My Experience as Youth Pastor

So this week I am officiating my first wedding. I am really looking forward to this but I'm also very nervous. I really want the couple to work out but there isn't any way for me to ensure that beyond counseling and Godly encouragement and prayer. Having done all of that I think the most important thing is to geek out the rehearsal and revel in the geek wedding that could have been.

First and foremost you must know that I was asked because of who I am and not the title I hold. Any happenings that happen will be done with utmost respect to the sanctity of the union and the couple who will be joined in marriage.

That said, I will be reenacting the wedding scene from the Princess Bride during the rehearsal. This is a must. If you are not familiar with the scene please watch the clip. If you are familiar with it you will want to watch anyways because it is amazing.

Now that is about geek level one. It isn't enough. I'll be meeting with the bride today to discuss the vows and order of service. I'm hoping she'll go with some of my suggestions. Let me know what you think?

Star Wars

DC Comic

Gamer

Klingon

All out Geek

Labels: Geek Alert, Geek Facts, geeky

A couple weeks ago I bore witness to a dream of geek culture in a merger of science and art in one t-shirt.

A couple years back the guys at Think Geek created a prank product for April Fool's day (a day I truly love) called the "Personal Sound Track" shirt. This prank gained a huge fan base and so they made this shirt a reality. Thus the interactive sound shirts were born. From this came the "Electronic Drum Kit" shirt. Certainly everyone who has ever sat in church beating out mad drum rolls on the seat in front of them would desire this shirt, but some of us need more. Fortunately Think Geek has come through. Witness the guitar shirt.

Labels: Geek Alert, Geek Facts, geeky

Yeah so I am just all over the place right now. Fridays I was trying to bring a little more geek, but sadly I started a new series last week instead of the geek because I'm feeling lazy. So now I bring you the geek update on Tuesday. Getchergeekon. (seems like there is probably a convention out there with this name. If not I call dibs because there needs to be one)

I recently, as in last night, found out about a really frigintacular music resource called Groove Shark. Basically it is a music database much like what you might have in the form of your personal music collection. The difference is this system has way more songs than I do and can find new music based on what I am listening to. I've used a few other resources like this but generally they start making recommendations that are nothing like what I want to listen to.

So far this has been a much better engine for finding new songs than other resources I've used in the past. As you add more songs to your listening queue and rate them gets smarter with the "you might like" songs it plays.

It also has some other nice features. There is an online community where you can find and follow other users and shape your listening based on their choices too. It also integrates with various other social networks. You can share what you are listening to via twitter, for example.

The best thing is it is free. They have a small ad banner but whatever. You can also pay $3/month or $30/year for VIP status which gets some extra benefits and removes the ads. This is a really good price if you can't stand even a small add banner and want some of the extra features like first selection of new songs and extra themes.

I'd like to see a few other options, but right now it is clean and works well so I'm not sure if it is a good idea to try and make many changes. One of the things I really think that someone needs to figure out is a mood based play list. I can do it manually but I want to have something a little more intuitive. Basically a way of saying what kind of mood I'm in and then the system noting what songs I start selecting and then making recommends based on that. Next time I select the same mood it should know what I'm interested in listening too and make it happen.

I'd also like a preview of some of the VIP features to see if it is worth my money, but over all I'm really happy with the service, so check it out.

Labels: Geek Alert, Geek Facts, Geek Friday, geeky, Music

Hey, if I'm going to be talking about all things geek then I need to make a few things clear right up front. Geek culture is vast. I am generally a techno-geek but I'm also a language geek, a comic geek, a film geek, and several other categories of geek. Generally you can be a geek in almost every niche of culture by fully investing in that niche. However, for the purpose of this blog I will be using a more mainstream version of the term, so geekiness is measured by the technology invested or referenced as well as the potential for science. Science Fiction would fit in this category as well even if there is no basis in real science because I am not so concerned about real science, just potential for science.

Now that we are all on the same page, how does a geek cook? There are the old standby geek meals, which include pizza (frozen or delivered), microwave burritos, ramen noodles, and energy drinks, but many geeks want more. I, for one, believe that geek food can be good food. To that end I am gracious for Good Eats with Alton Brown. He brings geek chique to the Food Network. You can tell the difference between standard cooking and geek cooking because of the science and the tools used. In most episodes processes are described in science terms as well as anthropology and other useless information for actually making the meal. Useless to any non-geek but for the geek elite it is as precious as the food that nourishes us. Beyond that the tools used are impressive and diverse. It is nice enough that there are plenty of standard tools, but the geek code holds that if you can make something better to do a job then don't buy something to do the job. Alton often builds pretty amazing devices to do his cooking and also finds ways to incorporate power tools, which is a win.

