation Fault when you try to run Doom3. That’s about the same status as the last Linux release. Thanks guys, big help. The Control Center on XP installs as normal, reboots as normal, then pops up a notification that says Catalyst Control Center will not be fully operational until SMARTGART has determined your optimal graphics processor settings. Please wait…, which never goes away. Permanently stuck windows, however pretty, don’t make me confident about the rest of the software.

Like I said… Downslide.

Call me shocked but this CNN article about a reporter search for why Cookie Monster giving up cookies, proves the existence of a breed of geek I never seen before “The Sesame Street” geek. I wonder where in the hierarchy of geeks this fits? I also wonder which Sesame Street character would be considered a geek? My money is on Big Bird, but the Count’s love for numbers screams geeks

Mandrakesoft has announced that they are changing their name to Mandriva, which is billed as a contraction of Mandrakesoft and Conectiva. Apparently, this is a company of math Geeks. It is obviously not a company of marketing geniuses. Any salesman would choke at the prospect of a name so easily warped into “Mandrivel“. The image of Geeks drooling all over their keyboards doesn’t give one a “warm, fuzzy feeling” about the security of an OS. I guess we can forgive them, knowing that English is not their native language.

Hate to make a fellow geek look bad, but this is a geek-oriented site, so I feel compelled to be “Fair and Balanced” (whatever that means). Star Wars geeks have lined up at the wrong theater in advance of the upcoming “Revenge of the Sith” release. There I said it, but I don’t feel any better. Seems like some sort of a betrayal.

I hope that the release is moved to Grauman’s Chinese Theater, and that you all end up looking like prescient geniuses! There, now I feel better.

Atlas Computer Laboratory, Chilton one of the UK’s national computing facilities, back when computers were BIG and EXPENSIVE. Check out the Technology link to see just how big and expensive computers were back then.

CNN had a good article about all the hacks available for the PSP one week after the launch of the PSP. Some of the cool hacks are the ability to chat on IRC on PSP, read web comics on the PSP and play programs recorded to your TIVO on your PSP. The other big news that article talked about is the PSP portal sites now up that allow you to surf the web using “Wipeout Pure” and a PSP, no more need for crazy DNS hacks.

NASA is studying the unique microbes found in lakes around the Mexican town of Cuatro Cienegas to create models of what alien life would look like on other planet. Scientist plan to use the models from the lakes to find alien life on other planets by matching a planet’s fingerprint with the fingerprint generated by microbes in the lakes. Hopefully this will finally prove that we are not alone in this vast universe.

Check out Tom’s Hardware Hard News concerning a mod for Novalogics Joint Operations. This mod is for all of the Geeks/Gamers who have not found that special some one.

Last weeks blog post Are the PSP and DS Worth It? by Shinnite has been converted into a permanent page. If you missed it, or you want to read it again, check it out. It also has the new comment tracker on it, so you can let her know what you think about the submission.

While perusing eWEEK today, I saw an article about the WordPress home page caught in the act of search engine spamming. Please say it isn’t so. This very blog runs on a slightly modified version of WordPress 1.2. I would hate to think that the same organization who wrote a great blog tool has stooped to something that low. These folks have been among the leaders in the fight to eliminate blog spam. Shouldn’t they practice what they preach?

I’d like to give the Wordpress guys a chance to respond, but I really can’t think of an excuse. Telling an online publication that what they did wasn’t “spam” is just an attempt to get away on a technicality.

If the guys can’t come up with a good reason, maybe the OSS blogging community should think about putting WordPress in the hands of someone better, or if necessary, starting a new project.

Color me disappointed.

Gamespot has an interview with EB Games Jeff Griffiths reveals that some EB Games stores still have the PSP for sale, when asked if his stores still had PSP for sale. Here is the exact quote:

“GS: Do your stores still have the unit in stock?
JG: There are some units in stock throughout the chain, but I think that the vast majority of stores just sold through their initial allocations. “

I love when we call it right and remember you heard it here first.

The Dallas Morning Times is running a story that PSP did not sellout and in some locations sales where fairly lackluster. Dallas Morning Times reporter, Victor Godinez, confirmed what Shameless had figured out yesterday, by doing the same thing Shameless did, that the PSP is not sold out. Godinez did this by ignoring Sony’s claims that the PSP was a sellout and called several stores and asked if they still had PSPs in stocks, and several reported that they still had plenty of PSPs on stock.

Okay, I know I should be doing the opinionated sarcasm on the DS - which I should post either today or tommorow - but I decided that there’s something else that needed to be said.

Politicians. We all rant about politicians - the stupidity/ineptness of - and how they’re obviously not doing the right things. So, you think you can do better?

NationStates

Time to put that assumption to the test and rule your own nation by your own standards. It’s a relatively simple game - you get a number of legislative issues a day, based on personal preference - and you pretty much control the country. In fact, along with the more serious issues (tax funding, education, etc.) there are also ‘looser’ issues, such as public nudity.

Specifically speaking, on the Public Nudity issue you will be given an option to outlaw clothes and make public nudity mandatory. How’s that for returning to our roots, eh? =P

And, if you want to check out my nation, Pingvi, go ahead. According to them my country is Democratic Socialist. Down with capitalism! XD

Welcome to 2005, where watching videos and movies isn’t just a family get-together affair where you sit around a soul-stealing television and fatten yourselves with heart-attack-inducing popcorn anymore.

Nosiree. Now it’s about sitting around ignoring eachother while everyone watches their own movie, and the family dog/cat sits on the floor eating the popcorn because nobody knows its there. Why? Because they never heard the person who brought it down with their blasted earphones on!

Gaming consoles - the diet plan for the future.

Well, they could also be considered the diet plan of the present, too, what with those acne-scarred 40 year old teenagers hunched over their gamecubes and X-boxes, playing an RPG for over 16 hours straight (guilty as charged).

