Assorted Geekery

Via Digg: You absolutely need to read this hilarious article about a drunken rumble-that-almost-was between employees of ATI and NVIDIA employees at the CeBIT conference. It appears to have started after the ATI folks showed up during an NVIDIA and started hitting on one of the female NVIDIA employees.

You should really take this quiz to find out. It will test your ability to decipher between Web 2.0 start-ups and Star Wars characters. I’m embarrassed to say I only scored a 31 on this, which is an affront to both sides of my geek.

But seriously, this is a really impressive fan film lightsaber fight I found via Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. It’s actually really entertaining. Watch Ryan vs Dorkman here.

You simply HAVE to check out this video of what might be the best game ever, which I found via the blog of my friend Chris. The game is called Spore and it looks absolutely incredible.

Not everyone has use for this kind of feature, but I use it almost every day for a wide variety of uses. For example, I can check on a lengthy compilation process, test a theory using a one of the applications native to my Linux system, or to bypass a corporate internet filter when it has mistakenly blacklisted a site I need to access for code reference.

Mmm… Time wasting. You scored as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Obi-Wan Kenobi: The Mentor. Obi-Wan Kenobi71%Master Yoda67%Qui-Gon Jinn63%Luke Skywalker58%Count Dooku50%Darth Sidious46%Mace Windu46%Anakin Skywalker42%Darth Maul42%Random Jedi33%Darth Vader25% What Force User Are You? created with QuizFarm.

What can I say? I’m in love.

I haven’t posted in a few days, in part because I’ve been pretty busy, and partly because I’ve been overhauling my system with a brand new Linux distribution. I’m now running Gentoo and I absolutely love it.

Last night I was monkeying around on my computer while enjoying the David Cross comedy album Shut Up, You Fucking Baby!, and I noticed a dark shape out of the corner of my eye.

Many years ago, back when I was in high school, my three closest friends and I were called in to wage war against an opponent roughly 0.5% our size. You see, Quentin’s family had a bat that had snuck into their guest room and was trying to set up a life for itself in the shadows above the canopy bed.

I had to respectfully withdraw from the TTLB Ecosystem because the JavaScript required, which updates my status on it, was causing serious drag at load time for the blog. I no longer shall fight for my meat in that food chain, so the infuriating white screen while you wait for the Ministry to retrieve content shouldn’t happen anymore.

Via Digg: Here is a extremely articulate and well reasoned rebuttal to Dvorak’s claim that Apple will switch to Windows as their primary OS. Rob Hyndman clearly illustrates his reasoning and does what I think is an effective job of attacking the Windows argument that has been presented.

If you are unfamiliar with the geeky folk/rock musical stylings of Jonathan Coulton, you are seriously missing out. I cannot even imagine what the inside of this man’s mind is like, but I bet it is a lot of fun.

Via Digg: Apparently, Microsoft is holding a sweepstakes to give away MacBook Pros and iPods. The initial link to the contest is found on their Office for Mac page, and the list of prizes can be found here.

John C. Dvorak, a tech journalist and cast member of the This Week In Tech has a theory that Apple’s switch to the Intel processor signals that Apple will actually switch their OS to Windows.

I was just reading the blog of Warren Ellis and came across a very funny little discussion between Ellis and Joss Whedon occuring in the comments of one of the posts.

The purpose of this guide is to show you how to record your Skype conversations for legitimate purposes. Remember to respect your local laws regarding the recording of telephone calls, and to respect your local copyright laws in any recording endeavor.

Just read the about this quote from the head of the British Video Association via Boing Boing, which indicates that people who illegally download movies and films are actually see as many films legally as the folks who do not download.

Okay, I have yet another addiction provided by the Internet. Among all the other things I spend my time doing online, between listening to podcasts, reading blogs, writing blog entries, tracking news and writing code, I am now avidly listening to the podiobooks provided at (where else?

I just read an article that the governor of my adopted state has just signed into law a bill that will require future touch screen voting systems to be open-source software.