People always claim they are either an optimist or a pessimist by how they see a glass that is half-full with liquid. Of course geeks know that the glass is completely full, maybe not with liquid, but it's full.
Self-proclaimed Geek David Huang rocks this t-shirt which says "Only You can prevent Forest Fires. Seriously. We've been defunded. It's only you now.".
Now available for the first time as an e-book!
The cartoons in this e-book have been specially formatted for optimal viewing. The e-book will only work on color tablets and is not intended for viewing on desktop apps or black and white tablets.
Perhaps the most brilliant comic strip ever created, Calvin and Hobbes continues to entertain with dazzling cartooning and tremendous humor.
Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes has been a worldwide favorite since its introduction in 1985. The strip follows the richly imaginative adventures of Calvin and his trusty tiger, Hobbes. Whether a poignant look at serious family issues or a round of time-travel (with the aid of a well-labeled cardboard box), Calvin and Hobbes will astound and delight you.
Beginning with the day Hobbes sprang into Calvin's tuna fish trap, the first two Calvin and Hobbes collections, Calvin and Hobbes and Something Under The Bed Is Drooling, are brought together in this treasury. Including black-and-white dailies and color Sundays, The Essential Calvin and Hobbes also features an original full-color 16-page story.
Q: Why did the Higgs Boson go to church? A: For the mass.
Did you hear about the company that sells elastomeric insulators?
Their motto is "Resistance is butyl".
Intern: How I get to the marketing department?
Engineer: Easy, go west until you can smell it and then turn north until you step in it.
We had our engineers work in HR for a week to encourage better teamwork. They immediately sent out an employment ad that read "Supermodels wanted, (must be able to solder.)"
Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body. One said, "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints. "
Another said, "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections."
The last said, "Actually it was a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?"
Engineer cooking dinner
Geek Humor
The engineer's wife left a note for him to prepare dinner that evening:
"Shepherd's Pie needs to be taken out of the fridge and placed in the oven at 140 degrees."
So that's what he did.
TRS80 Model 100
Way back in 1983 the Great Lakes Geek got his first portable computer. It had a great form factor, nice keyboard and useful ports.
The LCD screen was only 8 lines and 40 characters across but that seemed plenty for the text-based BASIC programs you ran on the unit.
Maybe the best part of the ahead-of-its-time unit was the built-in 300 bps (yes 300 bps) modem. It made the Model 100 a favorite of journalists who could type about 10 pages of text into the unit and then plug into a phone line and upload their columns to the main office. 300 bps sounds excrutiatingly slow but when you just transferred ASCII character and plain text, it was surprisingly useful. The Geek spent a lot of time on the old Cleveland Freenet with that device.
The Great Lakes Geek recently uncovered his old Model 100 and shot this video of it. Ah, memories.
Nielsen's latest numbers say that about 1/3rd of US cell phone subscribers now have a smartphone. They surveyed 9,200 people and Women want iPhones more than Androids (31% to 23%) while it's the opposite for Men (32% to 28%).
The latest Great Lakes Geek poll has Droid users leading 72% to 24% over iPhoners (4% none or other).
The annual Parade the Circle isn't the typical parade. With floats decorated by University Circle institutions and participants tapping into their vast creativity, Parade the Circle is as unique as the neighborhood it travels through.
You have to admore the creativity. For example, this float called the Phoenix is a 10' bird made by Sawson Alhaddad, an anesthesiologist at the Cleveland Clinic.
Alhaddad saved up clear plastic packaging from medical supplies and created this amazing structure.
The Geek had a blast at the first annual Cleveland Asian Festival. Lots of terrific food, entertainment and so on.
But some of the most fun was watching people don a fat suit and try their hand at sumo wrestling. As this short video shows, maneuvering wasn't always easy.
OK, I've heard of wearing your heart on your sleeve but broadcasting the amount of e-mail in your inbox on your shirt? That's what Chris Ball does.
