In the last week I’ve watched the entire first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender and initially this post was going to be about why you should watch it (which I’ll cover in a future post). Strange enough though, thinking about this new show (for me at least it was new) has given me a major eye-opener about myself: I had totally lost faith in the creation of good great cartoons.

Looking back, I realized that I hadn’t seen a single animated tv show since high school (six years ago), casually dismissing all series without even trying them. During that time I did consider myself an animation lover, but just believed that nothing that was produced now could ever reach the standards of previous shows. I did keep watching animated films, but subconsciously just disregarded new animated tv series. I’m really only fully realizing that now and I’m still in shock by it; how could I not watch potentially addictive material?

I guess I do understand where this in part comes from. In the years before I stopped watching, you couldn’t exactly say that the quality of the then-new shows were any good. On the other hand, it could also have been that only bad ones were being shown on Dutch television (if that was the case, why the hell didn’t they broadcast any good stuff?). Or alternatively, that my standards were just way too high. No matter the reason, somewhere along the way I started believing that all new cartoons were bad and that from that moment on only bad cartoons would be created.

What was I thinking?! How could I ever be so halfwitted to even think there would never be a good animated tv show ever again? I’m still amazed, baffled, flabbergasted that my mind (no, scrap that, I shouldn’t be giving my mind the blame) that I could ever believe such a thing. And yet, it is true. I’ve lived under this weird illogical delusion. Me, someone that prizes herself for being a logical person. It’s as if never reading another book in your life again, just because you read a couple of bad books, even though you read hundreds of great books before that. It’s a fallacy, an utterly faulty reasoning, a down-to-the-core wrong deduction.

I’m still in shock. I just can’t believe it. It’s not about Avatar. It’s not about not watching cartoons. It’s about realizing that there’s this weird little part of my mind that’s been influencing my choices in life (even though it’s something as simple as tv-watching) based on a reason that is so out of sync with the rest of me. It just feels so very, very weird.

Maybe I’m overreacting, but then I’m writing this in the wake of my illumination. And very late at night, after 2 days of sleep deprivation. Yeah, not the perfect time to blog, I know. But I know that for me this has just been a revelation and my mind it still trying to cope with it. Hey, blogging is supposed to be therapeutic, right?

Episode 49: “We’re not in bloody Cardiff anymore, we’re in London”

What do you get when combine a group of sleep-deprived geeks, lots of sugar and the anticipation of the series finale of Torchwood? This video:

To find out more about this video, check out the Torchwood Swede Blog.

Interesting links for March 31st through April 3rd:

• Cool Hunting: Charles Cumming: The 21 Steps – Short interview with Charles Cumming, who wrote the first episode in the We Tell Stories project.
• Asylum – Jeremy Harris Photography – Creepy photos from an abandoned asylum. Just looks plain spooky.
• And Great Lyrics Quiz Rock Roll The by Matthew Baldwin – Can you guess which songs these are? They’ve taken the complete lyrics, sorted the words alphabetically and taken all the doubles out. Pretty difficult!
• Interview: Jane Espenson Talks About Writing for Firefly and Battlestar – Remember the Buffy Musical? The parking ticket song? That woman was Jane Espenson, one of the writer on Buffy, Firefly and now BSG. Short little interview about the differences between Firefly and BSG.
• Pasta Shape Identification Quiz – Do you know your pasta shapes? I thought I did, but I only got half of them right (12 out of 24).

I mentioned earlier that I always have problems with finding shoes, because one foot is larger (or is it longer?) than the other. At the time I discovered that Nike has a cool service, which let’s you customize your shoes (and other products): Nike iD. The idea is that you can specify the colors of your shoes yourself and with some designs this gives you a lot of choice. What is great though is that with some designs you can even specify different shoe sizes for each foot: perfect!

For woman they’ve got 33 different designs which you can choose from, for men 67 different types. This also includes though multiple type of football shoes and basketball shoes for the men, while woman for instance only have one choice of football shoe. I’m not complaining though, I don’t like football.

The coolest part of the customization choices is that you can put your iD on them. For the shoes, this means you can let them stitch your name or a short phrase on the tongues of the shoes (or if you’re boring something like “Left” and “Right” or “Sinister” and “Dexter”). Beside the shoes, you can also customize bags and watches. Guys can also customize clothing, but they only have a couple of tight running T-shirts. I would like to see some “normal” girly sport clothes that I can customize myself, but I guess we’ll have to wait for that.

Next to the regular NikeID shoes, you can also get Nike+ID. These are shoes that have a secret compartment in the left sole, where you can place the Nike+ iPod sensor. While working out, the sensor sends all types of information to your iPod. I got a pair of Air Zoom Moira+ iD for my birthday, together with the iPod sensor. I had gone to the Nike Store at Oxford Circus (London), where they have a special section for Nike iD orders. The guys there are quite helpful and you can try out and see the different designs and colors they have. What I found a bit weird though was that they didn’t have the model I wanted in my size to try out.

I’ve got sizes 5.5 and 6, which isn’t too small, I think. I had to fit on shoes from another model to try and guess my size. I ordered them, hoping that I guessed right. I was told though that if after receiving them they didn’t fit or even if I didn’t like the colors, I could get my money back or order them again in another design and size. It took about a month to actually create and ship the shoes to the Nike store and I got a nice email telling me when they were ready. I picked them up without too much hassle. What I adore about these shoes, is that I’ve actually got Miss Geeky on them:

After running with these a couple of weeks, I have to say I love how comfortable they are. I might even wear them besides my running, although they might be a bit too shiny for that. I haven’t mastered the iPod sensor yet (it doesn’t do completely what I want), but more about that another time. If you are looking for new running shoes, these are pretty good, but they might be a bit expensive for some (80 pounds). Add the iPod sensor to that and that’s quite an investment into some sports gear. For me, it was absolutely worth it and if you’re willing to put a bit of money into it, this is by far the way to go.