Of course, geek cooking doesn't end with a single show. There are a multitude of gadgets out there for the geek in us all. There are fridges with tvs in the door and amazing new technology like the anti-griddle. These might be a bit out of the budget for your average geek, but that doesn't mean we have to go without. The nice thing about being a geek is the sheer volume of useful but no longer used gadgetry in the world. For example, I have a dead laptop with a perfectly good LCD screen. A little bit of dremel work, soldering, and hacking can result in a refrigerator with a TV in the door. If I have a serious need for an anti-griddle I could rig of something pretty quickly with an aluminum plate, and a modified window air conditioner.

Geek cooking is about the technology but also about making things happen and that is why I'm proud to be a geek. I'm feeling inspired to turn my fridge into a tv right now, I wonder if my wife will let me?

Labels: Geek Alert, Geek Facts, Geek Friday, geeky

At some point in the past I was posting 6 days a week and had a nice theme going for each day. Then the summer happened. Now I'm trying to recover a bit and start my regular posting again. I could go back and see what Friday is all about but I decided that I'd rather start something new. I have claimed to be a geek, even using it in my name, but I spend so little time showing off my geek. Ok sure the Fellowship of the Travelling Smarty Pants crew knows of my geek-fu as I have handled many fixes for them, but it is time to let the geek make regular appearances. In that vein I will be trying to highlight some specific piece of geekdom each and every Friday.

Instead of picking a specific gadget or software today I think it would be great to point to one of the best sources of geekitude on the internet, Think Geek. This website has some of the best geek apparel and gadgets. I have a few items and a wish list a mile long. Some of the offerings can be enjoyed by anyone regardless of their geek-belt degree, but many of the items couldn't be understood without fairly advanced geek-fu. A great example is a shirt I love which reads "There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't." Now if you have a sufficient geekabulary then you will get the shirt. If you are my mother-in-law you will laugh because you think you get it, but the joke is not, "only 10 people in the world understand binary." Since I am in the category that understands binary I get the shirt and I also get the binary clock that is sitting on my entertainment center.

I hope you will find this merchant of geekery as enjoyable as I do.

Labels: Geek Alert, Geek Facts, Geek Friday, geeky

If you haven't figured it out this month has been serious on Tuesdays. I've been talking about sacrifice and Lent and stuff like that. I'm really not feeling like being serious. Actually I feel very much like being serious which is why I can't be. It is like having a big red flashing button that says "danger do not push." You know I'm gonna push it. I figure I have a 10% chance of dieing by activating something clearly marked as "warning, danger definitely under no circumstance do not..." 10% seems like a small chance when you take it at face value, but consider a few important things.

First, most people have less than a 1% chance of that death. Much less.

Second, let's face it how often have you seen a button or switch with that kind of warning label? Yeah that means there can't be many but if I'm within a few miles I figure my instincts will kick in a take me to the source of my destruction. I just can't pass up something like that.

Third and finally, the other 90% is related to the same kind of accidental death just not involving a clearly labeled button or switch. I'm living proof that curiosity can kill more than just cats.

I can't help it I need to know what things do. My last words will most likely be, "fascinating" or "So that's what that does."

What does all this have to do with why I can't be serious right now? I feel like I have to be serious. I'm tired and a bit cranky, plus this is my serious post day. Everything tells me to do it so I'm being defiant. That is just how it works.

So in an attempt to find humor in frustration.

So I need to clean the floor in the Youth room. We have an old floor cleaner but it is broken. I can get it to spray chemical but not water. I took it apart and there is no physical reason I can find. It is just obstinate. (on a side note I do understand how I frustrate my wife by being the same but unlike the machine I can appreciate how funny it is to irritate people) We called someone with a floor cleaner but that one is broken to. It will spray but not vacuum.

Now for some reason my solution isn't acceptable to my wife and the other lady. I say bring the other floor cleaner over. I have one that will vacuum but not spray, they have one that will spray but not vacuum. I have a hammer and duct tape, we can franken-cleaner them into a single working unit.

Speaking of franken, did I ever tell you about my frankenphone? It is my single greatest achievement. Sure some people are proud of their kids, and mine are awesome, but this is more awesome. A few years ago, when I was a carpenter, I was very abusive to my phone. It wasn't intentional, but the silly thing kept falling from heights. I think it might have been depressed because all the newer cool phones could play mp3 ring tones but it was stuck with the old polyphonic tones. Anyways, one day it leaped to its death and broke the LCD. Fortunately I had acquired an identical phone when a friend upgraded theirs. I was using the replacement as a charging station so I could run my battery dead and have a backup in place.

I switched the sim cards and presto I was back in business. Then the new phone got depressed seeing all the other fancy phones. It jumped off while I was going up the stairs and damaged its circuit board beyond repair. So there I was with two dead phones and my cheapskate alarm went off. One phone had a dead LCD and the other had a dead circuit board. A short time later I had pulled the circuit board from both phones and put the good one into the phone with the working LCD. Next thing you know I had a working Frankenphone. The new phone seemed much more durable as it lasted another 2 years before I upgraded. The Frankenphone now sits in a place of honor awaiting its call to the big game. One of these days it knows the new fancy phone will give out but the will of the Frankenphone will endure. It will rise from the shelf and takeout any new fangled electronic device as it establishes world domination.

