Let’s start with the speakers.

I am consider a bit of a sound perfectionist and I cannot handle speakers that simply cannot produce all the necessary tones and frequencies to bring out the best in music.  Well, these speakers come pretty darn close.  They unfortunately don’t come cheap at around R950, but the quality is really great.  Crystal clear with a nice all round sound.  The only issue I had was that the bass, low frequency tones were a little flat and sound like someone was banging on the bottom of an up-side-down plastic bucket.

These speakers feature a unique 360 degree “surround sound” system which gives you the impression that the sound is coming from all around you, rather than two boxes in front of you.  I loved that about these speakers.  They have peak RMS of 26 Watts which is really great for a small set of desktop speakers like these.  And they boast auxiliary inputs for your iPod/MP3 player without having to have the speakers connected to your PC.

The question is this, would I pay R950 for the speakers?  Personally, no, I would go for a much more high end system and probably spend a lot more.  But if my budget were R1000 for a decent set of desktop speakers, then definitely.

The other product I tested was the 2 Megapixel Webcam.  What a brilliant gadget.  Look, there is only so much one can say about a webcam.  it transmits video, in high quality, has a built in microphone and is really simple and easy to use.  The microphone pic is good quality, and the 2MP quality is such a treat.  Not so great with our lowclass broadband in SA but will definitely be worth it when our speeds increase in SA.

This is an expensive webcam coming in at about R800, but the quality is well worth the price.

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Briget from BecauseIcan has started a new initiative.  You see, basically her car is breaking down and due to financial constraints of the recession, she can’t afford to buy herself a new one.  So she’s come up with a mathematical calculation that works out to 500 people paying R260 each.  This will enable her to get brand new wheels.  Already 9 people have signed up, that only leaves 491.  Come on, you know you can spare it.  I only wish I’d thought of it myself.  Good luck Briget – we’ll be watching how well this campaign does!

I’m urging all Nerdmaggers to join in & help her out – it really won’t be the end of the world for you, but it might mean the world to her.

Go, go go!

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If we take a moment to break down online romances I believe they make almost a bit more sense than meeting people face to face. Let’s see quickly:

Pros

• No awkward face to face rejection
• It is a meeting of minds more than physical attraction
• Meeting of minds is often more meaningful than just pure physical attraction

Cons

• People can put on facades a lot easier
• People get involved in your love life if you meet in community based media (e.g. IRC or its modern day equivilant: Twitter)
• Bonds develop a bit stronger when you are physically with the person
• The hot 18 year old picture is really some fat creepy 47 year old guy with croocked teeth *shudder*

In my (vast!) experience through the years the pro’s have managed to outweigh the cons. I believe this is all purely because I was an early adopter and the perverts hadn’t made it online yet. Thank goodness.

For me there are laws that you need to follow if you are going to have a successful online romance. In fact, most of these apply to the real world too.

Firstly:
Do not fight on public forums.
Secondly:
Your sex life should remain out of the public domain. No matter how good you or your significant other think it is.
Thirdly:
Make it real. Be with each other in person.
Fourth:
Be honest with each other about who you are.
Fifth:
Set up expectations upfront.
Sixth:
Distance. It is a bitch. Don’t do it if you don’t want your heart broken and your wallet devoid of purpose.

Speaking of long distance relationships. This is mostly what online romances are. Be it self imposed, or just cause you connected with that individual across the country/ocean/planet. I will admit I’ve been this stupid. It filled a deep seeded need in me to feel a connection with someone, yet remain free to do what I want to do.

Here some arb stats that I found on long distance relationships:
Average distance apart: 200km
Avaerge visits: 1.5 times per month
Average number of calls: 1 every 2.75 days
Avergae length of phone calls: 30 minutes
Average letters written (letters, not emails): 3 per month
Average time before they can be closer together: 14 months
Average success: 1 out of 10 relationships of this nature end up together and married

My advice on this topic. Use the interwebs as a means to communicate when you have to, but don’t have your relationship online unless it is a long distance relationship. Before you get into the long distance relationship, think about see the person only once every 3 weeks a phone call every 3 days that last 30 minutes and 3 letters per month. And doing that for a little over a year. It sounds to me like the relationship I have with my grandmother in Cape Town.

