geek culture
Getting Blocked of 50% of My Life.
geek cultureI am a big web user. I get on my website and write or podcast everyday. I get most of my information through many places. I Twitter and Plurk and Pownce and many other social keywords.
Today I am in the car dealership getting maintainence on my car. The process was going to take 3 hours to do, so I asked if they had Wifi. They said yes, and so I made plans just to work from the dealership.
How Much Do You Trust?
geek cultureIn my J.O.B. I work for the IT department of a college. Because of my position and my responsibilities, I naturally have access to a whole lot of things I don't really want to have access to. I have been in the same job for eight years, enjoy what I do, and in turn, have taken my responsibility for keeping my nose out of where it doesn't belong on the servers, even though I have access to just about anything I'd want to see. In addition to having server access, I also have a master key, a physical key that will get me into any interior office, closet or classroom on campus. This means I can walk into the dean's office, the president's office, the head of campus police's office, or the archival room of the library. I can go anywhere in the business office, cashier's office, faculty offices, etc. I am one of only four or five in my department who has one of these keys.
Where have all the women gone?
geek cultureMany of the readers of this blog will be familiar with working in male dominated environments. Personally while I have seen much greater numbers of young women entering the tech sector than when I first started, this does not seem to have translated to a significant overall rise in female participation.
Here's my jetpack!
geek cultureThis news story has been all over TV today, words cannot adequately express how much I want one of these.
I doubt there is a geek in the world that has not dreamed of their own jetpack, and the key disapointments of the turn of the millenium where that there were no jet packs or flying cars. While the Moller flying car has been a disapointment so far but at least there is now an actual working jet pack that will gives me hope that I might get to try one.
Video games DO NOT cause violence.
geek cultureCan we stop with the conjecture and speculation please! There seem to be as many theories about gaming impact on specific incidents and tenuous causal links as there are people that believe there is an intuitive link. The latest is discussed in Cognitive Daily which looks at a study that measures the difference in heart-rate and galvanic skin response when watching a violent video between two groups. The first has played violent video games immediately prior and the second hasn't. The results are used to insinuate a desensitisation to violence from violent video games. To say that this linkage does not hold up to scientific rigour is a gross understatement.
Japanese tech ads
geek cultureOther countries culture and humour can be hard to understand. Any of you that have been to Japan or seen any Japanese TV will know that that it can deliver equal measures of genius, bizarre and funny. Network World has put together 10 Japanese ads mostly advertising tech items that each have their own set of weird or funny.
We Humbly Interupt for this Introduction...
geek cultureI wanted to take a moment to introduce myself before I posted my first entry to Geek News Central’s blog. I’m a long-time listener and fan of the Geek News Central podcasts, and a sometime caller and commenter, and branching out into writing a few tech blog entries seemed to be a smart step to take.
The life of Gary Gygax
geek cultureI am sure that there are a large proportion of GNC readers who have played a session or two of D&D. Gary Gygax was a legend in the roleplaying world, played a large part in the creation and growth of Dungeons and Dragons and had a huge influence on the greater role-play scene through GenCon, the biggest role-playing convention out there. Still active in the community in his late 60's, Gary unfortunately died last week due to heart problems.

