What are your favorite science fiction TV shows, books and movies?  Lately I’ve become addicted to some BBC sci-fi shows, thanks to Max’s recommendations. I burned through three  seasons (or series as they’re known in England) of Primeval and I eagerly await the fourth, which isn’t even in production yet.  I’m also watching Torchwood which I like a lot, though its not quite as good as Primeval. I’ll probably move on to the new Dr. Who eventually, since Torchwood is a spinoff of that franchise. I got bored with the drama queens and kings on BG after the first season. Is there any reason to watch Caprica if you didn’t finish all of BG?

As I sit here writing this at 7:15 pm Eastern Standard Time, less than two hours remain until the start of the Battlestar Galactica series finale. It promises to be eventful, with so many loose ends waiting to be tied up. After all, the remnants of the human race are still adrift in space, running out of food and basic necessities, and no closer to finding a permanent home than when they started; the vast majority of the Cylons are still actively seeking to destroy them; the Galactica is falling apart at the seams; the child Hera, who holds the key to their salvation, is in enemy hands; and we still don’t know whether Kara Thrace is a human, Cylon, half-Cylon, or some other species as yet undetermined.

Plus, lots of people are a-gonna die. Here are my best guesses, which will no doubt be proven wildly wrong:

Will Die:

Laura Roslyn. Yeah, I know this is an easy one, because she’s dying of cancer already.
Bill Adama. He has seemed old and tired this entire season, and he wouldn’t want to go on living without Laura, anyway.
Lee Adama. I think the scene with the bird in last week’s episode was a foreshadow. Doves (and a pigeon is a type of dove) are often associated with death. Besides, every fan of the show wants he and Kara to finally end up together, which is more than enough reason for this show’s fiendish writers to do precisely the opposite.
Galen Tyrol. He will sacrifice himself to save Hera and atone for his part in letting her get captured by the Cylons.
Sharon Valeri (aka “Boomer.”) She’s switched sides in this conflict so many times that pretty much everybody on either side wants her dead, anyway. Hopefully she goes out heroically, saving Hera.

Won’t Die

Gaius Baltar. If there is one thing I am positively certain of, it’s this: Gaius will live. His one defining character trait over the past four years has been his selfishness and ability to survive anything. He always looks out for #1, right up until last week, when he desperately wanted to do the right thing and join the rescue mission, but just…couldn’t…force himself to do it. No one needs redemption more than Gaius, and that redemption will be earned by leading the remnants of humanity to safety after most of the other main characters die.
Kara Thrace. C’mon, she’s already died once! That’s enough.
Karl Agathon. He’s the most morally incorruptible character in the entire show, and he’ll need to be around to take care of his daughter after Athena dies. Unless she lives, in which case he dies.
Saul Tighe. Someone has to lead the military after both Adamas perish.

No Frakkin’ Idea if They WIll Die

Umm…all the other major characters.

Your thoughts? Theories?

(Shamelessly cross-posted nyah)

Ever since my XO laptop arrived, I’ve been tinkering with it, looking for ways to make it behave more like a traditional laptop. While the hardware on this technological marvel is neat as hell, the childlike operating system quickly grew tiresome. I looked into ways to load Ubuntu onto it, but the complexity of the process, XO’s lack of a cd drive, and small amount of storage space on the internal solid-state drive made that proposition a dicey one.

However, there is a less intensive way to make your XO grow up, one that doesn’t involve wiping out the operating system or trying to boot a second one from the flash drive: namely, you can install a new graphical interface right next to the one that already exists. The Xfce desktop, being very small and lightweight, is perfect for a machine like the XO, and detailed install instructions are already readily available on the web. I followed these, and had the new desktop up and running and most of my desired software installed in about an hour and a half. Yeah, most of the config has to be done from a command line, but you can cut and paste lines in from the website, and it only needs to be done once.

When I finished, I had a tiny little laptop that could pull in a wireless signal from anywhere, browse the web in Firefox, run Open Office, and play media from an SD card or USB drive. (Although I’m still looking for a media player that will play mp3’s, since Fedora, the underlying Linux operating system, apparently doesn’t include mp3 codecs on any of its media software.) All in all, I was pretty pleased with myself…

But then I heard a certain Snarky Penguin crowing about his brand new Asus Eee, a tiny, commercially available laptop similar in design to the XO… but with a much bigger internal drive.

So now I have Eee Eeenvy.

