Easy as pi!

In the tradition of any excuse for a party, today (3/14) is Pi Day. And in the tradition of Belinda being rather a bit of a geek, I have a special design release to celebrate.

Presenting....Pi, er, Squared! (Well, pi are round - cornbread are square, as the line goes...)

An Assisi-style Pi, with the first 40 decimal places.

A variant pi design. Pi biscornu, anyone?

I'm almost embarrassed to admit I thought of these at about midnight last night, but wasn't sufficiently motivated to get out of bed and boot the computer.

Answers to the lyrics quiz:
1. Meat Loaf, "Everything Louder (Than Everything Else)", Bat Out of Hell II
2. Garbage, "Stupid Girl", Garbage 2.0
3. Great Big Sea, "Stumbling In", Sea of No Cares
4. Stabbing Westward, "Save Yourself", Darkest Days
5. Rush, "Double Agent", Counterparts

White & Nerdy

A coworker sent me a link to a YouTube video for the new Weird Al song "White & Nerdy". Pretty funny and a bit of a headsticker...even if parts of it strike pretty close to home for me! It's off his new album Straight Outta Lynwood, released earlier this week (and currently on its way to me from amazon.com..)

I had a 'white & nerdy' moment yesterday, actually. One of the big news stories for yesterday was the hospitalization of notorious NFL player Terrell Owens for drug overdose, and whether or not it was intentional and such. My DH is out of town on business, and since I knew he didn't have Internet access at work there, I mentioned it to him last night.

My DH had to laugh. He's currently in Dallas (where T.O. plays), and this story was all over the airwaves. But it honestly did not occur to me that he might have heard on the radio or TV about it, because I get practically all my news on the Internet.

Talk about nerdy...

Inklings...

Yesterday in the car, I saw a magnetic One Ring on the back of another vehicle.

Or so I thought - as I got closer, I realized it was a magnetic "Livestrong" bracelet. But I swear it looked like the One Ring from 20 feet away.. does that make me a LotR geek?

Speaking of Tolkien and friends, the whole family saw the new Narnia movie yesterday afternoon. It was very well done, in my opinion, and true to the book. I think C.S.Lewis would have been pleased, and since his stepson Douglas Gresham was involved, I'm sure that helps matters. I really liked that the movie opened with The Blitz, lending historical context to why the Pevensies were at the country manor in the first place. When I first read the Chronicles of Narnia, back in elementary school, I didn't know about The Blitz and that many parents sent their children away from the cities for safety. I also liked all the little touches - the good-natured banter between Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, the White Witch's outfits (especially her icicle crown), and so on. I won't want to spoil too much, though! On the whole, it came across as very believable and very real. So much so that I was immediately discomfited by DsD and her friend commenting that Tumnus was 'cute' - they meant the actor, of course, but I'd already thought of him *as* a faun by then.

Definitely one to get when it comes out on DVD! This blows the 70's animated version I have out of the water, that's for certain. And DD wanted to read the books first thing when we got home. My set is getting kind of ratty - maybe Santa will gift her with a brand new set for Christmas.

Wooly bully?

Shamelessly stolen from a meandering friend...

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You are a Geek Sheep!
You're one l33t g33|< 5|-|33p! No one understands a word you're saying, but you don't care. Bespectacled geek by day, fearsome DND warrior by night! Geek power ;)
Which flock do you follow?

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|344...

Thanks to a friendly weather goddess, I found a The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test. And the verdict is....

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Outcast Genius
69 % Nerd, 65% Geek, 69% Dork
For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in all three, earning you the title of: Outcast Genius.

Outcast geniuses usually are bright enough to understand what society wants of them, and they just don't care! They are highly intelligent and passionate about the things they know are *truly* important in the world. Typically, this does not include sports, cars or make-up, but it can on occasion (and if it does then they know more than all of their friends combined in that subject).

Outcast geniuses can be very lonely, due to their being outcast from most normal groups and too smart for the room among many other types of dorks and geeks, but they can also be the types to eventually rule the world, ala Bill Gates, the prototypical Outcast Genius.
How you compared to other people your age and gender:
You scored higher than 64% on nerdiness
You scored higher than 84% on geekosity
You scored higher than 99% on dork points

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Um...okay. I'm not particularly happy about the comparison to Bill Gates, but I guess the rest of it fits, somehow. And I've already determined that the Web seems to feel I have missed my calling as an evil genius.

Outcast genius...evil genius.... I'm not sure I really *want* to achieve world domination, though. You know how much work that would be??

