Come on down this Saturday, May 28 and hang out with other geeks. We’ll provide you space to hack, snacks, lunch and plenty of projects to come and learn!

Date: May 28
Time: 12pm to 5pm
Where: Open Source Technology Center @ Novell (map)

More information available on the UTOS Project Day website and the UTOS Blog. UTOS is looking for operational volunteers. Stop by between 9-11am and volunteer to help out!

Always free admission, free software and free food.

We’ll see you all there!

Cheers,

Herlo

Well, I think I had better get another day of the challenge out there.  This one was quite an easy one for me, though there are a few good rivals.  I have to say that I really didn’t start to enjoy reading books until I was in my early 30s.  Thus, a lot of my life I didn’t read, and while others might be much more well read. 

Anyway, on to my choice, I did think about other good book like ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy‘ and ‘Angels and Demons‘, I chose the ‘Ender’s Game‘ series of books.

Ender’s Game led me into a world of imagination I didn’t know existed. For me, reading became not only an escape, but a pure joy. I could escape into these books for hours during a difficult time in my life. I would become engrossed in possibilities and twists and turns and of course, the surprise ending of Ender’s Game is what made the book so good.

The book series has such grand dynamics and scale. The politics of later books is intriguing as well, Ender, his brother and sister and Ender’s friend, Bean, all were excellent. I really enjoyed Xenocide, a book where Ender spends time with the Hive Queen and the piggies while trying to determine how to irradicate the Descolada.

Other books I enjoyed in this series were Speaker for the Dead and Children of the Mind, I also enjoyed The Shadow Saga series as well.  I highly recommend these books and might just go pick up where I left off a few years back.

Cheers,

Herlo

I have been thinking on this one for a few days.  Mostly, I was thinking back to the first geek I could remember, but for some reason, nothing was coming to mind.  It was weird.

At first, I thought maybe the first geek I knew of was my programming and system administration mentor. His name was Mr Chumple (aka Paul Tiemman).  I met him back in 1999 when I worked as a programmer for Big Planet, an ISP company which was originally an investment from Nu Skin and then later purchased and rolled into it’s MLM conglomerate.  He taught me the ropes about programming, Linux and shell scripting.  Red Hat 5.1 was the first version I ever learned and it was fun.  Running WindowMaker was awesome! (still is)  I learned about Linus Torvalds and how he said ‘Linux’ :)  I still am very grateful to Mr. Chumple for all the time he spent with me during our time together at Big Planet.

Takes me back…

Later on, I continued to think more about the first geek I recognized.

Was it Bill Gates? No, surely not.  I mean, I had heard of him, but I don’t think I knew really who he was until I was using Windows 95.

Was it Steve Jobs? Nope, he wasn’t even in the picture in my mind until he started appearing on talk shows and was the face of Apple.  I remember him being forced out of Apple, but I don’t think he was it either.

So, more thinking, more cycles…and it hit me.  It wasn’t time to share with you about the First Geek I recognized.

My Geek Hero

Tonight, sitting at my computer, perusing Facebook I noticed a post from my friend Travis about Alan Turing.  Now that’s a guy I truly think of as a genius.  A guy who was truly a geek in every sense of the word.  So intelligent, so reclusive, so amazing, an enigma, if you will.

I remember reading about Turing in High School, probably senior year.  It was most definitely in a math class, might have been geometry.  The teacher was so enamored with the algorithms and the amazing things Turing did, I couldn’t help but look him up.

At the time, I wasn’t very interested in math, I’m still no good at it today.  But one thing that Turing did for me was help me to understand algorithms better.  Later on, in college, my discrete structures professor brought Turing back up, when the course covered the Turing machine. The class talked about Turing complete algorithms, essentially how the rules followed in sequence on arbitrary data can produce the result of any calculation.  Many of the modern programming languages and compilers implement Turing complete systems.

