The Geek Tree 2006 Photo Set

For years, people have been asking me for pictures of the Geek Tree, and for years, I've been promising to find a way to take them. This year, I finally did. Check out the Geek Tree in all its glowing glory in this Flickr photo set.

I experimented with a couple of different approuches, but ultimately I hit upon taking the photos with my Sony Cybershot DSC-L1 digital camera on "auto" mode with multi-point focus enabled and the flash turned off. The baseline photos this created were not spectacular, but using Adobe Photoshop Element 3's "Auto Smart Fix" enhancement at 25-50% effectiveness I was able to improve the brightness and contrast of the photos without making them look bland and washed out. I'm pleased with the result -- the shots aren't spectacular, but they nicely illustrate the tree.

Converted

I converted The Atomic Age over to the Blogger's beta software. So far, it's looking pretty good -- it's not nearly as impressive as WordPress (what with it's built in support for Flickr, Del.icio.us and other web goodies) but it's a giant leap forward from what they had. Heck ... it's got categories now!

Geek Gazette

Yes, the Atomic Age has been quiet for a while, but I figure promoting a fellow geek's web site is a good exercise for it. All power to Google!

The site in question is the Geek Gazette, a monthly to bimonthly (hey, publishing is hard!) PDF-based ezine. Its content spans the breadth of geekdom itself, from movies to games to TV to comics to, well, everything that makes up geek life! Pick it up and geek out!

Radio Active #41: Harping Monkey's Second Life, SysStat, Model Makers

Sickness and teething played havoc with Radio Active's publication schedule, but the podcast returns with a shorter show that catches folks up on happenings around the thermonuclear burg. In Net News, I take a look at the Harping Monkey Inn's virtual digs within Second Life, talk about the SysStat widget for Mac OS X, and talk about a the Model Maker's Podcast, a show dedicated to tips and tutorials for wargamers and modelers. Get the episode.

Radio Active #40: Geek Fitness, 7th Son, OSRIC, Pandora's Star

Geek fitness (or the lack there of) leads Episode 40 as I talk about my quest to lose 35 pounds. Over in Net News, I congratulate Jason Adam's for reachign the 50th episode of Random Signal, talk about Nathan Fillion's upcoming appearance on the 7th Son podcast, and offer some old school, 1st-edition D&D-style gaming with OSRIC.

Rounding out the podcat is a review of Peter Hamilton's science fiction novel Pandora's Star, a space opera in which humanity has spread to the stars via a system of planetary wormholes and suddenly finds itself confronting the mystery of two stars instantly encapsulated by Dyson spheres. Get the episode.

Radio Active #39: Nuke(m)Con, Doom, Geeky Media

The gaming world has GenCon. My gaming group has Nuke(m)Con. Radio Active #39 starts with a look at our home grown convention and then takes a look at a couple of new geeky media outlets in the form of the Geek Gazette newsletter and Geek Label podcast as well as an exceedingly useful anti-repetitive stress injury software tool for the Mac. Finally, in the category of "movies we watch so that you don't have to", there's a review of the video-game inspired horror flick Doom. The film stars the Rock and once again proves the axiom that you can't make a good movie from a video game. Listen to the episode and read the show notes

Radio Active #38: Painting Ghosts, Portable Apps, A Feast for Crows

Radio Active starts glowing again as the Great Fall Painting Project of '06 winds down. This time around I've got updates on said project as well as the far geekier AirTunes setup I finally got working. Sites of Note looks at Jonathan Coulton music videos shot using World of Warcraft, the world-building third season of the Harping Monkey's Round Table and the very cool (and very geeky) Portable Apps web site, which provides geeks with self-contained versions of Firefox, Open Office and other programs they can stick on a thumb drive. Finally there's the much delayed review of A Feast For Crows, the fourth book in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series. Get the show, read the show notes.

Radio Active #37: GenCon (Almost) Live, Geek Acres, Nintendo DS

Home improvement once again takes center stage as my wife and I prepare to re-paint our living room. But it's not all painting and scraping: I've also got two new sites to talk about -- GenCon (Almost) Live and Geek Acres -- and a run down of my favorite games for the Nintendo DS. And that review of George R.R. Martin's A Feast for Crows? Yeah, that gets delayed again -- look for it in Radio Active #28. Get the episode and read the show notes.

Radio Active #36: Stargate, Geek Design, Tech Podcasts

Technology vlogs -- also known as video podcasts -- take center stage in Radio Active #36 as I run down the big list of shows I watch every morning while eating my Cheerios and feeding the baby, including commandN, diggnation, dl.tv, Geek Brief and Geek Entertainment TV. I've also got news about the Stargate SG-1 Viewers Choice Poll, ramblings about resisting the urge to pull an all-nighter, and thoughts on geek interior design. Get the show.

Radio Active #35: Eberron Music, Vintage Gamer, Geek Activism

This show features a Radio Active first as I do a game and music review of the same product: Wizards of the Coast's Sharn: City of Towers for the Eberron campaign setting. The show has a ton of listener feedback from Radio Active #34, as well as a review of the Vintage Gamer podcast, a discussion of the 95 Theses of Geek Activism and a link to a conversation between two famous geeks: Zack Braff of Scrubs and Garden State fame and Kevin Smith, known for his films Clerks, Chasing Amy and Dogma. Get the episode and read the show notes.

MySpace

The Atomic Age has certainly fallen on hard times since the new Nuketown went live, which is ok, since suspect RSS aggregators and search engines were the only ones really reading it. Still, I should post here more often, as it is a sort of back-up outpost for the ol'thermonuclear burg.

While we're on the topic of little-used outposts, I do have a MySpace profile that I setup back in the spring for a workshop I gave on Web 2.0, and I decided I'd beef it up a bit just in case anyone's looking for me over there (hey, it could happen). You can check out the profile at this url:

http://www.myspace.com/knewquist

If nothing else, I've found MySpace a useful way to show support for some of my favorite independent bands and performers, like Jonathan Coulton and the Atomic Swindlers, both of whom have profiles on the site.

Radio Active #33: Battlestar Galactica Season 2 Soundtrack, Uncle Bear Podcast

Radio Active #33 is online after I successfully hid away on the third floor and forced myself to get the damn thing done. It features a review of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 soundtrack, and various ramblings about the new Nuketown

NT Redesign: It's Alive!

The new Nuketown is up (and thus, the number of posts around here is down). So far response has been positive, but there hasn't been much in the way of comments, so I'm working on penning some content specifically aimed at getting a response.

NT Redesign: All Over Except for the DNS...

The redesign is finished -- yesterday I setup the email addresses through the new house and worked out the page forwarding scheme that will make sure people can get from the old pages to the new ones. I also told Network Solutions to point to the new Web hosting service, an arcane process known as changing the DNS. Now those changes neeed to spread through the internet, and once they do, the new site will be accessible.

NT Redesign: RSS Tweaks, Statistics, File Uploads

The list of things left to be done before the new site launches is growing ever shorter. During lunch today I created the "RSS" page that points to the two major feeds on the site (the main site feed, and the podcast feed), I got the new "Hall of Fame" statistics page working completely, and added the last four podcasts to the web site.

Only two tasks remain: setting up the redirect to send folks to the new web pages, and the mod_rewrite redirect for the old podcast files, so that all the old podcast file links don't break.

After those two things are done, it'll be time to officially through the switch; I'm hoping that will happen tomorrow, and that the new site will be officially "live" by Saturday.