My brother, who has a career in superscience, has created a self aware robot minion using a child’s toy, simple electronics, suspicious programming know-how, and a Wii.

Fear it. Also fear Bob’s inevitable path towards professional costumed aggression.

***UPDATE***

Bob’s evil invention made Gizmodo! And probably a zillion other places by now.

My friend Brad pointed me to this really cool application that creates a customized word cloud from any text or URL.

This one is created from the text of my cookbook. Good times!

Are you a true geek? Check out these über-geeky home decor items. Most of these things are actually really cool! I’m not sure I’d put the Pixelated Sofa in my living room or have the patience to use the Defendius maze door chain every time someone came to visit, but waffles are awesome and keyboard-shaped waffles have got to be a lot more fun to eat than the standard square or circle variety. And while it might be a little creepy to actually use a desk containing the body of Han Solo frozen in carbonite, you’d immediately achieve godlike status amongst your nerd friends!

In which I out myself as a complete and total nerd:

As I mentioned two posts ago, I was saddened to learn that Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, failed his saving throw vs. death on Tuesday. I spent the entire four years of my high school career (why do they call high school a career, anyway?) immersed in D&D with my girlfriends. We did not have boyfriends (I’m sure that comes as a real shock), and so we’d spend nearly every weekend and some weeknights playing.

I don’t think that we really played the same way that most other people play D&D. We weren’t sticklers for the rules, or calculations and charts, and we definitely didn’t have little figurines to represent our characters. Our characters had definite personalities and extraordinarily complete backstories, and while we still did a lot of normal D&D adventuring, we preferred to play “Personal Happiness.”

“Personal Happiness” resulted in me having, to this day, an entire file box full of scribbled notes from one character to another. During sleepovers, or evenings at each others’ houses, or even during school when we were supposed to be doing algebra or chemistry, we’d write notes back and forth to each others’ characters. Each conversation would have its own sheet of paper:

B.P.- How’s life?
-Selina

Selina- Alright. How about you?
-B.P.

B.P. - I suppose it’s okay. The kids are driving me NUTS. N-V-T-S, nuts! Nevermind. I got a cat. All black, named Macbeth.
-Selina

Selina - I’ll take the kids if you’d like.
-B.P.

B.P.- If you want ‘em for a while, it’d sure be nice.
-Selina

Selina - Okay, I’d like to have them.
-B.P.

B.P.- How’s the love life? If you don’t mind my asking, that is.
-Selina

Selina - Nonexistent. And you?
-B.P.

B.P.- The same. I’m surprised Kook Sul hasn’t asked me to marry him lately.
-Selina

Selina - I think he gave up.
-B.P.

This was essentially a pen-and-paper precursor to instant messaging! And yes, most of our Personal Happiness conversations revolved around love and relationships – the very things none of us were experiencing in real life. For what it’s worth, Selina was my cleric, recently divorced from Sarah’s character B.P. (Black Panther), a half-elf/black panther shapeshifter.

It was seriously like a four-year soap opera.

Geeky and pathetic as it may sound, I think that the intensive imagination that this required helped develop not only my creativity but also my writing skills and my skills at relating to people. I haven’t always had good people-relating skills (okay, maybe I still don’t!) and D&D really cemented my relationship with my girlfriends. We are all still good friends today, twenty years later, and who knows if we would have been as close as we are if it weren’t for RPGs.

A couple of other notes: We always wrote out our marching orders at the beginning of adventures, and the title always was “Marching Order (smooth, like a little froggy’s bottom).” Why? I have completely forgotten, but I’m sure it was for some hilarious reason. Also, in the marching orders we had columns for name, class, rank, and hit points – the usual stuff – but also a column labeled “V/NV,” which I believe stood for “Virgin/Nonvirgin.” Clearly this was important to us!

This was my favorite character, Bradley Dale, named (not so secretly) after someone I secretly was in looooove with in high school. Click for larger images.

And we weren’t big fans of charts full of numbers, but we did keep a few:

The word around the internets is that Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away this morning. I spent much of my teenage years happily immersed in D&D.

I can’t tell you how many nights Sarah and Kim and Molly and I stayed up until dawn, working our way through Ravenloft or Greyhawk or hack’n’slash-ing through the Tomb of Horrors, drinking Coke and eating M&Ms until we were sick, then crashing in our sleeping bags on the living room floor and sleeping till midafternoon. Good times, good times.