I’m fascinated by games and software that attempt to “improve” your intelligence or memory. There’s an element of wishful thinking and vague, inflated promises with some of these games, but there’s also some research indicating that this stuff actually works. For example, this Wired post reports on research indicating that a game called “dual n-back” actually improves fluid intelligence, which is what IQ tests supposedly measure. This is exciting if true because fluid intelligence is usually hard to train or improve. On the other hand, it’s unclear whether the effects demonstrated in this study are temporary or permanent. You can try a dual n-back test here. Feel smarter? You can find other brain games on that same site.

I’ve also been using Lumosity, which costs $75 per year (1 week trial available). I don’t know anything about the science behind their games, but they’ve got a bunch of PhD’s on their advisory board.

Also, if memory is your main concern, read the article on Piotr Wozniak in this month’s Wired.  Wozniak is a Polish scientist, eccentric and polymath who designed an app called SuperMemo, which is sort of a flash card program on steroids.  I’ve been using it for about two weeks, and while it’s clunky, ugly and hard to learn, I’ve gotten the hang of it, and find it really useful when trying to keep track of large, complex subjects (e.g. learning a programming language).  It supposedly requires disciplined, daily attention over a period of months (at the very least), so I’ll let you know down the road if I see any improvement in my learning.  If you’re on a Mac, there’s a program called Genius that does the same thing as SuperMemo and supposedly has a much nicer interface.  Also, there are a few open source apps based on an early version of SuperMemo.

UCD Steps: by Rosenfeld Media

Same company. New position.

As of Monday I’ll be in a new position at my company. That’s the news. You can stop reading now, and go visit Digg if discussions of web design processes bore you.

Since graduating from the ISchool I’ve been working as a site manager, which in some other organizations might be called a technical project manager, and in others a producer. Basically, I’ve been responsible for the day-to-day upkeep of a number of different web properties–working with IAs, developers, writers, taxonomists, and designers to keep the sites fresh and our customers happy. I’ve enjoyed the work, but its a lot of what I’ve been doing for years, both professionally and as a hobby. Plus, it doesn’t require any particular expertise, other than a vague understanding of how the web works and a knack for staying organized when the firehose is turned on. So, I was getting kind of bored and felt my degree was a bit wasted.

So, as of Monday, my new title will be “User Experience Architect.” Those geeks and librarians in the house might know my new job better as “information architecture,” and indeed, that’s much of what I’ll be doing. However, at my company (a large web marketing consultancy) we don’t separate the processes of gathering user data and insights from the nitty-gritty of wireframing and sitemapping; rather, the two are part of a large user-centered design approach, and user research flows right into the design portion.

Here’s what my company says about it:

“Information Architects” or “User Experience Architects” provide user research, information architecture, interface and interaction design, and usability testing. They conduct primary research, often in the form of interviews (in-the-field, in-person, and via telephone), to understand the goals, attitudes, and behaviors of users of the web sites and applications. This understanding is expressed through personas, scenarios, mental models, and task flows. These deliverables are shared with clients and project team members and are used to inform strategy, prioritization, messaging framework, taxonomy, information architecture, and design (including visual design).

IAs/UXAs create site maps, user flows, and wireframes to define logical grouping of content and features, navigation systems, labeling, elements per page/screen (and their layout), and interaction behavior. IAs/UXAs evaluate the usability of the designs via heuristic evaluation (using the Forrester Scorecard), paper prototyping, and clickable/interactive studies in the field or in the office. This work is collaborative with Editorial, Taxonomy, SEO and Visual Design.

For those who still have no idea what I’m talking about, think of my new job this way:

Before, I was the foreman on a construction job: I’d take the designs, and work with my team to build them. Now, though, I’m becoming the architect who designs the building.

Pretty cool, huh? This should allow me to take on new challenges, have a greater impact on projects, give me some subject matter authority, and take me to a new income bracket — all very good things.

At long last, the final present of Christmas 2007 has finally arrived: I hold in my hot little hands none other than an XO laptop. In fact, I wrote this post on it!

No, my hand is not in the foreground. It really is that tiny.

Perhaps you’ve heard of the One Laptop Per Child program, the rather ambitious aim of which is to put $100 $200 laptops in the hands of schoolchildren in developing nations worldwide. For a short time last year, they ran a special “Give One Get One” promotion, wherein you could purchase one XO for yourself if you also purchased one for donation to a child in the developing world. On the very last day of the G1G1 program, yours truly, deciding he needed to both repair his fractured karma and purchase a new toy, plunked down the mad scrilla.

Last night, it finally arrived.

All the crazy stories you’ve heard about this machine are true: the screen really is visible outdoors in direct sunlight, the twin wifi antennas really can pull in a signal from a ridiculously long distance, the touchpad really can be used as a writing tablet with a stylus, it really is impervious to dust and heat, and it really does have no hard drive (all internal storage is handled by a combination of ROM and flash memory.) This is an amazingly well-designed piece of hardware.

