Yvette's Inner Geek Blog

If you like good rock music and have 5 minutes and 27 seconds to spare… I present to you Red Fang’s “Prehistoric Dog.” (It loaded slowly for me, but was worth the wait.)

My friend Bryan blogged about this being his new favorite music video. It is now also mine. Ben about flipped his lid because it was so awesome… seriously, I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his skull as he emphatically told me how much Awesome there was in this video.

And to add to the awesome, Red Fang’s website features ASCII art in their header.

They have their EP available on vinyl and MP3s, but it doesn’t look like they have a CD out yet. I would want a CD with this video included in high quality for sure. I know my SCA friends would love it!

But I doubt I could get my fellow medieval band members to recreate it. We mostly play recorders, bells, and acoustic guitars that have the medieval persona of a lute.

…and I’m hoping to roll a natural 20.

It’s taken me several months to decide what to do about my computer situation. I determined a while back that a laptop will suit me better than an upgraded desktop, but that raised another difficult question: Mac or PC?

In addition to making a choice based on technical specs and price, I was having a Mac/PC Identity Crisis while trying to resist making an emotional decision as a result of the proselytizing marketing efforts of either side.

I made my near-final choice over the weekend, and have spent the last couple days mulling it over and deciding exactly which model to buy. Ben was a champ as I (naturally) dragged him along my path of indecisiveness with me. Thankfully, as of today, that decision has been made. The topic of conversation will now turn to which flavor of Ramen noodles we’ll have for dinner tonight rather than which laptop to buy.

I purchased a MacBook Pro from Amazon. It will arrive on Thursday.

STOKED!

When one has a digital camera, and certain felines are more than happy to pose in adorable and personality-infused poses, this is what happens.

I first give you Phoebe, who can usually be found wherever Loki is.

“urrrr…?”

“THAT CAMERA IS SHINY WERE YOU AWARE OF THIS.”

She’s trying really hard to eat a lot so that she can balloon out like Loki (who didn’t wake up during the entire photo session).

And she strikes a pose for the camera. How does that not hurt her legs?

Later… Isis watches. She’s not interested in playing your reindeer games.

Later still… Isis turned around and “lazr kitteh” Loki tries to fit his dog-sized butt onto one stair.

Phoebe decides to practice for the Feline Olympics. She starts up the stairs, hugging the wall before jumping over her first hurdle.

She clears it, but then comes the hard part: Isis is not a hurdle, but she is a dangerous foe and may jump out at Phoebe if she gets too close, much like a chain chomp.

Phoebe clears the course and strikes another pose at the top of the stairs. She would like more cowbell in the next photo shoot.

I’m going to start posting some of the emails I receive, along with my reply, here on this blog. This is in addition to the place I’ve set aside for crazy emails. I’ll start with an interesting question I received that goes back to the days before the Geek Test was Internet Famous.

Hello Yvette,

Thanks for your great website! Many years ago on the front page there used to a picture of a cat’s head. This kitty was making a comedy face and was named Fairuza in the filename. Who is this cat and what is this picture? When and where was it taken? I’d love to get more information on this great picture! I attached the picture. Please reply soon, thanks! have fun, Mike

Hi Mike,

The first thing visitors saw on my first version of innergeek.us was the cropped head of a kitten that Ben and I named Fairuza (after Fairuza Balk for a reason that I can’t quite remember). You were one of the first people in the world to take the Geek Test if you remember Fairuza on the front page!

This photo was not photoshopped other than to crudely remove the background. I took it in the fall of 2000, a few weeks after our newly adopted cat, Isis, had kittens. (We didn’t know she was pregnant when we took her in, but watching five kittens grow from soggy mouse-sized creatures into curious kitten-shaped mammals was a fun and rewarding experience.) We took a lot of photos (especially considering that we were still using film-based cameras back then) and I must have caught Fairuza mid-yawn for this one.

Here’s a recent photo of Isis mid-yawn. Sucky lighting, blurry photo, but can you see the resemblance? She’s making a crazy face for the camera… all pirate-eyed and practically screaming “Yarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!”

Fairuza went to a good home with a woman who renamed her Tiny.