Oh, wait, my bad. Not the X-box. Because the X-box was designed for wanna-be jocks who want to get it on in the games since they’re last to be picked in real life! =O

Okay, now that I’m done with my X-box/Microsoft crack of the day…

The PlayStation Portable. The Dual Screen. Sony and Nintendo’s attempts, respectively, to become the Microsoft of the gaming world. (Sorry, my bad. Couldn’t resist) And, of course, all those loyal fans with their PS2s and their Gamecubes are going “Wow! Kewl! It’s new so it must be advanced! Lets wait in line 15 hours to get it since we have no real life! Lolololol!!!!11111eleventy-one”

But, truly, is there anything new there? Anything at all that would require going out and facing monster lines to get, what to some, is a life necessity? Knowing what I know about recent game consoles, I took a second look. Beware falling sarcasm, obvious partiality, and wanna-be wit - I’m not a daughter of the Shameless Geek for nothing. (more…)

The recent release of the PSP might be a good thing, because Sony itself has been sued by Immersion for copyright infringement.

Ladies and gentlemen, it appears that Sony’s Playstation and such popular titles like Final Fantasy X, Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Grand Theft Auto utilize copyrighted software, which Sony and the game producers failed to secure a license for.

Tsk tsk tsk.

And what does this mean to us poor gamers out there? At first, the halt of production of both the playstation and the offending 47 game titles. Poor us! =0 My PSII had better last as long as it can! I mean, even if Sony got rid of all the copyright infringement, what would be the use to start another line all over again?

After all, we’ve got the PSP fer chrissakes! /sarcasm

But, we can breathe easy. Sony is taking countermeasures, and the original court’s decision was put on hold.

And why are you still reading this post, anyway? Go read the article itself, ye lazy kids! =P

…because it’s not just about being a shameless geek anymore. =P

You know you’re living in 2005 when…

1. You accidentally enter your password on the microwave.
2. You haven’t played solitaire with real cards in years.
3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.
4. You e-mail the person who works at the desk next to you.
5. Your reason for not staying in touch with friends and family is
that they don’t have e-mail addresses.
6. You go home after a long day at work and you still answer the phone
in a business manner.
7. You make phone calls from home, you accidentally dial 9 to get an
outside line.
8. You’ve sat at the same desk for four years and worked for three
different companies.
10. You learn about your redundancy on the 11 o’clock news.
11. Your boss doesn’t have the ability to do your job.
12. You pull up in your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if
anyone is home.
13. Every commercial on television has a website at the bottom of the
screen.
14. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have
the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for
panic and you turn around to go and get it.
15. You get up in the morning and go online before getting your
coffee.
16. You start tilting your head sideways to smile.
17. You’re reading this and nodding and laughing.
18. Even worse, you know exactly to whom you are going to forward this
message.
19. You are too busy to notice there was no #9 on this list.
20. You actually scrolled back up to check that there wasn’t a #9 on
this list.

AND NOW U R LAUGHING at yourself.

Slate has a good article explaining the style differences between Americans’ emails and Europeans’ emails. According to the article, Americans tend to dump their thoughts into a semi-personal email and then press send. The Europeans tend to write more professional, just the facts, business-like emails. The article also points out that Americans respond to email faster, but not to every one, while the Europeans are slow to respond, but respond to every email. This may explain why Shameless never responds to my email.

Lincoln West Studio is planning to start selling Pez candy dispenser that will dispense MP3s, instead of the tasty candy treats. Lincoln West Studios plans to make the heads of the MP3 Pez dispenser will be interchangeable with any head found on a Pez dispenser. The MP3 Pez dispenser will sell for around $129 and have a LCD screen and 512MB of memory. The MP3 Pez dispenser will come with earphones and USB cable used to download songs to the MP3 Pez dispenser.

For those people who enjoy hitting the snooze button, try using this clock for target practice: Clocky the clock.

Well, those of you who know me, know I’ve been threatening this one for a long time. So I’ve finally gotten around to it… I’m finally going to add a programming feature to this web site. I will start with a short series about elementary C programming, then branch out to whatever seems popular and appropriate for geeks. If you would like a sneak preview of my first submission, check out my C For Yourself introduction. If you have any thoughts or comments about the introduction, you can either post them here or drop me an email using the webmaster address at the bottom of the page. I’m looking forward to your feedback.

This one has been banging around the net for a couple of weeks now. A group of Microsoft’s preferred customers is petitioning the company to extend support for VB6 beyond the end of this month. Microsoft is still adamant. VB support ends 03/31/2005.

Well folks… deal with it. Microsoft, whatever their reasoning, is doing something good for the software community. You’re choices are to get off your duff and upgrade, or get off your duff and learn a real programming language. ’nuff said there.

Microsoft posted a good article on the top tools that ever good .net developer has in their development toolkit.

EA Games has announced a profit warning for the 2004 fourth quarter today. EA is projecting that revenue came in $200 million under the original estimate of $700 million. EA is blaming the stronger then normal Christmas competition from the games: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Halo 2, and Half Life 2 for causing the downfall. While competition did drive down sales of a lot of games, EA is neglecting the fact that most of the bigger games it released this past Christmas got less then stellar reviews and failed to catch on with consumers. The only game to catch on with consumers that EA released for this past Christmas season was Need For Speed: Underground 2. The amount of sales for Need For Speed: Underground 2 where not strong enough to make up for the loses the other EA games suffered, hence a profit warning.

Leakenova has released a PSP Survival Guide. You will definitely want to look this over befor you dive into the world of yet another gaming system. This submission contains tips about how to acquire your PlayStation Portable, which features to be sure to check out, and some of those little things that you might not think of on your own. Enjoy.

This year E3 Expo looks like it will be the biggest in years. All the dealer space has sold out. If you are in the interactive industry you can still get tickets just not a booth at E3 website. For all of readers not able to attend Shameless Geeks is working on way to bring you live on the floor coverage.

CNN and New York Times (registation required) have both posted reviews of the Broadway play Mighty Python’s Spamlot. Both media source reviews for Spamlot was that Spamlot was very good. Hopefully one of the staff from Shameless Geeks will be able to attend and get a review up soon.

CNN is now reporting that Star Wars eposide III will be a tearjerker in the simlar vain of ‘Titanic’. Right when we think Lucas can not drop a new low he goes and turns Star Wars into a chick flick.

I was poking areound in the Shameless Geeks archive today, and found a Shameless article that was never actually posted. It was announced here a while ago, but failed to make the permanent list. Here it is, for those of you who missed it. It’s called the Career Game, and it just happens to be one of my personal favorites.

Once again, Shameless has managed to catch someone by surprise. Check out this TV executive’s response to his concept for a reality show. As usual, He just doesn’t quite understand the concept.