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While on the job, the player has direct control over their Sims’ work and can choose how to spend their days. Players can opt to make house calls and save lives as a doctor or choose the devious route and test experimental medicine on patients, be the hero firefighter tackling raging infernos or smashing everything in sight at the victim’s home with an axe, or take a shot at solving cases as an investigator, nicely convincing sources to divulge secrets or roughing up perpetrators in a dark alley to get information.

“The variety of careers to choose from is unmatched and we’ve never given players the opportunity to follow their Sims to work and affect their actions on the job,” said Scott Evans, General Manager of The Sims Studio at EA. “The Sims 3 Ambitions changes that. Players’ actions at work now directly affect their lives, community and neighbors and become an extremely important part of how the game is played.”

Players can now experience some of the most exciting and varied jobs. In The Sims 3 Ambitions, players can choose to hunt down vengeful spirits as the ghost hunter, invent brilliant and potentially destructive gadgets as an inventor, craft glorious masterpieces as a sculptor, and solve riveting cases by any means necessary as an investigator with dozens of cases to solve and numerous clues to find.

Additionally, players will be able to change the look and feel of their town by becoming an architect and directly affecting the neighborhood around them leveraging Build and Buy mode. The stylist career and new tattoo system allow players to make over their Sim neighbors in fashionable or catastrophic ways.

For the first time, players will be in charge of how their Sims’ career progresses and decide if they will work for good or evil, pursue creative endeavors or technical affairs, climb to the top quickly, or be a slacker. The future of a Sims’ success or failure is entirely in the hands of the player.

The Sims 3 Ambitions will also be available for feature phones, iPhone and iPod touch in late 2010 from EA Mobile™. These versions will have customized mobile gameplay features which will be revealed in the coming months and will not require a base game to play. For information on carrier availability and pricing for all EA Mobile games, please visit www.eamobile.com.

For more information about The Sims 3 Ambitions or The Sims 3, please visit www.TheSims3.com. Developed by The Sims Studio, The Sims 3 Ambitions for PC/Mac has not yet been rated by the ESRB. To download artwork, please visit www.info.ea.com.

*Requires The Sims 3 for PC/MAC to play.
**According to NPD data.

About The Sims

The Sims franchise celebrated its ten year anniversary in February 2010 and an impressive more than 125 million units sold since its launch in February 2000. Now translated into 22 different languages and available in 60 different countries, The Sims has quickly become a universal gaming and cultural phenomenon.

Since its June 2009 launch, The Sims 3 has sold more than 4.5 million copies worldwide to date and holds the #1 best-selling PC title for 2009 in North America and Europe. Fan intensity is evidenced through the 110 million downloads of player created content including: Sims, houses, stories and more. The Sims 3 community site, www.thesims3.com, welcomes up to six million unique visitors monthly, handles 300 content downloads every minute and more than 1.8 million uploads have been made to date, including 20 movies each hour.

The Sims 3 YouTube Channel is in the top 5 most viewed sponsored channels of all time with more than 26 million video views. Visit The Sims 3 official website to see what the players are creating at www.TheSims3.com or the official YouTube Channel for The Sims at http://www.youtube.com/user/TheSims.

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I base this claim on my family.

My younger brother is most definitely not a nerd. He’s always been one of the cool kids, and had far more social skills than I ever did. While I was mashing ‘have sex with lady’ commands to Leisure Suit Larry on the 486, he was outside running aimless circles around the garden improving his cardio-fitness or some such nonsense. I was only 14. My idea of exercise involved a wad of tissues and 5 minutes of alone time.