The software, however, is another story. It’s a special, stripped-down version of Fedora Linux called Sugar, and it’s designed to be very simple for kids to use. I think it’s a little too simple, personally: installing new software is very difficult. The visual look of the GUI is like no operating system you’ve ever seen, so different in fact that it’s quite jarring. And the included web browser is just hideous: it’s slow, breaks formatting, and forget about playing embedded audio or video content.

However, all of these things are fixable. The good folks at Opera have already created a version of their browser specially modified for use on the XO, which I was able to install in just a few quick steps. And lo and behold, there are already several hacks for installing Ubuntu as an alternative operating system, to give the laptop a much more grown-up feel. (There are even rumors that the Redmond Borg Collective will attempt to shoehorn XP onto the XO, but I prefer to pretend that’s just a horrible, horrible nightmare.)

So, yeah: a qualified thumbs up. It’s not a mobile workstation, but it ain’t a toy, either. And it was cheap and it helps out kids in need. I heartily approve of both the concept and the execution of this program.

I’d say run out and buy one immediately, but you can’t. The Give One Get One ended on December 31st, and there are no plans to revive it. I am, and will always continue to be, the only person you know who has one of these babies. Ha ha!

You can still give one to a kid in a Third World country, however. So go do it, you stingy bastard! Now! What are you waiting for?

Remember the days when you had one Geocities home page, and that was it? Yeah, me too. Good times. I think fondly back to The Goat’s political manifesto and rambling biography. Goat, we need a new manifesto on Ooh Ooh. Please?

I actually started before that, when my home was my web space on WWU’s servers. I hosted the Spyda and the Family Funk home page and discography, a man’s guide to looking good, and some resources on vegetarianism.  A later iteration had me flying with stuffed animals. God, it would kick ass to have screenshots of that site.

Anyway, as we’re all acutely aware, the web is a different place now–its a participatory web, and our activity is scattered across the tubes. Although some dismiss this new culture as a “cult of the amateur,” I think we all sense that the level of discourse on blogs, the maturity of social networking, and our general demeanor on the web has vastly improved since the Geocities days, and even since the inception of blogging. Maybe it’s because we’re older and more careful about our reputations and the kids are as dumb and careless as they ever were (certainly the media would have us believe this). Or maybe its because our onlinve activity is motivated by new, different things–connecting professionally, getting ideas into the webiverse, playing Scrabble, sharing pictures, or participating in politics.

I’m not here to ruminate on the web. Lord knows I’ve done that enough already. Instead, I want to put out there all my accounts, so we can all hook up elsewhere. Most of these will be familiar:

• My Tumblelog
• Facebook
• MySpace
• Last.fm
• Delicious
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Digg
• Wikipedia
• Google Reader – Starred Items (for me, for later)
• Google Reader – Shared Items (for you)
• Upcoming
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Lord knows where else

Where are you?

I suppose that if I were a Windows or Mac fanboy, the title of this post would read “Ballin’ With Bill,” or “Surfin’ With Steve.” As it stands, the alliterative properties of “Linus Torvalds” make “living” the most obvious choice — and the most accurate, given the all-consuming nature of my computer habit. Ask Dina. If I had it my way, I’d sleep with my arms snuggly wrapped around my laptop.

Yes, living. Because that’s what I do now . . . I live with the operating system that Linus Torvalds built back in the early 90s, Linux–or more specifically GNU/Linux, though my distribution of choice, Kubuntu, uses neither “GNU” nor “Linux” in its name. I first tried Linux four years ago, when I installed Mandriva (back then it was Mandrake) alongside Windows XP. I wasn’t prepared at the time to move. Some of my hardware components didn’t work, XP was relatively new, and I didn’t consider Linux to be a serious OS for serious people.

I moved to Linux on my server about a year and a half ago, when I again installed it alongside XP (which by this time was, itself, about five years old). At the time there was a lot of internet buzz about Ubuntu, which was being touted as the first viable desktop Linux distribution, and I was curious. XP, by this time, was running agonizingly slow on my aging hardware, and I was sick of waiting for 5-minute boot-up times and constant defrags. I was pleasantly surprise, as it installed mostly without a hitch on my aging desktop server, and cut my boot time down to a minute or so. I followed a guide for sharing with Samba, and I was up and running with a file and music server.