The trailer to Star Wars Episode 3 is now online. Enjoy, but remember this episode will be dark. One thing the trailer left me wondering: does Emperor Palpatine look like a drunken Irish man?

Note: This requires quicktime MOV support, which is a proprietary format that Apple won’t release to the OSS community. There are a few rumored hacks out there, but they are likely to be illegal. So much for Apple supporting Linux You’ll need to run Windows or Mac OS and install Quicktime 6.

Microsoft Watch has a short blurb about some leaked details of IE7. I don’t know about you, but doesn’t this look an awful lot like Firefox? If they actually implement the features listed here, they will have gone a long way toward fixing most of the problems that I complain about most. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to be pushing toward CSS2 standards. That’s a pity, because it would allow webmasters more choices in how they present data.

If you were a real geek in High School, you have intimate knowledge of the meaning of the term Wedgie. Well, Webster’s is finally going to acknowledge your pain by adding the word “wedgie” to the next edition of it’s New World College Dictionary. The new edition is due to hit bookstores this May.

If you want to check out the actual definition, as well as some other words that will be added, check out this USA Today article. As for me, the memories are too painful, so I’ll just sit in this corner and suck my thumb.

Notorious WorldCom boss Bernie Ebbers has been found guilty on all counts, according to this USA Today article. Ebbers is one of the last remaining Dot-bomb bosses to be brought up on charges for unscrupulous business practices following the Wall Street tailspin of a few years ago. The accounting scandal surrounding Ebbers involved somewhere around $11 billion (thats with a b).

Lots of people lost their jobs and their retirement funds based on this man’s unbelievable greed. The high-tech industry still hasn’t fully recovered from economic hard times, in large part because the actions of Ebbers and others like him have destroyed the trust that investors had in our markets. IMHO, he should get the maximum 85 year sentence. At the very least, he should get enough time to insure that he dies in jail, and in poverty, as he should.

A new E-magazine for new Linux users.

According to this article from El Reg, Microsoft’s new legal strategy seems to be that of sending a swarm of lawyers after each student, then fighting to a climactic… draw. It’s pretty clear that their suit against a chem student who auctioned his student discounted copies of Windows was meant as a statement to other students. It’s also pretty clear what that statement was: DUH!

Though it is obvious that the student did something that wasn’t exactly legal, it wouldn’t have taken a legal genius, or more than a few minutes of investigation, to figure out that the kid wasn’t a criminal, just intellectually lacking. Any reasonable mind would have avoided this case and went after someone selling 100’s of copies purchased with a student discount. This case had the word STUPID printed all over both sides. Now it also has the words Microsoft Embarassment and Settled out of Court written on it too.

Oh well, I guess someone had to hire all of those unemployed SCO lawyers

Lucas is warning parents that next Star Wars installment will be very dark and will not be suitable for younger kids. The third installment will be PG-13 and not PG like all the other Star Wars movies. I guess the rumored killing of a certain Gungan was too gory for a PG rating.

The 2005’s Game Devolper choice awards where just awarded here are the results as posted by Slashdot:

Best Game -
Half-Life 2 (Valve Software / Vivendi Universal Games)
Ken Birdwell, Gabe Newell, Jay Stelly

Innovation -
I Love Bees (4orty2two Entertainment / Bungie Studios / Microsoft Game Studios)
Sean Stewart, Jordan Weisman, Elan Lee

New Studio -
Crytek (Far Cry)
Avni Yerli, Cevat Yerli, Faruk Yerli

Audio -
Halo 2 (Bungie Software / Microsoft Game Studios)
C Paul Johnson, Marty O’Donnell, Jay Weinland

Character Design -
Half-Life 2 (Valve Software / Vivendi Universal Games)
Ted Backman, Dhabih Eng, Bill Fletcher, Bill Van Buren

Game Design -
Katamari Damacy (Namco)
Keita Takahashi

Technology -
Half-Life 2 (Valve Software / Vivendi Universal Games)
Yahn Bernier, Brian Jacobson

Visual Arts -
World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment)
Sam Didier, William Petras, Justin Thavirat

Writing -
Half-Life 2 (Valve Software / Vivendi Universal Games)
Marc Laidlaw

Community Contribution - Shari Graner Ray
First Penguin - Richard Bartle
Lifetime Achievement Award - Eugene Jarvis

I am glad to see that Halo 2 did not win best gameand Doom 3 did not win anything. Katimari Darcy win and success may finnally pave the way for more innovative style games that are the norm in the Japanese market.

A retelling of Monty Python and The Holy Grail is set to appear on Broadway as the musical Monty Python’s Spamalot.

AMD may not have the top slot in the chip industry, but you gotta hand it to them for their sense of humor. Apparently, this skywriter’s banner was reportedly seen in the skies around the Intel Developers’ Forum. For the uninitiated, Turion is AMD’s mobile CPU chip, which is in direct competition with Intel’s Pentium-M. I have no idea whether this is a hoax or not… If it is, it’s a good one. If not… it’s still a good one.

Thanks to AnandTech for the pointer.

The Sony PSX is not dead as previously reported. The PSX was another of Sony’s great ideas that well they just sort of messed up and well it failed to live up anything Sony promised. The Sony PSX is designed to play PS2 and Playstation games, utilize broadband and record both DVD’s and television. Sony just forgot to add MP3 and DVD+R/RW support to it.

Firefox 1.0.1 has been released with a whole host of bug fixes. The release notes also mention some internationalization and tabbed browsing improvements. As always, I heartily recommend Firefox both for it’s security and it’s ease of use.

Here’s one from the head scratching department: Why would anyone steal a swimming pool?. I guess the only answer is “Because they Can". I’m surprised nobody has taken credit for this abduction.

If you are an OSS Geek, then you might want to check out tuxscout.com. It’s a site dedicated to matching up employers and employees employees in the open source community. Just like the employment section of this this site and GeekHall.com, tuxscout is free for everyone.

Before you ask… No, they are not affiliated in any way with this site. They are just OSS guys that have a similar idea about how to help a segment of the Geek community, so I thought they were worth a little free advertisement.

Someone stop these Redmond lawyers. According to this eWEEK arcticle and others, Microsoft’s lawyers are trying to patent the IsNot operator. This just illustrates what current patent law has degenerated to.