We found homes for the other four kittens. I would have liked to keep one of them, especially since Isis was a great parent, but we lived in an apartment and already had Loki. So we remained a two-cat family until last summer, when Phoebe showed up outside my employer’s office.

So though I no longer have an awesome Fairuza face on the front page of my website, there are still plenty of places where I gratuitously place my cats’ funny faces. I guess it’s fitting that that’s how everything started out.

My mom came out to visit a few weeks ago, and we were standing in the sun when Ben suddenly exclaimed, “Holy crap, you have the same eyes!” I knew it already, but it was fun to hear him say it (hope it didn’t weird him out too much, though). Ben took a photo:

The sun was really bright, hence the faces. Well, mine anyway.

I like having multi-colored eyes. There’s a dark green band on the outer edge of the iris and a starburst of golden brown around my pupils. In between is a medium green that battles with the brown starburst for real estate on a daily basis.

My mom’s father had similar green/brown eyes, though he was colorblind and insisted that he had blue eyes (and blond hair, though it was really gray). Interestingly, none of my Mom’s eight sisters have our hazel eyes —the oldest two have blue eyes and the other five inherited my grandmother’s brown eyes. What are the odds?

If I weren’t already an unemployed writer, I think I’d be a geneticist.

It’s already December. Are you planning your July trip to San Diego for the 2009 Comic Con yet?

If you are, you should check out the new Schmap!! guide to San Diego, where you might come across one of my photos from last year’s con! Go to the Services – Business area, mouse over “San Diego Convention Center” and wait for the magical moment when my name appears below a photo in the loop.

At least is was a little magical for me, okay?

The truth is, I didn’t think it was a really great photo… but I guess it does capture the sheer mass of people who were flooding into the convention center with me from the trolley.

This iPhone mock-up was presented to me by Schmap!! to help me visualize what my photo within their guide would look like to someone who has a much cooler phone than I do. They have guides for a couple hundred cities around the world, clearly designed with the internet-enabled mobile phone user in mind. Old-fashioned PC users like myself can download their little program and view the desktop version of their guide.

Schmap!! found my photo on my Flickr stream and contacted me through Flickr to request permission to use the photo in their guide.

I didn’t see a reason not to comply – I’m not using the photo for anything else, and now I get the return benefit of being Totally Famous. At least in the eyes of my mother, who will always think that I’m the greatest thing since sliced, gluten-free and flax seed fortified bread. (Thanks, Mom.)

Will I take the red pill or blue pill?

When the line of salt is poured on the hangar deck, will I be on the right side?

Am I a Mac or a PC?

Among the important decisions one can make in life, the Mac vs. PC choice has drawn a hard line since its inception, and there’s little wishy-washiness permitted from either side. The new Mac ads and Microsoft’s response ads reinforce this notion of Identity via Platform. You either ARE or ARE NOT.

So what is one to do with a mixed background? I know that there’s a small percentage of people out there like me, who were not raised with hard-lined indoctrination.

My family’s first computer was a Macintosh 512K in 1985, but in school I was exposed to the Commodore 64 and the Apple IIe. Friends had IBMs with fancy color screens and floppy disks that were actually floppy. My family graduated to a color-screened Macintosh Quadra 610 at about the same time my high school put new 486 PCs in all the classrooms.*

In 1995, I helped my mom computerize her dental office with PCs that ran Windows 95, and subsequently inherited one of those PCs during college. Ben has built all of my computers from scratch since then, and I’ve watched him play around in Linux environments. In my last job, I worked closely with the art team (who of course used high-end Macs) and learned lots of Adobe tricks and developed a minor case of Mac Envy.

So that brings me to my current dilemma: My computer needs a serious overhaul, which under normal circumstances would mean that Ben would buy some new parts and reuse what he could to build me a new desktop. However, I’ve determined that a laptop will suit my needs better than a desktop right now. And Ben doesn’t have the manufacturing facilities available to build one for me.

For the first time in my adult life, I will have to choose a Mac or a PC.

