At least the movie will be better than Star Wars Episode I.

I’ve been dabbling in buying lots through Liquidation.com and then re-selling most of the items through eBay. So far this little capitalist “experiment” is going ok: profit margins are not big, but then again I get to keep the stuff I don’t sell.

The last lot I purchased had a bunch of headphones, so I’ve been able to sample a wide range of brands and types. I have but one thing to say: I am loving wireless headphones. I can plug the base into my computer, dance all around the house, and still hear the music (much to Shannon’s embarrassment). I’m definitely keeping one of these.

It’s not like wireless headphones are a new idea - where have I been for the past few years? Maybe I need to have my nerd card revoked.

For Halloween I put on a large blue sheet with cotton balls attached in various places. I also carried around a spray bottle. My costume was called “Partly Cloudy with a Chance of Showers.” Vincent also wore a costume to work - he was Mumm-ra the Ever-Living (from Thundercats)!

We looked pretty freakin’ sweet:

Vincent is pretty damn cool (in a geeky way), especially when it comes to costumes. He always makes his own, sewing most of the complicated outfits by hand. I’ve decided to share a collection of his costumes from over the years - MegaMan and Syndrome (from The Incredibles) are my favorites:

I just heard about a new mini-series that’s coming to the SciFi channel: Tin Man. I’m trying not to get excited about it, but so far I really like the concept and the cast (especially the excellent Neal McDonough, the quirky Alan Cumming, and the bad acting but good looking Zooey Deschanel).

Hopefully the mini-series will be as good as Firefly or Battlestar Galactica - then again, that may be asking for too much. The trailer is a bit lame (mostly because of the voice-over), but their website rocks. Check out the Infinite Oz… it’ll blow your mind, baby!

Legend has it that one lucky Thursday, several months ago, a few geeks arrived at work wearing red shirts. Recognizing the significance of the coincidence they declared that Thursday would forever be declared “red shirt day”… or, if not forever, then at least until we could convince everyone to participate.

Today I present to you our progress so far: 7.5 happy employees celebrating Red Shirt Thursday (Dave’s shirt, while technically reddish, only counts as 1/2).

Talk about geeks: here’s Libby learning some sweet computer skills from her papa (ok, “checking e-mail” skills… whatever).

I wonder if she’ll enjoy working with computers as much as I do? For now she seemed more interested in trying to eat the keyboard.

One of these people is my co-worker: guess which one

I work in a technical industry, so it’s natural that most of my co-workers are geeks. And I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill technology geeks, who you might find ogling the latest plasma television or talking endlessly about car engines. These are REAL geeks.

Let me be very clear here: when I say “geek” I mean it in the most flattering sense of the word. Because secretly I am a geek too.

I have a great deal of respect and admiration toward someone who can follow their passions, convention or popular opinion be damned. This picture was taken at a convention, where I’m sure he had a blast hanging out with a few thousand people just like him.

I must admit: I am a little bit sorry that I missed all the geek-i-ness.

I love the internet for many reasons. One reason is that I occasionally stumble upon little things that make me giggle, then smile, and then waste 10 minutes doing absolutely nothing. Today I have two such wonderfully quirky things to share with you:

The first is Acrobots, a hypnotic time drain. You control small three-armed “acrobots” as they gracefully try to keep each other aloft. There’s not much point to it - and yet I still found it quite enthralling.

The second one, Screamin’ Beans, makes me laugh hysterically… but I’m not sure why. You’ll want to mute your sound if there are other people around. Just keep clicking on things - you’ll see what happens! I love the super saiyan reference at the end too!

There is a McDonalds near my work that is participating in the RedBox trial run. RedBox is a kiosk that allows you to rent “new release” movies for $1/night. I stopped by last night to try it out.

Even though the selection was small I can not see how this won’t be widely successful. It took me less than a minute to walk away with a DVD, and at a buck/night it competes well with chain rental stores and even NetFlix.

A few suggestions for the company in the future:

• Fix the kiosk interface. Making all of the buttons the same shape and color might have made your fresh-from-design-school intern happy, but it sure as hell makes navigating difficult - who wants to be forced to READ what each button does.
• Have the kiosk create it’s own DVDs. There are several benefits: each kiosk only needs to be replenished with writable DVDs and movies could be distributed across the web (eliminating the cost of manually updating the selection and guaranteeing fresh titles).
• Provide the option to buy “older” DVDs so that more room can be made for new releases.

Mike and his lovely wife Kristen recently moved within walking distance of our house and it is a wonderful thing. And I’m not just saying that because he happens to also be babysitting a friend’s Wii for a couple weeks

After putting the kid to sleep I headed over to their house to play some Bowling, Baseball, Billiards, and other games that don’t start with the letter “B”. It was a lot of fun to just hang out and play video games - reminded me of our youth.

As if I didn’t already have enough reasons to buy the Wii for myself Libby, they just announced the release of a brand new fitness device called the Wii-Fit!

Must… resist… urge… to… buy…