Since when are common and accepted practices patentable? I’ll tell you… the DotBomb boom. That’s when this country sprouted too many lawyers for us to support. It’s also when pseudo-technologists started trying to cash in on “discoveries” that were so obvious that a real engineer would never even consider a patent. (anybody remember single click shopping?)

My last dealings with the USPTO were in 1998, when I had to defend a patent application that was challenged just because the term “double buffered” was in the description. Because we weren’t trying to patent the “double buffered” part, it could be rewritten without the “double buffered” term. I don’t see how MS can rewrite this one without using IsNot. This patent isn’t meant to capitalize on an idea… just to tie the competition up in useless litigation.

Garbage patents like this keep Engineers in court and Lawyers in Jaguars. Though it pains me to say this, it is beginning to look like we will lose the economic wars to countries with saner patent laws. Defensive garbage patents have become the accepted way to squelch competition and thereby subvert the US economy. Those who file them should be considered guilty of treason.

Intel has released a new batch of P4’s including a new P4 Extreme Edition. This batch is kinda a snooze. Everyone (including Intel) is looking ahead to the first batch of dual core chips that are scheduled for late this year. In this round Intel has done a pretty reasonable job of ‘catch-up’ by releasing 64-bit parts with an enhanced “Speed Step". The 64 bit CPU will become much more testable in a couple of months when Microsoft releases 64-bit XP. The Speed Step technology is a voltage and frequency reduction during light CPU loads. It is similar to, but not as flexible as, AMD’s PowerNow! feature. AnandTech has a pretty good review. Firing Squad has one too.

Note that I said Intel has done a “reasonable job of catch-up". The comparisons seem to indicate that they haven’t quite caught AMD in performance. Maybe next time.

Ign has a good article about the attempts to resuce Enterprise from cancelation. I am presonally in the camp that is glad to see Enterprise die a painful death. Star Trek needs to take a break and come back in 10 years.

Kotoku has managed to get the specs from an inside source on XBox 360, also known as XBox 2. click here for more info

Not only does MicroSoft have problems with thier software but now they are having problems with hardware. MS recalls 14.1m Xbox power cables | The Register

To get you in the mood for the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie you can now play Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy online. It’s one of the greatest games of all time.

It looks like WindowsXP-64 RC2 has been available since Jan 25. Don’t understand how I missed that. Oh well, It’s not news anymore, but it may help someone.

Slashdot is pointing to an article on Space.com that adds a new wrinkle to the argument over life on Mars. The argument is based on methane signatures found in subsurface rocks. I’ll bet they can get the same methane signatures from my basement tiles right after I serve a pot of chili at a LAN party. Lots of sulphur too!

Leakenova has submitted his review of Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath for your perusal. If you’re looking for an honest appraisal of the game and it’s finer points, this is for you.

FiringSquad.com has posted a HL2 optimization guide for moderate machines. It can be a real help to those of us on a budget. If you would like to push up your FPS on your 1 or 2 year old system, check this out.

I stumbled across this link to the trailer for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on Slashdot today. Obviously, every Geek should pop over there for a look. There are some obvious differences between the books and the movie. I know that Douglas Adams worked on the screenplay before he passed away… I’m eager to see how his view of the story changed.

One thing to note: I watched the Amazon trailer using Firefox on a Linux system, and it worked perfectly. Kudo’s to Amazon for their compatibility. It isn’t often that you find a company willing to make ALL of it’s customers comfortable.

Mark your calanders this week for the one of the best Anime conventions on the East coast: Katsucon XI, in Crystal City, Virginia. While attending Katsucon XI you will enjoy COSPlaying, video games, tons of anime, Larping, a dealer room, art work, special guests, and even a band.

CNet recently wrote a great article on the new growing trending of making money via Massive Online Roleplaying Games. The scary thing is they are correct you can. One of my best friend’s kid actually did make a ton of cash buying selling stuff on Evercrap. Granted he basicly only made about 2 dollars an hour; but he did make money; I think he stop when Sony banned selling Evercrack items.

Care to be in charge of middle earth? If you have a few pounds to spare (thats pounds sterling, not pounds of hot pockets), you can buy it here on Ebay. Hopefully, the buyer of this domain and site will respect it’s meaning to all of geekdom. Middle earth should be treated with reverence.

Thanks to TheRegister.com for the initial post.

Blizzard is hiring for Diablo 3. Here is the link to hiring website:
Blizzard’s HR site. I am seriously thinking about applying for that tools position

In this article from the offbeat section of USA Today, a man was arrested for telling lawyer jokes in front of a courthouse, but had the charges dropped. Does anyone else see a really good lawyer joke in that story? How would you like to be the prosecutor who lost this case?

Chech out http://www.rssautopublisher.com/

After a long, long layoff, the Shameless Geek is back. Check out what happened during Shameless’ short lived tech support career. Those of you who have handled tech support know you have always wanted to say these things

AnandTech has posted a scientific guide to upgrades. It is essentially a cost/benefit formula for when and what computer components you should upgrade. Because of the fuzzy nature of some of the variables, I don’t know if it is hard science… and I doubt that its inventors intended it to be. One thing is for sure: It would make an excellent case for convincing a spouse that your new video card is a necessity, not a luxury. The married geeks of the world have a good reason to thank the folks at AnandTech.

According to TheRegister.com, the sale of IBM’s PC division to Lenovo may be in trouble. EWeek has a very similar article. It seems that the experts are focussing on the fact that this is a commodity business. They seem to forget that the deal allows Lenovo access to IBM technology and facilities for 5 years. The implications of this need to be considered carefully.

What both articles fail to mention is that the White House is still irritated with the sale of UAV equipment to China last year. Let’s see if the White House has forgiven them for that one.

I’ve updated the saga of the powercolor. You can check it out on this link or just scroll down till you find it.

This really makes all concerned look bad, but ATI especially. I would go easier on them, except that they could have eliminated a majority of the problems with an alternate power connector on their reference design. Oh well, check the update for the rest of my rant.

Mr. Microsoft has donated a significant chunk of change to vaccinate the children of developing nations. It seems that he’s not all bad. Kinda lessens the pain of turning all of my hard-earned dollars over to his empire.

