The Ultimate Sidekick - Little Wooden Boy

In response to @agent_m's posting of Speak:

Fan made 'Little Wooden Boy' - Hero support extrodonaire!

I was honored to sign his butt.

The Tick

I guess its time to start writing again. They've released 'my' (amongst others) combined works for 2 series:

The Tick Specials AND The Tick & Arthur, including Heroes of the City

Backups are your friend

It feels good to have a webcomic strip posted again, I can't believe its been four years.

The 'Baroness' Real-estate Agent Extraordinaire

In anticipation of David (Comic co-creator, co-writer, and sometimes editor) finding the actual amusing 'Baroness' strip I mention in my previous post, I have decided to post the one where she is selling real-estate.

Yes, it is very linear, but well it's my G.I. Joe appreciation week and after last nights twitterfest of updates from the very successful webcomic creators Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub with their twittering of lines like "I can't wait for G.I. Joe 2: Joemaggeddon!" (They twittered while watching the movie) and the posting of videos made in the bathroom at the movie theater, I just had to post it.

(A little background: In our (now defunct) webcomic, David and I alternated writing and drawing the strips. Being lazy I used David's version of the Baroness, and now I suddenly have the urge to draw my own version.)

Well Crap.

In honor of the new G.I. Joe movie I wanted to post a strip we had done for the webcomic back in 2005 that featured the 'Baroness' from G.I. Joe, (now retired and selling realestate) but I can't find it (Grrrrr).

When I was looking, I ran across my favorite San Diego Comiccon picture:

Oh yeah, I have a blog! Doh!

So I got laid-off in June and I have taken the opportunity to study for some various tech certs and do some reading with my free time while also working on the job search.

I just re-read the Wheel of Time series in about 2 weeks which was fun. Reading eleven 600 to 800 page novels in that short of time really immerses you in the stories. I hadn't really been following the news for WoT, so I just recently checked the Dragonmount site and was happy to see that a new book is due out in November "The Gathering Storm" and was excited to learn that there will be at least 2 more books.

I know some people don't like long series, but I love them. It was very sad news to learn of Robert Jordan's passing. I can't imagine working on a story for 25+ years and not be able to finish it. I am very glad his wife is continuing the project. I met them once at the San Diego Comic Con, in the professional's backstage area, it was a very meaningful event for me.

Speaking of long series and fun diversions, I also just read the eleven Dresden file novels "Turn Coat" and those are good fun if you like that genre. It was a brief TV series, but I have to say as usual the books were much better. Except I liked the old WW2 jeep better in the show than the VW Bug in the books, but anyway it is a lot like the first few Anita Blake series novels before Laurell got side tracked...

I also read "Cryptonomicon" by Neal Stephenson, it had been on my to do read list for awhile and I have to say I wish I read it sooner. It was quite possibly the best book of that genre I have ever read. I highly recommend it.

Well, now that my reading list and free advertising for Amazon is done, (I typically buy all my books at Barnes & Noble, guess I could have used their site to link the books now that I think about it. The store in the Arboretum in North Austin is nice and they have leather chains upstairs that the boys and I like to hangout in.) I am going to go take a nap on the couch.

Catalog of Exoplanets

Catalog of Exoplanets:

This site has very cool animated visualizations of the extrasolar systems!

With Kepler up there more will be coming.

Extra Solar Earth?

I am fascinated by the search for extrasolar planets and therefore the ultimate prize the discovery of second Earths and with them life. It has been an interesting journey. It has only been since the late nineties that people have stopped questioning if any other planets outside the solar system existed, and early examples seemed to force doubt to if any Earth like planets existed.

The race is now on to find them as the technology gets better. A couple of days ago Cosmic Log posted an article about it. One my favorite aspects of that blog is the many hundreds of comments that some articles receive. This one goes with the above linked article.

"Three or more years? So the chances of us finding an alien civilization willing to buy mortgage backed securities in time to stave off financial disaster is pretty slim I take it." Dan - Vancouver WA (Sent Tuesday, February 17, 2009 8:50 PM)

There are so many ways to take this comment, it is funny and biting and could be interpreted from many perspectives.

Mathematically they are out there, and it is only a matter of time before we find one. What changes when we do?

Has it been that long really?

"L0pht Heavy Industries, the renowned Boston-area hacker think-tank, will reunite for a panel discussion to discuss the last decade of the security industry and how it has evolved." Youtube video

So watching this reminded me of an event, I guess it was over ten years ago at M.I.T. with Mudge and the gang, (pre-corporate days) in panel form to 'discuss' computer security with the FBI.

What I remember of the event was very sad at the time and amusing now is that many of the FBI agents on the FBI team (3 or 4 of the 5 if memory serves) had yet to go through computer training.

So here on the small stage was an apex of hackerdom and a group of Federal novices, the disparity was so great, that I don't recall anything very relevant being debated or discussed.

The discussion quickly degenerated into questions from the small audience (Directed to the FBI) of "So do you guys get to carry guns?" and the like. It's hard to believe its been that long. I wonder if those agents are still in the industry?

Eh, I need to write right?

For the lack of anything interesting to write, I recently started to use Twitter and I have been thinking about the service. (Apparently, as was @botchagalupe with a post about about being a 'twidiot'.

You have got to love the Internet for it's influence in making up words. For instance, my oldest son recently coined the term "traumacational" during a discussion about biology (birds-n-bees ya know) he says "Dad, thanks, really, that was both traumatizing and educational at the same time, it was traumacational, now can we talk about something else please?"