Don't look at me like that. I am not an animal.

BTW did I mention I'm distracted by the revelation of shiny candy? You got to get past a nekkid buttler but it is there are the bottom of this post (I made two references to rear ends hehehe)

Labels: Death, funny, geeky, not serious

My SYP post is late today because I watched the series finale of Battlestar Galactica. I watched the show from the beginning and almost gave up on it as they got more and more political. At one point the humans found an uncharted planet and decided to settle. The cylons found them and the two Battlestars in orbit jumped away leaving the surviving human race to a cylon occupation. The cylons felt they could help the humans but only hurt them. The humans resisted the occupation through whatever means they could find including suicide bombing. Essentially the story reflects the writers' view of the scenario in the Middle East portraying the terrorists as the good guys.

That really challenged my loyalties because I hate when shows start getting preachy. They won me back with one of the most awesome moments on TV. The liberation of New Caprica involved several plans coming together. The most awesome part was then Galactica hyper jumps into atmosphere on the planet. As the giant battle ship falls through atmosphere converting air to plasma the vipers launch through the burning atmosphere and Galactica jumps out leaving the plasma to dispurse just before it hits the tent city. This is the reason I watched the show, awesome space battles that really seemed to follow physics.

A lot of space programs have ships maneuvering like they are in atmosphere. Watch the Star Wars films. They have the accelerators on constant and the ships banks and turn as if through air instead of using thrust maneuvers. In one of the earliest episodes of Battlestar Starbuck in is a dog fight with several cylon raiders. She has one come up on her tail. In atmosphere you are limited to facing the direction you are flying so this is a really bad position to be in. In space inertia will keep your course so lift doesn't matter. Starbuck hits her front thrusters and flips to face her attacker while continuing on the original path. She unleashes a stream of death on the cylon, taps her front thrusters again to face back into the fray. That is the kind of maneuver that most people don't quite think about for space battles.

The show began to take on more and more drama within the ships with less and less actual space battles. Then it started getting very preachy but kept dancing around this idea of a single God that is interested in us and our destiny so I watched for those random episodes that could only take place in space.

In the lead up to the finale they introduced so much that I thought they would end up with a spin off just to tie up all the loose ends. I was quite wrong. If you watch the show and haven't seen the finale I won't give away any spoilers. I will say that the ending is mostly good and pretty much everything is tied up nice and tidy. There are a few mysteries that aren't answered but they were intentionally not answered. As far as shows go I feel this ended was quite satisfactory.

When the Stargate shows ended it felt like just another episode without any real resolution of the major events of the series. In SG1 they actually setup the movie they released instead of ending the series. I felt like that was another attempt to cash in on the fans instead of ending the series. In Atlantis they took the team out of Atlantis but left the major threat in the Pegasus galaxy in place with no consideration for the potential future hope of that galaxy. It was a major let down.

With Galactica the show actually ended and it felt like it was actually over. That is a nice switch.

Labels: Battlestar Galactica, geeky

I just posted on an article I read so I'm scheduling this one for tomorrow because Katdish can't keep up. (Happy now kat?)

SciFi is changing the name of their channel. It will now be SyFy (yeah you thought the Fy was for something else. Dirty dirty minds need to be cleaned with soap and a pressure washer). In this article they say that the name SciFi is too geeky.

I have several problems. First this is the age of the geek. Look at the most popular shows on TV right now. Geeked out TV. Look at the increasing market for video games and comic based movies. Geek culture has taken over and the flag ship is turning from its geek heritage? Someone needs to fire that PHB (Pointy Haired Boss from Dilbert) before they run the entire channel into the ground. (Yep I held that metaphor till the end. You didn't think I had it in me did you?)

My second complaint is, if anything, SyFy is more geeky because it embraces the web 2.0 look and feel. They are trying to feel more like iPod which is yet another example of the supremacy of geek culture. The problem is that geeks will see that they are abandoning them in their statements and be less forgiving in the reality that the new name is even geekier (holy freak my spell check accepted geekier as a word). If you don't believe me read the comments on this article.

Remember the geek shall inherit the earth. Or something like that. The regular Wednesday follow-up post will come later in the day.

Labels: Geek Alert, Geek Facts, geeky

An update on how awesome my daughter is. She has recently started using the computer. We got a Charlie Church Mouse Kindergarten program form my mother-in-law and decided to let her start playing it earlier this week. She watched me start it one time and now we have to watch her because she will hop on the computer and start the game whenever she feels like it.

Now she is browsing the internet. I mean as I type she in cruising around Disney online. I put her on the page then went to get something before trying to find something she could do and a minute later (maybe less) I walked back in and she was in Pixie Hollow. I had to setup her account because she can't spell (she is only 5 after all) but then she started making her own fairy all by herself.

Yep, she is my mini geek. Now I just need to go find her a mini geek tee-shirt.

Found it

Labels: Geek Alert, geeky, My Kids