But recently something happened. He bought a computer. Nothing too fancy – something I’d scorn at, but apparently it was more than good enough for World of Warcraft, which he now spends a good number of hours on a week. He is also almost finished a degree in computer science.

Then there’s my darling mother. Of the 5 of us in the family, she is on Facebook the most. She also watches far more TV series than any one of us, and has taught me one or two things about computers. And who do I ask if I have an Excel problem? Why, mommy dearest of course.

Seemingly the last to adopt the ‘fancy’ computers of today is my dad. He’s an electronics engineer by trade, and in the last few years has not only completely digitised his productions, but he knows more about video and sound editing than he’d ever admit to. Why, I’d even seen him program some hefty looking macro’s for the control system he uses to control some 50-odd slide projectors.

Why am I telling you all of this?

I’m losing ground. I’m no longer the long haired geek and high-tech low life. Everyone in my family to some degree is more computer literate today than 80% of my matric class of almost 10 years ago. But why the sudden change? Because dear friends, we live in a nano-second society.

Productivity is no longer measured in days, but rather hours. And we have the computer to blame for that. We have the genius engineers that can create something infinitely complicated, but that I can use by just hitting a few keys on a keyboard, or clicking a few times with a mouse.

We are no longer the elite. We are the normal.

And I LOVE it.

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Then there is this guy, who is quite possibly the coolest guy ever, just your regular looking Joe Someone, who has found a way to defy gravity and perform amazing tasks!

As for me? I’m still trying to figure out how to open the packet of Tennis Biscuits without breaking the first two.

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No, the topic of discussion today is more important, and even more terrifying. Geeks are not headed towards an abrupt end, quite the contrary. I predict, geeks will roam the earth as a dominant force for centuries to come. We will grow in power AND quantity, moving from the fringe of society, to it’s forefront.

Sure, it appears that this is already happening. It don’t take take no Rocket Surgeon to figure that out, you’re probably thinking. And you’d be right. But for all the wrong reasons.

The NERD event isn’t a new one. There have been nerds and geeks of some description gracing our planet with their wisdom for millennia! From the first human that figured out that tying a sharp stone to a long stick might make for better hunting, and the resultant Cave Jock that wielded it into glory. To the under-appreciated inventor of the pocket protector. Nerds have skulked in the shadows, making life better for all of us. Despite this, we’ve been bullied and mocked and oppressed for our intellectual pursuits. We’ve been bog washed and wedged and donkey bitten and ridiculed. I believe this is a good thing however. We NEED to get hung up by our underpants from school showers, we NEED to be ‘put in our place’. We need balance in the nerdy force!

Let me explain why.

We live in an age where information is king. And the people that have tamed that vile, scary beast, are we, the geeks. Without IT support, trillions in revenue would be lost each day! (probably because a few low-brows forgot to press the ‘on’ button) In fact, almost everything of value we do these days, has a geek in the shadows to thank. TV? Geeks did it. Telephones? Geeks did that too. Rugby? Okay… geeks avoid that one like the plague… but do we REALLY rely on Rugby for survival anyway? Who controls the web, our electricity grids, our airports, banks, the technical side of just about EVERYTHING!? The oppressed, under-appreciated geeks. That’s who. And that is the scariest bit of news you’re likely to hear this week! (Unless you live in America, or plan on watching the news this week)

But Why?! I don’t get it?! What is there to be afraid of.

Let me put it the geeky, scientific way.

Geeks + constant oppression = Continued global prosperity.
Geeks + Awareness of their own power + Popular culture making geeks cool = Comic book style super villainy of frightening proportion!

I fear the vengeance of the geeks. and so should you. A Geek strike would WIPE US OUT!

Nerds are starting to stand up and getting noticed! Alfred Nobel (Nerd that devised Dynamite) even started a glamorous awards show to honour them. Hollywood is even pushing the cool nerd culture on us, shows like Big Bang Theory and Chuck are making it trendy to be a Nerd. Nerds are coming out of the shadows and into the limelight, and we must stop them!

