Yes we can. Yes we did!

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

The cultural differences between the two candidates are huge. I can’t figure out these “undecided” voters that are brought out and addressed, like during the debates.

Here’s the only scenarios I can come up with:

• They’re uninformed.
  They just don’t know enough about either side to make a strong decision, hence “undecided.”
• They have conflicting issues.
  They agree with one candidate in one position, yet agree with the other candidate on another position. Too many overlapping and contradictory choices leading to indecision.
• They’re stupid.
  Plain and simple. They’re easily swayed by each candidate whenever they speak. The glam and spectacle of elections draws them to each side more than the actual issues. They also fall prey to pyramid schemes and often buy things from infomercials. I think this is the most likely situation.

It’s strange, but I actually have more respect for decided voters who are on the opposite side of the fence from me, than these undecided idiots.

I, for one, welcome our pie overlords. You can’t go wrong with a candidate who mentions pie 15 times in 2 minutes, and doesn’t once mention cake.

Courtesy of Oober_Dave on Fark.com.

And the other, Google Mail Goggles. Never again will you send a late night email message that you regret because you tied one on. By turning on Mail Goggles, you have to solve some simple math problems before sending a message, thereby filtering out any drunken emails to your boss, telling him what you really think of his new plan.

Good stuff.

This image has been making the rounds on Digg today, and I quite like it. It picked up many of the cultural shifts in Geekdom over the past years, including the stereotypes and the realities. Of course, I’ve been using the 2.0 beta for quite a few years now. I don’t think I’ve ever had a job I had to wear anything but casual clothing, including my current one.

As for the 1.0 era, I came of age when 1.5 must have been the current version. I didn’t carry a D&D book, I carried Heroes Unlimited. I skipped the high waters and white shirt for jeans and flannel (it was the early nineties). Digital watches and computer magazines were mandatory, however.

The author/artist loses a few geek cred points for some minor geek faux pas. ‘Calculator’ was spelled as ‘calulator’ in the 1.0 description. The author sometimes included periods after sentences, and sometimes did not. Capitalizing ‘when’ in the middle of the roleplay handbook section was not necessary. The leather wristband is a bit more hipster, rather than geek.

The biggest faux pas of all: the use of Arial. Real geeks would know to use Helvetica, not Arial.

So imagine Anthony’s surprise when he discovered that his NetWorker theme for WordPress had been used by the British government without honoring the Creative Commons license. The theme has been heavily modified, including the removal of all links back to his site, but Anthony has been able to verify from the source files that Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own website is in fact built on NetWorker.

Not only have they illegally appropriated Anthony’s WordPress theme, the company who “developed” the site tried to deny the claim that it was originally their creation, and they only used his design for inspiration. However they forgot to clean the code thoroughly and they left in Anthony’s NetWorker credits at the end of the CSS source.

I think the final insult in the entire situation is that the government slaps their own Crown Copyright on the work, which is clearly someone else’s.

For a country that has nearly as backwards of a view of copyright and intellectual property laws as the U.S. does, this is quite an amusing mistake by the U.K. government. Unfortunately, the piracy is far too esoteric for the common public to understand, so it’s unlikely to gain any traction in the mainstream press.

“There were a lot of jokes about the shape. Not just the obvious ones,” said Newby. “I can remember some referencing to an earlobe, or the shape of the lower back/butt area.”

I think part of what makes the TiVo remote so successful is that it is a three dimensional shape unlike the vast majority of remotes which are mostly flat. The remote sits in your hand with gentle curves longitudinally and latitudinally but curves giving it depth as well. As weird as it must have been, those jokes should have been flags that the designers were on the right track. Evoking human emotions while using a technology product is really difficult. By reminding users of body parts it made the remotes seem more alive, comfortable and likely to be accepted by the public at large.

I haven’t put my hands on a Series 3 or TiVoHD remote and compared it to the Series 2 remotes that I’m used to, but I hope they solved the one issue I had with the Series 2 remote: it was easy to grab the remote in the dark and not realize you had it pointed the wrong direction since it was nearly symmetrical front to back, minus the gentle weight of the batteries.

Making the Most Amazing R2-D2 Cake Ever - B-Side Blog

Completely edible (minus a dowel or two). Fondant covered red velvet cake, rice krispie legs.

Though as a true Star Wars geek, I have to point out that it’s not R2-D2. It’s an R2 class droid for sure, based on markings and design, and it’s similar to Obi-Wan’s R4-P17, but the colors are reversed.