While browsing /. I stumbled across this fitting tribute to Douglas Adams. Naming an asteroid after him that was found in the year he died and carrys a designation of 42 just sounds too good. I’m sure that even Marvin the Paranoid Android is smiling about this one. Well, maybe not, but he should be.

AMD has made know it’s intentions of shipping a dual-core processor in Q3 of 2005. Wow! AMD/Intel announced a new product line, and the other company says Me Too!. (yawn) That’s so unexpected. (/yawn) Really guys… AMD/Intel, ATI/Nvidia. We love the competition, but the Me Too announcements are getting old.

ask.slashdot has a cute discussion on what it takes for a geek to become a manager. Some of the suggestions are genuine, others are genuinely funny.

As a geek who has spent some effort avoiding management and observed other geeks become managers, I say Don’t Do It. It will probably cost you everything you love about being a geek. You won’t get to solve many technical problems and you will have to guide other geeks (worse than cat herding). Worst of all, as your real skills begin to dull, you will become one of those annoying “I think this will work, but I can’t do it myself” guys who sells bad ideas to customers, then blames the failure on the poor geek who got stuck trying to do the physically impossible.

You can tell I’ve run into some bad managers, can’t you?

Check out this virtual keyboard designed for PDA’s. Now that’s some serious Geekware. I would get one myselfy, but the $200 price tag is a little steep for me, and they wouldn’t take a virtual credit card number.

So… I’ll ask the obvious question… Do I have to remove the virtual keys occasionally to clean off the finger jam?

If it works the way it claims to, it would be a nice accessory for those who tote their systems to LAN parties.

Thanks to Specialst for the pointer to this one.

Bought one of these cards as a gift for my kid. No Video. Put it in a different machine. Windows works great, Linux doesn’t. Put it in a third machine, and I get intermittent crashes on CS:Source. If it weren’t for the fact that I can get all of the features to work in at least one machine, I would say it was a hardware fault. I can’t blame the 9600 Pro chip, because I have an ATI 9600 Pro in my machine that has performed admirably for over a year. No, the Powercolor doesn’t work in this one either.

I tried 2 different versions of catalyst, omega drivers, all of the settings in both positions, AGP voltage adjustments, and every other wacky remedy I found on the web. No change. Stripped the OS, reformatted, and rebuilt. Still no go. I’ll be sending it back ASAP, but I thought people would want to know about this turd. Based on what I see on the wild, wild web, I’m not the only one to complain.

I like telling you about good experiences I have with hardware. I feel that it is my duty to also tell you about the bad.

Update:
I’ve upped the AGP voltage to 1.8V. Thats a 20% increase, and it is in the realm of scary things to do to your system. It seems to have stopped the crashes that happen during normal Windows stuff. I haven’t been able to test the card under load yet. I’ll post results when I have them.

Update 2:
The voltage increase has stabilized the system significantly. It made the system stable enough for me to figure out (by process of painful elimination), that I also needed to turn the bus speed down to 4x and turn fast writes off. This makes it perform just slightly better than the 9100 it replaced. Just to be fair, I swapped in my ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (I think they are made by Sapphire), and found that I could run with AGP 8x. Sounds like, whatever the problem is, Powercolor is much worse.

Speculation: There is a serious power problem with the 9600. It demands something that is at the limit of what many motherboard / power supply combinations can provide on a single AGP connection. The fault can easily be spread between the makers of the power supply, the chip, the AGP card, and the mobo. Any one of these can be a little lax about the impedances of the power supply rails, and POOF! endless hours of fun. My mobos (both MSI NEO series) have voltage adjustments for AGP that helped solve the problem. Those who don’t have luxuries like that could easily end up replacing their power supply and motherboard without fixing the trouble. It’s a really bad deal.

In the end, though, the finger should be pointed at ATI. It was probably quite obvious to them that this kind of problem existed (if it wasn’t… that’s an even worse thought). When they noticed it, they should have added an alternate power supply connector to their reference design. I’m guessing that some marketing genius decided that an extra power connector took away from the “mid-range experience” or some hopelessly vacuous bean-counter decided that the extra power connector was too expensive. Either way, it has made me decide that, even after being a loyal ATI customer for my last 4 cards, I’m going with NVidia next time. ATI has a lot to prove to me now.

I have invited ATI’s PR department to respond. Any bets on whether they will?

Update 3:
I reproduced the problem with an ATI branded 9600 Pro card. Though the problem was much less frequent, it still occurred. I guess it is safe to point a finger at ATI for this one. In addition, I’m not the only one with these problems. A quick search of the web will find you thousands.

By the way… ATI never answered. Go figure.

SCO’s recent legal victory keeps their hopes for “cash for nothing” alive. It was one thing to argue that Linux contained stolen code. It is quite another to say that programmers got the idea for how to write Linux by looking at code. Those of us old enough to remember the “Look and Feel” lawsuits of the early 90’s get a chill when we hear this.

*For those who don’t remember: Apple tried to sue Microsoft for stealing the “Look and Feel” of Windows from them. The court almost agreed… until they found out that Apple stole the “Look and Feel” from Xerox.

As pointed out by AnandTech, todays Mirriam-Webster word of the day is vaporware. Any one taking bets on which video card the guy in charge tried to buy?

According to TheRegister:
Scientists at Okayama University in Japan have rather agreeably discovered that unidentified
compounds in lager and stout may help to prevent DNA damage leading to cancer.

I think I’ll have another.

This British article in The Sun teases about a new X-Files movie. I wouldn’t get too hopeful. Gillian Anderson isn’t on board yet. No Scully, No way.

The boys over at HardOCP seem to think so. If you were considering SLI, It might be a good idea to see if your favorite games support it. Otherwise, you’ll be spending lots of cash for no gain. SLI could be the future of graphics cards, so you may want to ‘future proof” a new system… Then again… 3dfx thought that SLI was the future… several years ago. I don’t think it did them much good.

It seems that Google has finally noticed blog spam and has decided to do something about it. They are asking bloggers to add a “nofollow” tag to every link that can be added by the general public. That should take away most of the incentive for blog spamming. I’ve actually had to switch to “no comments” for the short term while I figure out how to modify my blog software to require a login.