Don’t let the Geeks think they are cool or clever! EVER! Especially if you’re a jock or bully. You’ll be the first to go.

So stop being nice to Geeks. Stop watching Big Bang theory and thinking it’s cool. Stop treating us geeks so well! It could be the downfall of us all! Just as we need people to flip our burgers, we need people to run our servers. Just don’t ever let either of them know, they’re capable of far, FAR more.

Follow Nick’s own blog here.

Tweets streaming in from attendees have both been entertaining and embarrassing.  Not only did she [allegedly] give out a sales pitch, but did a stint on self promoting, discussed her paint range and then tried to push glittered ham onto her audience.  After talking about all of her five houses.

“Arrogant” seems to be the most common opinion on dear old MS.  But the question I’d like to pose is, how arrogant are we?  To walk out mid-speech from an iconic personality who traveled far to get here and is addressing people of different culture – how arrogant are we to sit in the audience and mock her, for the rest of the room (see here a pic of the audience watching the live twitter stream on big screen) but also the world to see.

It’s one thing to criticize, folks, but it’s another to show our ill manners.

Is this treatment of Martha deserved, or not?  I put it to you, the readers.  Let’s discuss this.

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1)    Receive the “Nerdies request” on Pocit

2)    Go to www.pocit.mobi to download Pocit and register

3)    Open the application and select to pay the “Nerdies” payment request

4)    Either pay from your credit card, or add your bank account details to pay immediately

5)    Call Pocit call centre on 08600 76248 for help

Simple huh?

There was one time many years ago when I was into things like rock climbing and kayaking. In fact, I spent the better part of a year back in 2003 as an outdoor education tutor at a school camp destination. I remember fondly running up the highest peaks in the Lake District for fun on Saturday mornings. Those were the days – the days when I could see my own little man and I could still run to the toilet instead of a quick shuffle.

But some things about being a geek I would never trade for a top-down view of the wedding tackle.

There’s the internet.

Since the days of 9600 BAUD fax modems to the monstrous 56K dial up connections, I’ve been interested not only in searching for “free porn”, but how the whole thing works. Who was the guy on the other side of the line going “weeeeeeeeee chhhrrrgghhhhhhhh” so that I can see the fruits Cindy Crawford has to offer. Now, as I type this on Google Docs down a 4mb ADSL connection, which can stream Miss Crawford in HD glory, I can understand exactly how it all works, and I still love it to bits.

Then there’s technology.

You’ll find it everywhere, and I couldn’t live without it. From the little thing in my car that tells my fuel injectors how often to shoot petrol into my engine, to the multi-million dollar satellites the beam all sorts of shit down to earth for us. I love everything about it. I love being able to program appliances with the deftness of a 12 year old and trying to keep up with it all like the women at the country club on Wisteria Lane.

But my absolute favourite thing about technology is how we are all so connected.

I can write something on a keyboard and not more than 2 seconds later it can pop up on my cousin’s screen in the middle of nowhere Australia. In fact, 50 years ago more people would have thought it likely that they’d arrive home to find Haley’s comet in their lounge reading the paper than they could talking real time to people thousands of kilometres away while seeing their smiling faces holding up ghastly looking babies for you to make cooing noises about.

Just by picking up my cell phone I can see where I am in a matter of seconds to an accuracy of 20metres, and get a map or satellite image of the area almost instantly. That’s amazing!

I can fit 5000 LPs onto a device no bigger than a R5 coin and carry it around with me in my pocket.

I could go on but I’m sure you get the idea by now. We underestimate the genius of the technology and geekiness that surrounds us on a daily basis. Just 50 years ago, computers had all the compactness of a mountain, and the style of David Bowie. But today, we have devices hundreds of times more powerful smaller than your thumbnail.

Being a geek is always evolving and always cutting-edge and right now I’ve never been more excited about it.

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