Chris Ball is a free software developer who lives in Boston and works as Lead Software Engineer for One Laptop Per Child. On a recent free day he got some free electronics to mess with and came up with his new shirt. He made a t-shirt that displays how much unread e-mail he has using an Arduino Lilypad and Bluetooth dongle. An Android phone sends the number of unread mails to the shirt.
What is it about geeks and April Fool's Day? Manipulating hardware and software for fun and pranks has long been a favorite geek pastime so when society dedicates a whole day to it, what else did you expect?
Some of the old-time pranks will still work, especially with newbies, but are getting boring. I mean how many times can you rename one of those open the CD/DVD drive door files and send to a co-worker? So the drive jumps open. Oh boy.
There are a bunch of pranks for smart phones but since many are device specific, I'll let you search for them.
Here are 4 easy ones that you can try on your pals on the 1st.
If you have access to their PC, go into Word and set up the AutoReplace with something funny and irritating. You can be obvious and have the system replace a common word like "the" with an insult. Or delay the agony by making more discrete changes such as a misspelling of your company name.
Everyone has access to a wireless USB remote control for PowerPoint presentations, right? Sneak the wireless receiver into the victim's USB port and then when you are ready, and in range, start messing with his mouse movements and clicks.
You can also mess with their keyboard. In Windows open Control Panel, Keyboards and Languages (Regions and Languages in XP) and select Change Keyboard. You can change layouts or even languages. Most European language keyboard layouts are very similar so the target might not catch on for awhile.
This last one is a lot of fun. Take a screenshot of the person's desktop (PrintScreen in XP or Snipping Tool in Vista or Windows 7). Right-click on the desktop. Choose Personalize and change the default desktop image to the screenshot you just made. Then go to the View menu and uncheck Show Desktop Icons. Then the victim's desktop will look normal but when he clicks on an icon, nothing happens. It's just an image!
If you are more extreme, download an image of a broken LCD and use the above trick on the victim's laptop.
Be prepared for revenge - and they may not wait till next April 1st.
The Great Lakes Geek has always been a fan of Alice in Wonderland - but maybe for different reasons than most. In college I was exposed to the mathematics of Charles Dodgson, aka Lewis Carroll.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass are loaded with logical puzzles. So are the the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky."
Dodgson was a pretty good mathematician, and not just in logic. He also did good work in geometry and matrix algebra.
This has been around for awhile but it's still really cool. Alan Becker created a flash animation where the animation fights back against the animator.
It takes a few second to load but it's worth a view. I wonder how long it took him to do this.
John Williams’ score for the original 1977 Star Wars movie has been declared the best science fiction movie soundtrack of all time in a poll conducted by popular sci-fi website Totalscifionline.com. The score to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, composed by James Horner, came in second place, while Vangelis’ haunting electro soundtrack for Blade Runner - recently voted the best sci-fi movie of all time - completed the top three.
Matt McAllister, editor of Totalscifionline.com said: “With his score for Star Wars, John Williams created one of the most iconic and unforgettable soundtracks of all time. Most people could identify the movie from just a few bars of the main title music, and Williams’ work across all of the Star Wars movies really does create a palpable sense of intergalactic space battles and galaxy-spanning adventures. For many moviegoers, this is now the definitive sound of science fiction.”
Top Ten:
1) Star Wars (John Williams)
2) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (James Horner)
3) Blade Runner (Vangelis)
4) Star Trek the Motion Picture (Jerry Goldsmith)
5) Flash Gordon (Queen)
6) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Richard and Johann Strauss, György Ligeti)
7) The Day the Earth Stood Still (Bernard Herrmann)
8) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (John Williams)
9) Aliens (James Horner)
10) Transformers the Movie (Vince DiCola / Stan Bush)
Notice to all employees! Due to the hard economic times and otherwise depressing state of the world today, all personnel will now be required to at least look happy while working. Company-approved supplies will be provided to each employee at little or no cost. Here is the new low-cost, company-approved solution to cope with multiple priorities and assignments! Each employee will be supplied 2 paper clips and rubber bands.