USA Today has a good one about buzzwords in the tech industry. Most of us know someone who can’t speak without uttering a bunch of words that mean very little, but are intended to make them look like a tech insider. S’OK… That just makes the pretenders easier to spot. I must admit that I have been using the word blog a little too much lately. I guess I could cut down on it as a New Year resolution.

BTW… Tech guys are nothing compared to used car dealers. I knew some of those who were so big on buzzwords that they couldn’t understand regular American anymore.

Ran into this comparison of LCD and CRT monitors online. The article is less of a comparison, and more of a statement about how LCD’s have caught up to CRT’s in many ways. Still, based on my recent personal experience, it’s a pretty good analysis.

I recently switched from a 19″ CRT to a 20″ LCD to cut down on eyestrain. I expected that I would have to live with ugly interpolation for games. I was very surprised. The first time I ran Star Wars Battlefront, I was amazed at how good 1024*768 graphics looked on a 1600*1200 monitor. It almost looked like it was at it’s native resolution! Refresh rates were very playable, although I’m not sure I believe the 16ms advertised rate. As for the expected ghosting… non-existent. It seems that (almost) everything I disliked about LCD’s had been addressed and overcome. Now… If they could only do something about the price

In yet another spectacular government tech. failure, the FBI is abandoning it’s $170 million Virtual Case File software because it doesn’t work. I’m surprised that they abandoned it for such a petty reason . I’ve seen lots of government funded software that didn’t even exist by the end of the contract, let alone perform its function.

I would really hate to work for PeopleSoft right now. According to news.com, Oracle is handling up to 6000 PeopleSoft layoffs in an impersonal, and inherently offensive way. I know we all have our horror stories about leaving jobs. I once worked for a company that had the humiliating policy of publicly escorting all employees out to the parking lot as soon as they were informed of their layoff. This included company founders. I know that this policy had an influence on my decision to leave. It may not have been the main reason for leaving, but it certainly made me rush the decision to resign.

As with other people, I would love to see those who make these policies become victim of them. Anyone have Ellisons letter?

I’ve just finished the first draft of a Geeks guide to AMD’s Cool’n'Quiet feature. I intend to make this the first in a series of original tech submissions. If anyone has any ideas about what subject I should poke my nose into next, let me know.

NASA launced it’s Deep Impact comet buster on schedule today. The spacecraft is supposed to smash into a comet on July 4 to take pictures of it’s insides. Sounds vaguely like someone mixed up the plots of Independence Day and Armageddon. Hopefully, we won’t annoy any aliens living on the comet

Check out Wired’s 2004 Vaporware Awards. I must sheepishly admit that I was waiting for some of these products. I’m sure everyone who has any dealings with the world of high-tech has a million vaporware stories. I know I do.

TheRegister is running a story that could easily be titled Not Only in America. This one sounds like the 20 year, $10B (thats ten billion dollars) Comanche fiasco. If the public paid attention to how their tax dollars were being wasted on projects run by people with single digit IQ’s, they would be shocked. Unfortunately, nobody pays attention.

If you are involved in any type of development. you might want to check out this study of the reasons why development projects fail . I guess nobody wants to hear “I told you so", but it says exactly what I tried to tell so many software people for so many years: If you don’t use the right tools for the right job, things break. Maybe Engineers/Techs/Developers should spend less time arguing about whether a wrench is better than a hammer, and more time deciding which one fits the task at hand.

The fact that “changing requirements” came in so low as a reason for project failure was surprising to me… I guess if you think about it really hard, “changing requirements” is used very often to request an extension or an increase in funding, but I don’t remember it being an actual reason for failure. It is usually just the most iron-clad excuse that people come up with.

The one that they didn’t cover was “Idiots in charge". That would wipe the rest of the reasons off of the list.

Ran across a way to make Firefox scream on broadband connections. I tried it at home on Linux, and was amazed at the results. Basically, it enables the browser to make lots of requests at the same time, and cuts back on the amount of time it waits before acting on information that comes in. I also found it kinda cool to browse through all of the variables in Firefox.

Well, I’m back from holiday vacation. I’d like to use this first post of the new year to wish all of you a healthy, happy, and prosperous New Year.

Cnet informs us that a year end report will confirm that the CAN-SPAM act did little to slow the growth of spam. Maybe someone can convince the govt. that spammers won’t pay any more attention to them than they pay to their voters. It’s the money that talks. As long as Joe Dork keeps on buying penis enlargers from Russian spammers, and Gramma Nobody keeps buying Vioxx from Mexican spammers, we’ll have to put up with this disease. Eventually, the spammers (no honor among theives and all that) will rip-off enough people to stop these purchases, and the spammers will move on to the next get-rich-quick scheme.

I would like to wish all of you and yours a Very Merry Christmas. I would love to give each and every one of you a wonderful holiday gift, but I couldn’t get my matter-to-digital converter working in time. Oh well, there is always next year .

I plan to make some big anouncements early in the new year, so pop in now and then for an update.

AintItCool has news and reviews of the upcoming Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie. I have the books (including the omnibus copy) and the TV series on DVD, so I guess I qualify as a fan. I’ll post any movie stuff that I stmble across. Thanks to Slashdot for the pointer.

C Net has posted an interesting retrospective of the top 2 x86 CPU makers. Definitely worth taking this trip down memory lane.

PC Mag has published their list of Geek gifts to avoid. I just wish they would send a list to my wife. Well, hope she didn’t get any of these!

According to CNN, Microsoft is not ruling out a fee for anti-spyware software that fixes vulnerabilities that they planted on your machine and forced you to use. Does anyone else find this disgusting? Shouldn’t they be paying us for the time it takes to fix their poorly written software?

Get The Facts is something that everyone in the computer industry has been hearing for quite a while now. Get The Truth seems to be something that we really need. An Australian IT company has fired another shot in the TCO wars. This one claims to be more open than others.

My personal experience:

• The purchase price of Linux is free, but it is tougher to manage because it is so much more secure and versatile, plus the number of experts in the field is smaller
• Management costs for Linux have been steadily falling as people become familiar with it.
• Linux will have a tough time as long as existing hardware and application companies are held hostage by existing M$ agreements.
• Most new companies are avoiding these silly agreements, so that should change over time.
• M$ is still the only gaming OS around. That will probably persist for quite a while.

