I stumbled upon this recent post on Slashdot about the rise of the geek in modern times and found it darn interesting if only for the fact that I’m a bona fide geek myself
Hopefully those of you who call me a geek will come to realise that its the word has become something of a badge of honour for those of us who know how powerful geeks have become in today’s modern world. Without us you’d have none of the inventions of modern time as computers have risen to become one of the lynchpins of modern society. So next time you call me a geek, don’t be surprised if I take it as a compliment
In what can only be described as the biggest newsflash for the Slashdot community since Microsoft was sued: It is the age of the geek. New York Times Op-Ed columnist and author David Brooks writes a brief article that can be best summed up in the following: All your culture are belong to us. In the article proper he summarizes the rise to power and discusses a technocratic geek dominance on the social construct. He writes, ‘…the new technology created a range of mental playgrounds where the new geeks could display their cultural capital. The jock can shine on the football field, but the geeks can display their supple sensibilities and well-modulated emotions on their Facebook pages, blogs, text messages and Twitter feeds…They’ve created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated…There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.’
After posting about the sheer awesomeness of accountants and their profession I thought it only fair to focus on some more boring professions. Take biochemists for example, they’re pale and dull people who spend their entire days hunched over bunsen burners frantically trying to make up stuff about the blurry specs they see on their screens. I mean, look at the extremely dull gel pictured at the top of this post. Is there any way that actually means anything? Its clearly something that even a two year old could make up in 5 seconds flat. Though be sure not to tell them that to their face because then you’ll see the chemicals fly and in my humble opinion, anyone who has a large stock of cyanide near at hand should be treated very carefully
So remember kids, rather strive to become an exciting accountant and not a boring, dull biochemist. after all, who wants to look at the very matter of life when you could rather look at spreadsheets and numbers every single day for the rest of your life?
And to add insult to injury, look at their attempt to be ‘cool’ with The PCR Song
Good news for all of us gamers out there, Jack Thompson has finally reached the end of his infamous reign of terror over the gaming community. For those of you unaware of who this man is let me give you a brief rundown of his history. Jack Thompson is a Florida lawyer who was quick to spot that video games were ripe for the picking in terms of furthering his career by making games and gamers appear to be a breed of vicious psychopath that should be locked away from the outside world. As soon as any game came out with the least bit of violence in it he would jump upon it and decry it as the foul spawn of some twisted game developer’s mind. Unfortunately he came at a time when people are willing to fall for anything and soon enough he had a group of avid supporters who even though they, and Thompson himself, know nothing about the games industry or even what most games are all about.
Thankfully the news from Thompson’s recent misconduct trial seems to show that common sense and decency has prevailed. The following was on Kotaku:
According to a report from GamePolitics, the judge who presided over Miami lawyer Jack Thompson’s Bar trial has recommended to the Florida Supreme Court that he be found guilty on 27 of 31 charges of professional misconduct. Of the 27 recommendations of guilt, twenty-one are from a suit related to Grand Theft Auto and four are from an attempt by Thompson to have Rockstar’s Bully declared a public nuisance.
The Bar trial judge, Dava Tunis, found the violent video game activist guilty of misconduct such as “Engaging in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation.” The state Supreme Court will have to make a ruling based on those recommendations, with a disciplinary hearing planned for the first week of June.
Its always sad when you lose a friend. Not in the sense that they pass away but rather that you drift apart and lose touch over a period of time. Suddenly one morning you wake up and you come to realise that you haven’t heard from them in ages and that you really can’t recall the last time you seriously spoke to them. It comes as a shock to you how you could ever manage to lose touch with them. After all, you’ve always been close to them and shared your thoughts and feelings with them to the extent that you became close friends. What could ever tear that bond of friendship apart? The sad thing is that this is all too common an occurrence. I’m actually afraid that this might be happening in my life as we speak. Over the past few months I’ve noticed a schism between myself and a close friend that has just been growing wider with each passing day no matter how hard I’ve tried to bridge the gap between us. Maybe its just that this friendship was there for a specific purpose at that time and place. Who knows. I just know that its something that makes me sad to see it happen. I really could wish for nothing more than to regain the friendship that I once had and I’ll do the best I can to keep it intact. I can only hope though that it does eventually return to the way it once was. What makes it even more sad is that this schism didn’t come from anything particular. To the best of my knowledge there was no disagreement or argument that might have caused it. It just happened that we slowly started drifting apart a little more day by day. I’ll hold out hope still. As the last line in Shawshank Redemption says:
“I hope to see my friend, and shake his hand. I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams. I hope.”