Assemble items as shown
Apply as shown. Enjoy your day. This new office equipment will help you to reach the end of a productive work day with a smile on your face!
How many games in the NCAA tourney? Assuming we don't count the play-in game for the 64th spot you can count up 32+ 16+ 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 and get 63. (add 1 for the play-in game)
It's easy to determine the number of games played to determine a champion in a single elimination tournament. Say there are 64 teams in the tournament. When a team loses they are out so 63 teams must lose to determine the champ. That means 63 games are needed.
In general, if there are N teams in a single elimination tournament, you need to play N-1 games to get a champ.
If you want to make sure you have a perfect bracket you'd need to do every possible combination. With the play-in game, there are 64 games played.
There are two possible outcomes for each game so the possible outcomes are 2 to the 64th power or about 18 quintillion.
What do Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, The Spirit, Captain Marvel and The Hulk all have in common? If you said they have alter egos, look good in spandex, and helped shape American values, you're right.
Check out Zap! Pow! Bam! The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950 at the Maltz Museum through January 4th. Lots of one-of-a-kind stuff and fun, interactive stuff for kids.
Move your mouse over the screen, and you will have the impression, you are flying over the mountains. Aim the mouse arrow at a mountain top. Also, try moving it left to right. Get your Dramamine ready!
I wonder how long it took for the people to figure out how much the check was for?
For those of you who are mathematically challenged, 0.002 + e raised to the 2pi power is 535.4936555. The limit of the sum, as n goes to infinity, of 1 over 2 to the n'th power is 1.
So the check is made out for $536.49. But you already knew that, right?
HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first store opened on November 4, 1926, in Amsterdam . Now there are 150 stores all over the Netherlands . HEMA also has stores in Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany . In June of this year, HEMA was sold to British investment company Lion Capital.
Take a look at Hema's product page You can't order anything; it's in Dutch, but wait a few seconds and watch what happens.
There’s something about Halloween that brings out the inner geek. Whether you live in a castle or a dungeon, your pals at Psooodough Mart have dug up a wacky list of (mostly) techie toys designed to set the stage for a geeky Halloween experience.
I know all about Black 47. That's the Irish Band named after the most tragic year of the Irish potato famine - 1847. But I had never heard of System 47.
Turns out it is a Star Trek reference as explained at schlock.net: "Midway through Star Trek: The Next Generation, the number 47 began appearing on Star Trek seemingly anywhere the writers needed a number. Shields would drop to 47 percent; 47 people would die in a disaster; 47 minutes would remain until certain death."
So when the guy behind MeWho.com created his Star Trek screen save, he named it System 47.
It's a free download (only 1.3 MB) and you can always uninstall.
Here's two fun websites to test your reaction times. First is a hit the penguin with a bat - go for distance. Click on Bigfoot to start and then again to swing.
Have you heard the buzz about the new ringtone that supposedly only teens can hear?
The story is that some store owners were playing a sound that was supposed to keep mosquitoes away and found that teens could hear it too but not adults. So they started playing it to keep teens from loitering.
But teens can be industrious so someone figured that if they could hear it but not adults, it would make a perfect cellphone ringtone - one that teachers and other adults couldn't hear but their friends could.
The Great Lakes Geek spent too many years with the amps cranked to 11 to hear much of anything anymore but I was still able to detect this sound. Can you?
This is a great reference. Who would have thought that Britney Spears was such an expert in Schrödinger's equation and Quantum Physics. But she must be. It's on the Internet so it must be true, right?
The lessons are actually very good and the Britney connection makes it fun. These guys did a great job with their site.
Maybe you can get your teen son to do his homework now.
This has been around for awhile but it's still really cool. Alan Becker created a flash animation where the animation fights back against the animator. 