I know the arguments. I’m familiar with the “Mac tax” and of the issues that come with the various PC laptops out there. I’ve recently touched and played with more laptops in-store than should be legal, and I’m trying to keep my biases at bay. I’m trying to be practical. I’m trying not to let the shiny, clever Get a Mac ads affect my choice (which is hard, considering that I am in their target demographic and they nailed it, man).

What it really comes down to is that I feel like my future identity will be shaped by the laptop I choose. Mac people want me on their side. PC people want me on their side. Open source purists chide me for not being geek enough to even consider Linux.**

There are four choices, as I see it:

1. Pick a side. Accept the identity of Mac or Windows PC.
2. Go underground and choose Linux or some other obscure OS.
3. Accept a dual life and learn how to be both a Mac and a PC.
4. Choose nothing and become a Luddite.

“Be grateful you even have a choice,” I hear my ancestors whisper from Beyond The Great Divide, because  they didn’t have the luxury of choices like these, and they probably also had to climb up a hill both ways in the snow to get the the outhouse, which wasn’t even an outhouse but just a deep pit in the ground that was surrounded by angry bears just waiting to come after them the minute they dropped their pants.

Dear readers, if you’ve been lucky enough to make The Choice, which probably means that a bear never caught you with your pants down, what choice did you make? Did you struggle like me? Has your identity been shaped by your choice? Do you really wish you’d been attacked by a bear just so that you would have been spared reading this whole blog post all the way to the end?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

* Ben was actually a student and an IT employee at our high school who helped install and maintain the school district’s network. I have a cute photo of us together in the high school server/computer repair room. Didn’t know back then that I would marry him and that we’d always have at least one room in our house buried under tangles of cables and scattered computer bits!

** Unfortunately, sometimes majority rules and this is what happens to open source purists who dare suggest that one has to be like them to be a real geek. Comic yoinked from Dueling Analogs.

This… brings tears to my eyes. Is beautiful.

“Eat this glowing mushroom and they’ll all fade away.”

Thanks for the link, redrabbit! (Psst… visit her cool blog, Where Aren’t They Now.)

If you are not already a fan of Neil Gaiman, here is another reason why you should be: his recent blog post Why defend freedom of icky speech?

He gives an intelligent, easy to read, and in-depth response to a reader’s very valid question about why he supports the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund‘s (CBLDF) fight for Iowan comic collector Christopher Handley’s right to collect (what I personally find creepy and icky) lolicon manga.

Gaiman unequivocally supports our first ammendment right to Freedom of Speech, even when the content in question would probably disgust and mortify a large majority of the world’s population.

I grew up with a cursory appreciation of freedom of speech — censorship was something already in the history books for me, with an occasional current news story about another attempt at censorship by the Ridiculous Conservatives. I mean, I remember the 1999 uproar over Chris Ofili‘s artistic rendition of the Virgin Mary on a canvas embellished with elephant dung, but I wasn’t involved enough in politics of any sort to take sides when good ol’ Mayor Guiliani declared “There’s nothing in the First Amendment that supports horrible and disgusting projects!”

Nearly ten years later, after realizing that some of the graphic novels I actually own have been affected by that gray mess of censorship in the past, I am ready to take a stance. I may not personally approve of the very ideas of fetishizing children, oppressing women, abusing drugs, senseless murder, or conservative religion, but I’m not going to prevent someone else from writing or talking about them or creating comics and art and movies about them.

Ideas themselves don’t actively cause harm, and drawing a line or making exceptions to the concept of Freedom of Speech defies its very purpose.

Gaiman sums up this reasoning quite nicely:

Because if you don’t stand up for the stuff you don’t like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you’ve already lost.

Oh, Neil. Today I hate myself even more for not driving to Las Vegas to meet you.

Ben just pointed me in the direction of a politically relevant and super gametastically fantastic little flash game called “Super Obama World.”

If you haven’t played it yet, try it out! I haven’t gotten very far, so I’m not sure how it plays out… but the fact that the worlds are on a map that looks a lot like Alaska leads me to believe that Sarah Palin may be a boss along the way! Ooooo, fun! Let me know if you make it that far.

On a side note, it’s weird to realize that Nintendo’s amazing technology of the 80s can be recreated in a simple flash game played over the internet.