I still have all my dragon dice. I keep them in my desk drawer. For some reason I’ve never been able to simply store them away in the attic with my other souvenirs of childhood.

I’m glad the rumors of the MacBook Air were true. It is a thing of beauty, albeit an expensive thing of beauty.

Many things were announced, including updates to the iPhone and iPod Touch (including GPS! Freakin’ finally); a new version of AppleTV, which I believe is merely a software upgrade to original boxes, that is everything that the original AppleTV should have been; TimeCapsule, which Doc and I might want to explore; and of course the rumored ultrathin notebook.

I’m looking to get a notebook computer some time this year, but I have never been an early adopter of new products. I don’t think I can justify the $1800 for this (or $3100 for the version with the flash hard drive).

But damn, it’s sexy!

Yes, I am a geek. I am excited about the Next Great Thing to be announced in 33 minutes. What will it be? I will report back later today.

Doc and I joined Leslie & Rich’s team last night at the Trinity Hall Pub Trivia competition. Every Sunday night a bunch of smart nerd teams drink too much Guinness, eat fish and chips, and scribble down answers to six rounds of random questions called out to the pub by the quizmaster.

We’ve been meaning to go for a long time now, and finally managed to get to the pub last night. What fun! I think that Team Swizzlestixxx is normally at capacity, but Rich, Frank, and Guy couldn’t make it so Doc and I filled in as alternates on team Son Of Stixxx. I think that we did contribute marginally to the moderate success of the team. Lots of the questions were about movies, which I’m terrible at, and history and literature, which I’m also terrible at.

Nevertheless, we had a great time, and we’re thinking of forming our own team…. Assuming any of our friends can meet regularly at the pub on Sunday evenings… Hmm….

As a professional designer of web sites and e-mail communications, I think it’s very important to adhere to standards. Any designer worth her salt uses the best tools for the job and keeps up with the evolution of standards as defined by the W3C. That’s why I’ve spent years learning to write beautiful, lean, mean, efficient standards-adherent CSS and HTML.

One of the thorns in designers’ sides is having to write “fixes” into our code to make up for Internet Explorer’s failings. With the recent release of Internet Explorer 7, a number of those failings were corrected and so we had hope that perhaps Microsoft was finally coming around and using W3C standards and stopping the crazy cycle of developing “standards” of its own, the equivalent of taking its toys from the Internet sandbox and going home.

HOWEVER. Oh, and do I mean HOWEVER. With the recent release of the Outlook 2007 e-mail program for PCs (and by recent I mean January… yes, I am a little behind), Microsoft decided not to include the newly developed Internet Explorer 7 HTML rendering engine and instead to use the Word engine to render HTML in emails. The non-standards-compliant, circa-1997-ish Word rendering engine.

A huge percentage of people use PCs, and a large percentage of those users use Outlook as their primary e-mail program, and that means that Microsoft has effectively taken e-mail design back a decade. How can designers NOT comply with these arbitrary rules set by the maker of the most popular email program on the planet? We have to. We are forced to play their game, and write bad code to accommodate this brand new, horribly crippled e-mail program, otherwise a majority of our users would receive e-mails that look like shit. And e-mails that look like shit make users think poorly of your brand and your company.

What this means for me and countless other e-mail designers is that, because Outlook no longer supports a number of extremely basic HTML and CSS tags, we will now have to begin using outdated bloated code to assure that our e-mails display properly in Outlook 2007. It does not support, among other things, background images in divs and table cells, float positioning, and ALT TAGS. Yes, you read that right: it does not support alt tags. You know how when you get an email and the images don’t load, but a little bit of text displays in their place so you can tell what it’s supposed to be? That little text bitlet is an alt tag. And they’ve gone bye bye. And since background images are no longer supported, our emails will become much plainer and less attractive.

Microsoft’s reasoning is, apparently, that since the majority of their business users use Word to create HTML emails, then Outlook needs to use the same engine to display them.

I say, bullshit. There is NO REASON why Outlook should not make use of modern, standards compliant code rendering. If anything, they need to fucking update the craptastic Word rendering engine.

In both my professional and freelance lives, I am now going to have to begin redesigning everything I do to accommodate Outlook 2007. It will be more work for less payoff. We designers are used to having to write CSS that will degrade gracefully in older browsers; I never thought I’d have to write code that will degrade gracefully in the newest version of the most popular email program made by the largest software company in the world.

Way to go, Microsoft.

Holy cow, I’m white and nerdy!