In the Facebook post I mentioned above, it appears there will be released a documentary about Alan Turing.  Including World War II, Computing, Code breaking and more.  In the preview they showed, which is available on Youtube, one gentleman mentions that it was a shame he died so early on.  If he’d have lived twice as long, the world would be completely different.  I don’t know if the world would have been better, but I do know that Alan Turing, my geek hero, surely has done more for the computing community than most.

Thank you for modern computing, Mr. Turing.

Cheers,

Herlo

Okay folks, this is probably one of the easier ones in my mind.  When I was a kid, I loved to watch the General Lee driving all over those hillbilly back roads of the South.  The Dukes of Hazzard, were my favorite to watch ‘out-Duke’ Boss Hogg and his sidekick ‘Rosco P. Coltrane’ every week.  I would watch for Cooter and Uncle Jesse to come along and help out the Duke boys when they needed it the most.  And of course, when things got really dire, their very sexy cousin Daisy Duke, would pretend to stand out on the side of the road with a broken-down car.

Although an attempt to remake the Dukes of Hazzard into a movie more or less bombed in 2005, I thought it was a good attempt.  You just can’t do it right without Tom Wopat, John Schneider and Catherine Bach.

But this article is about the theme song.  It’s a doozy!  The Good Ol’ Boys, written and sung by none other than Waylon Jennings made the exciting chases just that much better.  The song hit number 1 the Billboard magazine Hot Country Singles in 1980.

[youtube oU6mPYFtF8E]

I’ve also included a link to the theme song for your enjoyment.

Cheers,

Herlo

I took a lot of liberty here, but I think this should be ‘any’ vehicle.  It doesn’t matter if the vehicle is real or imaginary in my mind.  So I went with a cartoon vehicle.

Voltron

As a kid, I loved watching Voltron on television.  All 5 lion robots converted to make one amazing crime-fighting, flying and powerful robot.  They would al

ways fight Prince Lotor, and as with many of the cartoons of my childhood, he would escape before Voltron could stop him for good.

What’s even better, you can watch ‘Voltron Force’ on Nicktoons starting this spring!  So become a nerdy kid again,

and enjoy some Voltron force!

Cheers,

Herlo

In my case, I might try to do this every day, but probably won’t.  I may also do them out of order, so feel free to do the same.  I will try to do at least one every week.  Enjoy the list, and the follow-ups for each of the days.  In my mind, this is a good experience to remind me why I enjoy being a Geek, maybe it will help you as well.

Day 1 – Very first Geek
Day 2 – Favorite Geek
Day 3 – Your Geek crush
Day 4 – Favorite book / book series
Day 5 – Geek you feel you are most like (or wish you were)
Day 6 – Favorite Web Show / Web Comic
Day 7 – Favorite Board Game
Day 8 – Favorite Shirt/Hat/Shoes (Something you wear)
Day 9 –  Saddest geek scene
Day 10 – Favorite TV Show series
Day 11 – Favorite Movie
Day 12 – Best alien /alien race ever
Day 13 – Geekiest quote/phrase
Day 14 – Current (or most recent) geek wallpaper
Day 15 – Favorite OS / Config
Day 16 – Favorite Developer
Day 17 – Favorite Hardware Vendor
Day 18 – Most Undesirable Tech Company
Day 19 – Favorite Gadget
Day 20 – Best! Videogame! Ever!
Day 21 – Favorite Vehicle
Day 22 – Favorite Tech Company
Day 23 – Favorite Language
Day 24 – Geek Hero
Day 25 – Best Website
Day 26 – Your favorite number
Day 27 – Favorite tv opening theme song
Day 28 – Favorite Comic Book
Day 29 – Favorite Robot
Day 30 – Biggest Geek Wish

Feel free to republish this list, and change whatever day(s) you need to change to suit your inner geek.

If you do the challenge, leave a comment here with a link to the challenge, so we can all compare each other.

Cheers,

Herlo

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