But I digress, I have mixed feelings about the service ('Twitter', if I've lost you), it is both a serious time-sink, informative, and addictive. I am both fascinated with it, and embarrassed by it.

A co-worker sent me a link about WOZ jumping ship to fusionio and I jokingly replied with "bah I saw that on twitter days ago!" his reply which mildly stung, ""Twitter" sounds like a place 13-year old girls go to chat about Pokemon and boy bands." I have to admit though that through the marketing and PR stuff, I have managed to find some very cool sites. Which then reminded me of an Andy Rooney quote: "Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don't need to be done."

But, many of the links are fantastic, and the conversations while often one sided are interesting. That is IF you connect with the right people, and I have saved so many links that I haven't been able to spend any meaningful amount of time looking at them.

So my twittering (there it is again, modifying made up words) was scratching at something in the back of my noggin, and it finally dawned on me what it was. It's MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online) chat without the game. I played EQ for years, and there would be a certain amount of people that only seemed to chat in the game, which is likely why Second Life is popular (I imagine, never tried it), well Twitter seems to mimic the many open windows, multiple conversations, direct tells, and secret replies that gamers become prolific at while gaming a MMO.

Interestingly enough, I have found a significant population of computer security people, which fascinates me because here they are updating to everyone with all kinds of information, most of it meaningless, but there are patterns of behavior, sites, and locations, which made an important distinction for me that security is not necessarily privacy. As a friend said earlier when I pointed this out (and I badly paraphrase), "While one facilitates the other, there are not mutually exclusive or dependent." Maybe this is an old subject, but I don't remember reading anything that specifically calls the subject out in this way.

Its definitely not a new concern by any means, one of the responses to @botachagalupes post is that the commenter's twitter posts are private so someone won't go rob his house in Cali when he's boarding an airplane to London, etc. But there is a very large group of people that link everything, linkedin profiles, blogs, jobs, GPS locations, etc. it's amazing.

Well, just another nugget to swish around in my brain for awhile, I guess.

Ah Memories

So laying about today, I re-re-read the graphic novel "Kingdom Come" by Mark Waid and Alex Ross, which reminded me that I had apparently irked Mark at a Wizard? party(It was a ComicCon party anyway), once by referring to his children as ratballs, a name I use affectionately for mine, granted I do call my youngest 'Weasel' so I can understand the misunderstanding.

Well the amusing part of this story is I didn't actually remember the conversation the next time I saw Mark (who gave me an annoyed nod) and I referred to him as 'that Mark guy" to my comic creation colleague David. David's response was a terse and incredulous, "You mean Mark Waid of the GN you love Kingdom Come?" What can I say, but that I probably uttered one of my favorite lines from Gross Point Blank, "Dumb F**king Luck!", and went back to oogling cosplay fangirls.

Over the years, likely not remembering the insult, but remembering me, Mark always said a polite hello or caught the Nerf football I was tossing around after the show, etc. Anyway, the last time I saw Mark we were at a panel, when asked by a fan about how or when he comes up with his best ideas, he said and I paraphrase here, 'when he is at his most relaxed', (and I thought dammit! He's just like me), and he finishes with 'when he is peeing'. (Damn it I thought, that's my line.)

Anyway, if you like graphic novels and alternate universes, histories, or futures, Kingdom Come is one of the best. Well that and Alex Ross art work simply rocks.

I have the watch, do I need the cellphone?

Kinetic energy, is it green? ;)

I thought this was a really good idea until, I actually pondered it for a moment. Those of you that know me, know I am prone to sending my beloved blackberry flying into the air in a horrendous and often plastic smashing arc for no apparent reason other than a caffeine induced spasm. Now imagine me with a kinetically charged blackberry. Can you say crunch?

"Shake It
If you've ever had your commute ruined when your iPod or cell phone runs out of juice, there's not much you can do but kick your phone around, which usually makes things worse.

But now all that misdirected anger could go to a better cause — and your kinetic energy could actually be used to charge your devices.

The technology has been around in self-winding watches and battery-less flashlights for years, but some designers are applying the charge model to music players and other small electronics to great effect."

Quote of the Day

so I won't delve deeply into whether or not it's lame that I have a quote of the day gadget on my home page, but one of today's quotes rings particularly true to my tech ears.

'The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents.'
- Nathaniel Borenstein

Quantum musing reminds me

If you like hard science and are interested in physics, I am also reading The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe by Roger Penrose. I picked this book up after reading The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene. While I enjoyed The Elegant Universe it lacked the actual formulas and I found reading about the intricacies of the theories frustrating without the actual math around to look at. Roger Penrose does not shy away from the formulas, though at over 1,000 pages it is not a book to pick up lightly. If you are new to String Theory and want to check it out, the August 2005 edition of Discover has a great article by Michio Kaku, one of the founders of the theory. If you can find a back copy, and I just realized he is on the Science channel now all the time, and maybe a tad bit over exposed.

If you are a true lunatic like me, Wikipedia, it has some great articles, you can get lost in the links for hours.

Quantum Radio

So I really enjoy reading Cosmic Log, especially for post like 'One Quantum Leap' about Quantum entanglement. Specifically the use of Quantum teleportation, "as in the transfer of information from one place to the other without passing through any physical medium." Which would have likely been needed to run the wonderfully lag free Matrix.

This work pretty much leads up to real time Internet from Mars using quantum computer mated pairs, one there one here. I wish I had one now, because it would solve the bandwidth issues I have stopping me from using the Cloud computing model for a few projects I have lined up.

Blogging

4 years ago now a colleague and I had a web comic, which was frankly way to much work, but on that website we each blogged, and I must say that was fun.