About a year ago I installed Ubuntu alongside Windows XP on my laptop, and began playing around, and got comfortable enough with it that immediately upon graduation I dumped XP entirely. (I needed to keep XP until then because of compatibility issues with other students and shared work in grad school.) This winter I installed the KDE desktop alongside the GNOME desktop, and found bliss. Though GNOME had treated me well, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. It lacked the polish that I wanted in a desktop, and its efforts toward simplicity were wasted on me, as I enjoying tinkering and customizing and whatnot.

My reasons for wanting something other than Windows run along the usual lines espoused all over the intertubes. XP is an aging operating system that will soon be phased out; it is often attacked by script kiddies and virus authors, requiring constant security monitoring; defragging sucks; XP and Windows software costs money; Microsoft is an infuriating company with a huge ego and monopolistic practices; and I desire the intellectual freedom that comes with open source software. To top it off, Vista was proving to be even worse than XP in many regards, and my time at work with it had proven frustrating at best.

Today I can honestly say that KDE is the best GUI I’ve used, and I can’t image ever going back to Windows. Or Mac. Or even GNOME.

That’s the story. Now for the good stuff. Here’s what I like about Linux (Kubuntu, in particular):

• APT is an amazing tool for managing software. Essentially, all your software is managed in a single place and updated for you automatically. If you want new software, you simply open up a program on your computer, search, and click install. No need to go to thirty different websites for thirty different programs. One stop–and it’s all free.
  
• There are a lot of programs that come with any Linux distro by default that will never come with Windows (due mainly to licensing and legal issues (unless you buy from an OEM like Dell)). For example:
  • CD burning software (K3b)
  • Partitioning software
  • A complete office suite (OpenOffice.org for me)
  • A robust photo editor (GIMP)
  • An excellent BitTorrent client (KTorrent)
  • A multiprotocol IM client (Kopete)
  • A lot more available for quick download . . .
• Canonical–the company that distributes Ubuntu and Kubuntu–releases new versions of the software every six months, which means that while XP is nearly 7 years old, I always have some of the newest software available right at my fingertips. (And with each release it gets better and more polished.)
• Kubuntu comes with EVERY driver I need for my laptop. That’s right every single one. I reinstalled a month ago, and the entire process took just over 30 minutes and required no additional downloads (other than for any additional software I wanted). The two times I reinstalled XP on my laptop, it took hours and a separate computer for downloading drivers for 7 different pieces of hardware disk.
• The little touches. Like hover states for photos (and notice the thumbnail on the desktop? Yes!):
  
• The file manager. The new one is called Dolphin, though some people use Konqueror. Both are very good, though there are many strong opinions about both. My favorite features are the split screen and the amount of detail shown for files:
  
• Amarok, the best music player around, is only available for Linux. Yes, best. I don’t miss foobar2000 anymore.
• No need for virus/spyware/adware scanning. And since no ports are open, save a few for web browsing, no need for a software-based firewall (and my hardware-based firewall protects the network otherwise).

And, my favorite programs:

• Amarok
• Firefox
• digiKam w/kipi plugins (photo management – as good as Picasa)
• Qtpfsgui (HDR photos)
• GIMP
• Kate (text editor)
• Kopete (instant messenger)
• Open Office
• KPDF (for PDF files)
• FileZilla
• VLC (movie player)
• Miro (free TV!)

Two final notes:

1. Much has been made of WINE, which is a program that allows you to run Windows applications within Linux. Whereas I can see the utility in using this program (especially if you’re a gamer or a slave to Photoshop, foobar, or utorrent, as some are), I personally won’t install it. It feels like bloat, and if I want to game, I’ll fire up my Wii. Otherwise, GIMP does me fine.
2. Some people won’t install GNOME applications within KDE, and vice-versa, even though they work fine. Generally, you must install extra files to do so. So, again, the bloat argument. I will. I don’t see this issue as being the same as running Windows applications under WINE. In the OS world, we’re one big happy family.

That’s all. If any of my peeps ever want to make the switch, let me know and I’ll assist.

Due to a frugality disorder that I inherited from my Scottish ancestors, I don’t buy a lot of gadgets, but here are the gizmos I sometimes lust after:

• Chumby
• Kindle
• A super-small laptop — either a Cloudbook, an OLPC or an Eee PC
• A new Smartphone — either a Helios Ocean or an iPhone.  I like my Treo, but as long as I’m dreaming about new purchases…
• A portable media player — probably an Archos 605 or 705
• A Nintendo DS Lite

What’s on your wishlist?

After 69 years, he finally lost a saving throw versus death (Ok, that joke has been told about 1000 times by now). My D&D years were roughly 1981 to 1984. Anyone other former or current gamers here?