If you use each OS for what it is designed for (Linux for work, M$ for home… subject to change) you’ll never go wrong. And thats The Truth.

Just ran across a Slashdot pointer to an article about the gEDA project. I ran across this tool many years ago, before it was mature enough to be of any use. I intend to get re-acquainted with it. For those of you who don’t know, gEDA is a suite of hardware design tools that are fully GPL’ed. Even if they turn out to be limited, they will probably be useful enough for a hobbyist. I’ll post a review in a few weeks.

Looks like Doom fans are unhappy with the guy who wrote the screenplay for the upcoming Doom movie, according to this article on HomeLAN Fed. The final product is scheduled for release in August, so I guess we’ll find out how bad it really is then. Knowing the track record of how the movie industry follows scripts not written by HollyWeird pap generators, I wouldn’t expect much. It will probably end up having something to do with posessed Republicans from outer space conspiring to steal innocent Promoters’ cocaine stashes. That’s what Hollywood people would consider the ultimate horror.

Yes, according to a CNet news article. The only problem is that they never really tested Windows. Now I’m a card-carrying Linux fan, and I believe that Linux probably has fewer bugs than Windows, but I’d rather wait until someone comes up with something more than a SWAG before I point to it as evidence. Try again boys! You’ll get there eventually.

The part of the article that states that Linux has far fewer bugs than average is certainly something to be proud of. Although the statement that average code has 1-7 bugs per 1000 lines of code is pretty disturbing. If my code had that many bugs, I’d be fired on the spot. Maybe I should send this article to my boss

Well, I think we all suspected it, but it’s official… We have now seen a judge listed on e-bay. And you thought it was only politicians that were 4 sale

13 pocky sticks a meltin’~ >_>

(Ahem) Anyway, anybody trying to figure out how to give your geek that special something? Or are you that special geek trying to get out of recieving yet another lawnchair this year? Just crawl your way over to this really REALLY subtle hint over here and have a merry christmas.

As for me, I’m going to grab myself a pint o’ eggnog and avoid doing any writing for the holiday season. >_> You heard me, Shameless! No writing! Hah!

……..admittedly not the smartest thing to say when I’m within throwing distance, but since when has anyone in this family had anything remotely close to common sense?

I think not. But that’s what Yahoo Media Helper told me when I inadvertently clicked on a Windows Media limk while running Linux. Looks like Yahoo’s web team really is a bunch of Yahoos.

An online “school” that gave an MBA to a cat is being sued for various crimes, as reported by USA Today. What’s wrong with a cat trying to pass as an MBA? I’m sure there are lots of MBA’s trying to pass as CAT’s

Silly as this sounds, it appears to be a real article over at TheRegister.com. Not sure if this would be a comedy, or a horror story.

Shameless has brought you his first Christmas Carol: The Shameless 12 Days of Christmas. As usual, it indicates a moderately twisted personality with a tendency to slip into delusional euphoria. Don’t know what that means, but it sounds like fun.

Microsoft has scrapped SP5 for win2k as reported by eWeek. Of course, this means that Win2K won’t even get the meager security fixes that XPSP2 provided. Honestly… If a bunch of students and volunteers can out-code your security, shouldn’t you just admit incompetence? …And how about a little quality control for those of us who have to keep fixing the virus infested PC’s you failed to protect? It looks to me like M$ has no room to complain about the fact that more and more geeks are recommending Linux and Mac’s to their friends and employers. Yeah… I DID Get The Facts, and found out that yours are spinning like a top. Try these facts on for size. M$ actually gained some credibility in my eyes when they made an effort (small though it was) to fix security issues with XPSP2. They just lost all credibility when they made this decision.

Hormel is getting into the spirit of the upcoming play “Monty Python’s Spamalot” by giving away a free can of Spam Golden Honey Grail to the first 100 people who buy tickets tomorrow. They also plan to make the product available to a limited number of retailers in February. You gotta admire a company that can laugh at itself along with the rest of us. I can wait for my next plate of Spam Spam Spam sausage Spam eggs Spam Spam and Spam. Now if they could just keep their product out of my inbox…

President George W. Bush just signed an extension to the Internet Tax Ban that lasts through 2007. Time to whip out the credit card and celebrate! Note that when our President does something I like, I always use his full name and title

If you’ve been under a rock this past week, here’s some news for you: Lycos has been waging a nasty DDoS campaign against spammers in Europe. The spammers fired back, taking out Lycos. I hate spammers just as much as the next geek, but doesn’t this look a bit like playpen tactics? It’s not even mature enough for the schoolyard. Instead of slash and burn, which can easily take out a lot of the innocent as well as the guilty, why not just expose them to the light of day, where they will eventually just dry up? Im also very surprised that a large company like this would get involved in something so dopey. If I gave out a Shameless Twit award, Lycos would have it locked up this year.

Someone in PA stole a Krispy Kreme truck, and Swatara Township’s Finest recovered it. Not really much of a story here. I just couldn’t resist a headline like Police Recover Donuts. Nothing like a good stereotype to get you going for the day.

Jeopardy’s winningest player, UberGeek Ken Jennings, finally ended his unprecedented winning streak as reported here by the Toronto Star. Is it a coincidence that a Geek got beaten by someone named Nancy Zerg? I think not. The question that he stumbled on was understandable. It was about someone who does taxes for a living. Real Geeks do their own taxes.

We should all thank Ken. he made Geeks look good 74 times in a row!

Those of you having trouble with your power supply after upgrading to a new video card might by having trouble with inrush current. Some of the other manufacturers aside from ATI and Nvidia, do not current limit the power coming in from the 4 pin molex connector. I tried a Sapphire 9700Pro video card, with a Fortron 510 Watt supply. The card pulled enough current on power up that it shut down the power supply. After several of these power ons, the supply refuses to reset. The easiest solution to this problem is to put some resistance in the +12V lead. The +5 lead is not used, so it odesn’t matter. You should plan for about 3 amps or more. The card will regulate this down to 3.3V and less, so a drop from +12 is not a problem. For example, a 3 volt drop at 3 amps is 1 Ohm. The power dissipated by the resistor is 3 watts, so a 5 Watt resistor is a good choice. You can also put resistors in parallel to up the power dissipation, but remember to up the resistance by the same factor. Mount the resistor(s) on a seperate card with the 2 molex connectors, and insert between the power supply and the video card. The resistance will absorb the inrush current, and allow the power supply to come up.