In my day to day job I am a trainee chartered accountant. You might think it dull and boring but rest assured, there is a multitude of awesome and exciting facts about accounting and accountants that you didn’t know. Just look at these facts:
Famous Accountants:
John Grisham, author of A Time to Kill, The Firm and many other exciting novels, received his undergraduate degree in accounting from Mississippi State University.
Walter Diemer, was an accountant for the Fleer Corporation in the 1920’s. In his spare time, Diemer tinkered with gum recipes and created a chewy, rubbery substance better known as bubble gum.
Arthur Blank, co-founder of Home Depot and owner of the Atlanta Falcons, is a CPA
Funny man Bob Newhart started out in accounting.
Former Texas Rangers Manager and CPA Kevin Kennedy did his players’ tax returns to make extra money when he managed in the minor leagues.
Track sensation Marcus O’Sullivan passed the CPA exam.
Chairs of several Fortune 500 companies, including Nike (Phil Knight), are CPAs.
After graduating from school, J. P. Morgan got his first Wall Street job as a junior accountant. Five years later he founded his own company.
Jazz artist Kenny G. was an accountant before he became famous.
Ray Wersching, the ex-San Franscico 49er field goal kicker, was a CPA during the off-season.
Nearly 1,400 of the FBI’s special agents are accountants. In fact, the #2 man at the FBI, Thomas Pickard, is a CPA.
When Hernando Cortes landed in the New World, he brought horses, soldiers–and his accountant, Alonso de Avila. As a reward for excellent service, de Avila was made the first mayor of Veracuz, in what is now Mexico.
Butthole Surfers band member Gibby Haynes was a star accounting and economics student at Trinity University in San Antonio.
Did you know that cost accounting is mentioned in the Bible? Luke 14:28 says, “For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it?”
Ohio State University is home to the Accounting Hall of Fame which honors outstanding contributions to the profession.
Robert Duvall turned to his CPA for advice on whether to undertake the financial and personal pressures of producing, starring and funding his manuscript for the movie The Apostle.
Just shy of two months since their last release the guys at Pidgin have seen fit to release version 2.4.2 of Pidgin to address some user issues that have popped up since 2.4.1, most notably the heated issue of the manual resizing of the text input area as well as the customisation of the typing notification used in the conversation window. There aren’t many other new features, rather this release appears to be a collection of small fixes as can be seen from the official changelog:
libpurple
In MySpaceIM, messages from spambots are discarded (Justin Williams)
Strip mIRC formatting codes from quit and part messages.
IRC now displays ban lists in-channel for joined channels.
Fixed a bug where the list of loaded plugins would get removed when switching between different operating systems.
Fix reception of IRC PART without a part message on Undernet (fixes a problem with litter in the channel user list).
IRC no longer crashes on /list on servers which erroneously omit RPL_LISTSTART.
Update the NetworkManager support to use D-Bus directly, instead of libnm-glib. Hopefully it’s stable now. It will now compile by default if you have D-Bus support and NetworkManager.h. (Elliott Sales de Andrade)
MSN buddy list synchronization is now more forgiving, only asking about buddies who have disappeared completely from the server list and not those that have simply moved groups.
IRC will now try to append 1-9 to your nick if it is in use, instead of substituting the last character with 1-9 where possible.
Bonjour buddies will be saved persistently if they’re moved out of the “Bonjour” group. (Eion Robb)
Pidgin
The typing notification in the conversation history can be disabled or customized (font, color etc.) in .gtkrc-2.0.
Added a plugin (not installed by default) which adds a Send button back to the conversation window. People without physical keyboards have a hard time with the lack of the button.
Clicking on the buddyicon in the conversation window toggles the size of the icon between small and large.
The settings of a chat (e.g. Handle in an XMPP chat, or Exchange in an AIM chat) can be edited from its context menu in the buddy list.
Add a “Present conversation window” preference to the Message Notification plugin; the “Raise conversation window” option does not unminimize windows or draw attention to them when they are on other workspaces–the “Present” option should.