@

It's very rare that I get hooked on a computer game. Maybe once every couple of years I'll pick up a game, play it for hours a day until I win it, and then I'm done with it. The usual suspects are world-building games such as Civilization or campaign games such as Heroes.

The latest culprit, though, is a very old game - Moria. Yes, the old text-graphics dungeon crawl game, similar to Rogue and Nethack. I spent far too much time playing Rogue, Moria, or Nethack in college. Extremely primitive by today's standards...

...but I know I'll keep playing until I kill that Balrog!

Cold logic

Another quiz, courtesy of the weather goddess:

Your Dominant Intelligence is Logical-Mathematical Intelligence

You are great at finding patterns and relationships between things. Always curious about how things work, you love to set up experiments. You need for the world to make sense - and are good at making sense of it. You have a head for numbers and math ... and you can solve almost any logic puzzle. You would make a great scientist, engineer, computer programmer, researcher, accountant, or mathematician.

What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?

Given that I am a software engineer by trade, I'm not at all surprised.

Speaking of weather, we're in a bit of a 'cold snap' right now. It's down in the 50F's at the moment. DsD was leading her high school JROTC unit in the local light parade tonight, and DH and I went directly to the parade from Mass (DH was cantoring this evening) so neither of us were particularly dressed for standing for an hour or more in windy 50-degree darkness. (I was wearing a short-sleeve dress and sandals - it was much warmer when we'd left the house). It was a nice parade, even though we left after DsD's unit had passed.
Probably a good thing, though, that Florida girl DD is spending the night at her bestest friend's house tonight, and wasn't out in the cold!

Geek moments...

I had a quintessential Geek Moment last night:

I had already gone to bed - it was about a quarter of midnight. While lying there, I thought to myself that I needed to remember to change something in my sidebar on Sunday.
Then I thought, "Y'know, I can just write a javascript to do that, then I won't have to remember."

At which point I started mentally writing said javascript, and there was nothing to do for it except get up, call up Blogger, and insert the javascript.

DH agrees that Getting Up Out of Bed at Nearly Midnight To Put A Javascript in One's Blog Template is definitely a stereotypically geek thing to do.

Anyway, I now have a javascript in my sidebar to insert seasonal or date-specific notes or images. And it all started when I did up an Advent wreath to put there. I'm actually quite proud of them...so much so that I'll inflict them on y'all. (If you like and want to use them, feel free to do so - just save them off to your own webspace...)
~ ~ ~
I've been playing around a bit with images from time to time (as you can see from the family in my sidebar). Doing decent transparent GIFs really puts the "pain" in MSPaint, though. At some point I may get a decent image editor. I won't quit my day job though!

Back to geekiness, today's Foxtrot is pretty funny...

It is official...

Remember to say, when time and place shall serve, that I am A Geek.

A Super Geek, in fact, at 48.32347%, according to Innergeek, home of the Geek Test. I'd probably score higher if I were more into Star Trek. I also think I should get extra credit for having married someone I met on the Internet *prior* to 1995, but that's just me...

Thanks again to Weather Goddess Glenda for pointing it out.

I actually do have my old revision Geek Code around somewhere, but not on my home PC. Maybe I'll post it at a later date...

game over

I am, I must confess, a colossal sucker for puzzle-type arcade games.

Instead of stitching last night, I spent several hours playing an annoyingly addictive game called Cubis on my PDA. I did (after several tries) manage to get a high score - double my previous one. I'm sure, however, it will be like my other flirtations with puzzle games on my PDA - I play it for days, until I have a good run and put up a significantly higher score than I'd been doing to date, make a few more attempts that aren't even close, and move on. It doesn't happen often that I get hooked on a game, but when it does I get stuck for a while.

I'm that way with PC computer games as well. A lot of them find their way into our house - DH is an avid PC gamer, with a strong leaning toward wargames. He's spent hundreds of hours playing Medieval Total War, and just this weekend he got another game from the same designers - Rome Total War. This updated game engine required us to upgrade to a 3D-capable graphics card, but it was money well spent...DH pulled an all-nighter Friday night playing it. I don't spend quite as much time on PC games. I'll occasionally get streaky on puzzle/arcade games or something like Civ 2, spend several days on it, then move on to non-computer pursuits. I don't mind that DH likes to play on the computer - my primary hobbies tend to be solitary activities, so I don't mind the odd streak of computer widowhood. Especially when I do the same thing, but far less frequently.

Hm....I've been hearing that Zuma is addictive, and it should be coming out on PDA soon....