Nighthawk flies in with an initial submission titled The Take-Back. It’s kinda like a computer geek action flick, if that’s possible. Incidentally, can you guess who ‘The Company’ is? Lots of clues here… but Nighthawk ain’t telling. Oh… and… May the penguins be with you!

I finally got the resume uploader to work the way I want it to. Global resumes are now linked from the employent page, so (hopefully) they will be indexed by the major web crawlers. Resumes uploaded with the local-only option are properly wrapped in an authorization script and kept from the crawlers. This will be a great option when the local resume searcher goes online, but that might be a few days. I have uploaded 2 versions of my resume as examples of how things will turn out. shameless.shtml is an example of a resume uploaded as HTML, and spork.shtml is an example of a resume uploaded as text. For now, HTML and Text are the only 2 formats supported.

I encourage all members to upload a copy of their resume using the employment upload page. What do you have to lose?

If you want to see your resume online, just upload with the global option, then use the link at the bottom of the employment page to browse the list of global member resumes. As an alternative, you could always just type ‘http://www.shamelessgeeks.com/resumes/global/username.shtml’ into your browser’s address bar.

The management and staff of ShamelessGeeks.com (that would be me and me) would like to wish all of you a happy Thanksgiving day. What are we thankful for? We’re thankful for both of our regular visitors (that would also be me and me).

Found a CNET blog entry claiming that some
Half Life 2 players are calling out for Ralph. I don’t know how true it is, but I know that real gamers don’t hurl. If fast motions and flying body parts cause you to pray at the porcelain altar, you won’t be seen as a serious gamer. However, gamers have been known to call their boss claiming all kinds of diseases on a major game release day.

Shameless has posted yet another commentary on life. Check it out when you have the time.

Looks like the lame duck congress might push through some of the incredibly STUPID legislation aimed at P2Pers. I don’t count myself among the ranks of the downloading public, so I don’t have a downloading religion to cloud my vision on this point. The thing that I noticed was that the concept of “fair use” that has been around for a while may get spiked with this legislation. Fair use was the reason you couldn’t go to jail for making a VHS copy of CSI for personal viewing.

Looks like we know the 3rd most likely place where the money you pay for CD’s will go… Congress. Up the promoter’s nose and into the lawyers Jaguar (a.k.a. horribly overpriced Ford) are always the top 2. The artist and the CD media itself end up somewhere just below the promoter’s L.A. poolboy. I’ll bet Shameless will have something to say about this one.

Toms Hardware has released this years holiday buging guide . I spent hours looking at the guide, but I can only remember one item. Unfortunately, she isn’t for sale . It says so on the TRO her lawyers sent me.

AnandTech has this article about the SCO arguments. Looks like Novell explicitly retains all rights to Unix code based on the minutes of a 1995 board meeting. Groklaw sees this as a showstopper for SCO. Can you see someone’s lawyer fees swirling their way toward the sewer?

Drog has submitted our first three Poetry entries. I have to admire poets. I can’t seem to squeeze out anything more artistic than a dirty limerick.

His submissions are:
Untitled
Technosoul
Aspiration Always Calls

Check them out. They bring a little class to this joint.

Uh Oh. Looks like CBS has ticked off Shameless. When you do that, you just might die (laughing, that is). Check out what he has to say to the network that pre-empted one of his favorite shows. Caution: contains senseless simulated stylized fantasy violence against executives and newsmen.

In an interview with Yahoo! News, Lucas Arts president Jim Ward revealed the future of Star Wars games. Looks like we’ll have a couple of Episode III based games, as well as a new RTS, within a year. Can’t wait for the RTS. Hope the gameplay is at least as good as Gallactic Battlegrounds was, but that the graphics are a lot better.

Oger has submitted our first Limerick. Let’s hope he has more where that came from.

Adding to the flurry of Open Source releases, the Mozilla Project released their official 1.0 version of Firefox today. I tried accessing the page via various links, including the one at the top of this site, but it appears that their servers are overwhelmed. I personally recommend Firefox. I’ve been using it exclusively for Windows and Linux since version 0.9, and I’m impressed. That doesn’t happen often. If you want a copy, you know where to find it (Hint: scroll up).

We’ve all seen the “Get the Facts” campaign that has been running for the past few months. Go to any IT-oriented web site and you’ll probably trip over banner ads leading to MS’s propaganda page. Novell has posted an answer called Unbending the Truth that could very well be just as misleading. Personally, I think this could get as bad as the recent elections, where nobody knew the truth.

I’ve gotten a reasonable uploader to work. It has found a temporary home on the Fiction page with the fiction submissions. While working on the uploader, I determined that the best way to handle authentication is to do it on an ‘as needed’ basis. The login page now contains links to account creation and lost password pages, but not login. User’s will now be authenticated when they first attempt to use a “members only” page. Currently, the uploader is the only page that requires authentication.

3D Gamers has posted a new version of the Star Wars Battlefront Dedicated server by Pandemic Studios. It’s supposed to be coupled with a new 1.1 client, but I can’t find it yet. If you see it, please post it here. May the Force be with you, Jedi.

Looks like SCO has given up on the idea of countering Groklaw as reported by TECHWORLD. I wish they would just SCO away. It’s one thing to claim that your great-great-great-granfather company wrote some code that someone else gave away. But don’t expect any sympathy if you can’t even show which code that is.

Shameless has written a brief description of himself on the main geek humor page. It explains a lot

The first 5 Shameless Geek columns are available via the main menu. These include:
Politically Incoherent with the Shameless Geek.
Are you a Shameless Geek?
Why are there no Geeks at the Olympics?
Why be a Shameless Geek?
Shameless and the Alien Abduction

Lynne has posted her first short Reality. Its a Sci-Fi story that asks the question “If no one remembers you, did you ever truly exist?".

Lady shinnite strikes again with a Sci-Fi short entitled Leaf. Its a dark story with a chilling view of the end of the human race.

Lady Shinnite has posted True Deamer, a story with a very unique approach. Definitely worth checking out.

Oops! Found out that it only takes a little bit of stupidity to delete a lot of work. I accidentally nuked all of the submission announcements. Please be patient if you notice that today’s announcements are repeats.