Add a preference to set Escape as the keyboard shortcut for closing the conversation window.
Add an option in the context menu to disable smileys in the selected text in the conversation history/log viewer. This should help people who regularly paste code in conversations.
Add a preference to choose the minimum size of the text input area in lines.
Moved the “Local alias” field in the Modify Account dialog to be below the “User Options” heading on the “Basic” tab.
Number of room occupants is now shown in chat tooltips where possible
General
The configure script now dies on more absent dependencies. The –disable-xxx arguments to configure can be used to bypass unneeded dependencies. This will also cause the configure script to die if an –enable-xxx option is used and the dependencies it requires are missing.
The Evolution integration plugin must now be explicitly enabled. Use the –enable-gevolution argument to configure to enable it.
The Contact Availability Prediction plugin must now be explicitly enabled. Use the –enable-cap argument to configure to enable it.
Finch
New default binding ctrl+x to open context menus.
Menu triggers and other bindings will no longer conflict.
Middle click pastes the internal clipboard (when mouse support is enabled).
I finally got round to finishing off Mass Effect today and without a doubt it is one of the most well made games I’ve had the pleasure of playing on my 360. The final sequence of events in the story is so grandiose and epic in scale that you cannot help but to feel like you’re part of a greater story in the game’s universe. From the get go the characters, story and dialogue all combine to create an engrossing and captivating plot that serves to drive you on through each mission and planet all the while eagerly awaiting the next cut scene. The cutscenes themselves are works of art with the character models being some of the most life like and detailed I’ve yet seen in any game. The way that Bioware has managed to use the character models to convey subtle emotions and facial expressions during conversations still amazes me. Speaking of conversations, the dialogue tree and system is the most natural evolution of the standard RPG dialogue tree I’ve yet encountered. At no point was there a clear ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. Every decision I made was a natural extension of my character and not forced upon me by the developers. The combat system too is well implemented. My first thoughts were that it was very much like Gears of War with its use of cover, but the more I played, the more I realised how well Bioware have managed to mask the underlying stats systems they use while all the time maintaining a real time atmosphere to all the enemy encounters. The final clincher for me was the great soundtrack by Jack Wall, Sam Hulick, Richard Jacques, and David Kates. The classic sci fi atmosphere they invoke through the use of synthesizers really made me smile as a sci fi fan of yore. So much so that I’ve just placed my order for the soundtrack. The best part was that they were influenced by Blade Runner and Dune’s soundtracks.
I’m really interested to see where Bioware takes the series from here. They’ve managed to create a cast of characters that really engender themselves to me as a gamer and with their knack for creating well penned stories in their games I’m sure that the further exploits of Commander Shepard will continue to make the Mass Effect series a strong contender for one of my favourite franchises.
My reputation as a law abiding citizen has become tarnished. I have become that which I most feared, a criminal. Upon returning home today for lunch I was greeted by the sight of an envelope containing a photo of my car and a notice that I have to pay a fine within a month for speeding or face a summons to court. I’ve never been handed a traffic fine before so this was a shock to me I can tell you! Thankfully its only for R 100 as I was speeding 2 km/h over the speed limit.
Now I can hear you asking what may have led me to becoming such a rebel and a deviant in the eyes of the law. Well let me tell you: Newlande. There you have it. From my previous posts about her you may be under the impression that she is a sweet and cute person but lo and behold she is actually far more evil and devious than she has led us all to believe. The speeding offence was on our way back from the Garden of Eden in Knysna and I distinctly recall her distracting me with her cuteness and all that. Of course she was aware of this heinous act of hers but nonetheless she wanted me to perpetrate a crime for her own benefit. Hopefully the fact that I am now a criminal will please her and justify her actions in her opinion but let me warn you now, she will not stop till I am behind bars. For what reason I am not sure but it seems as though she gains some semblance of joy from seeing a good person such as me become a depraved lunatic living on the fringes of society.
Thankfully I have hopes that I might be able to avoid any further run ins with the law by employing a bit of lateral thinknig and the deployment of a secret weapon. Let’s see you get past that Newlande!
I stumbled upon this recent post on Slashdot about the rise of the geek in modern times and found it darn interesting if only for the fact that I’m a bona fide geek myself 
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