Episode 48: “In Russia, Poland, Mongolia and other eastern European countries”

This is one of those things that you just don’t realise are done in different ways in different countries. It’s interesting to see how many different ways there are to count cash:

So how do you count your cash?

Yesterday was a very busy news day. Lots of new stuff coming out, special projects being announced, you’d think it was some special day, right? Anyhow here’s a couple of the most interesting news items from yesterday.

Virgle
Richard Branson announced yesterday a joint venture between the Virgin Group and Google: Virgle. Their goal is pretty straightforward: establishing a permanent settlement on Mars. Better yet though, the whole project will be open source. If you are bent on becoming a Virgle Pioneer yourself, you can even apply for it here. Find out more at Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes.

Moo’s MightyCard
We all love our little Moo MiniCards, but sometimes you just need something bigger. Something that will really impress you business clients. Something that doesn’t fit in your pocket. Moo has come up with the perfect solution: the MightyCard. They come in batches of 50 and just like the MiniCards you can get a different image on each of them. I can’t wait to see what types of holders they’ll design for these!

PayPerTweet
There are an increasing number of Twitterers with tens of thousands of followers, but no way to monetize their followership. Enter: PayPerTweet. Get paid for Twittering about web sites, products, services and companies. And earn extra cash by “ReTweeting”: users help messages go viral by forwarding the paid Twitters of others.

Flying Penguins
Camera crews for a documentary called “Miracles of Evolution” discovered a colony of Adélie penguins and were astonished when the colony suddenly took to the skies. The film maker, Prof. Alid Loyas, said: “We could hardly believe our eyes. It was amazing. It’s the perfect example of Darwin’s theory of evolution working in release.” Take a look at the flying penguins yourself:

Legend of Zelda: The Movie
I have no idea how I could have missed details on this upcoming movie! This looks so awesome; I just know this movie is going to blow everybody’s mind away. So far it looks like Link and Zelda have been perfectly cast, but I’ll have to see the complete movie to fully judge this. Watch the trailer at IGN.

Gmail Custom Time
In more Google news, Gmail revealed Custom Time, where you can set a custom time when you send an email. This way you can send emails to the past with those emails appearing in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. It uses an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality. Be careful how you use these though: every person is only allowed to use 10 pre-dated emails per year. So make sure you use them wisely.

gDay
Google has been busy! Google Australia announced their new search feature gDay, allowing users to search the web pages published tomorrow. The app uses MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation) to construct elements of the future. “Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.” How handy is that??

Conversational Ads
Again another Google announcement, this time for Adsense for conversations. With a few simple steps, you can display ads that are relevant to the topics you are discussing. Even cooler: anyone talking to you, can immediately take advantage of the product or service advertised. Just hit the ad with your hand and thanks to the new Teleportation Technology, you’ll be transported to the place where the service is offered.

New ThinkGeek Products
ThinkGeek introduced so many cool new products, I can’t even begin to describe them all. For starters, every geek should have the Betamax to HD-DVD Converter. It plays and records both Super and regular Betamax, uses electricity and even has a manual!

I always love a puzzle and I always lock my door, so the Defendius Labyrinth Security Lock perfectly combines this.

Caffeinated cereal! Brilliant idea! Each serving of Spazztroids cereal will pump your body with vitamins and nutrients and a 180mg dose of caffeine.

There’s also this T-Shirt that everybody is geeking out about: the Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt. It features a speaker on the front and provides background music and sound effects at your command. I wouldn’t want one of these though; my mind already provides a soundtrack and I think the two would clash with each other.

To check out more of their new products, just have a look at their website.

BMW Canine Repellent Alloy Protection
This is a great announcement for car lovers: BMW has designed a system to stop dogs fouling new BMW cars. The C.R.A.P. system harnesses energy, that would have been lost during engine over-run and braking, as Rim Impulse Power (R.I.P.). Whenever a dog tries to relieve itself against an equipped BMW, a small electric shock is administered. Dr Hans Zoff, Head of Automotive Security, says: “Beauty through engineering perfection – our philosophy in a wheel nut.”

World of Warcraft: The Molten Core
Wow, WoW is returning to console gaming! The Molten Core will allow players to experience the world of the World of Warcraft in a new format with new challenges and new rewards. It will be initially available for the Atari 2600 platform, but additional console systems will be revealed in the future. Check out the trailer, it looks super cool!

iPhone Can Connect To Everything
As a final news item, I wanted to highlight this blog post from Matt Cutts. He discovered his iPhone could connect to anything! It could even open doors:

Ever since Cristiano got his Crumpler bag (Warm Shower) a couple of months ago, I’ve wanted one of these handy bags for myself. Besides normal messenger bags, Crumpler has a great line of cleverly designed laptop bags. Perfect for a geeky girl with a lot of gadgets, right? Well, at that time almost all the designs were more focused on guys. I tried a couple of them out, but none of them ever really felt right.

Now though, Crumpler has released a couple of bags, clearly aimed for the geeky girls out there. The Cheesy Chick is a laptop bag, perfectly sized for a 13″ laptop with a padded laptop compartment and a separate removable laptop sleeve. It comes in four different colours: roadkill red, espresso, seeded mustard and dull black.

The Cheesytina is of a similiar design, but has space for a 15″ laptop. The pouch on the front is also bigger, but for the rest the bag is pretty much the same as the Cheesy Chick (what’s up with the Cheese names by the way? Girls like cheese?). It also comes in four different colours: black, oatmeal, washed dark grey and bordeaux red. If you’ve got a laptop bigger than 13″, this is the way to go.

Another 13″ laptop bag is the Fuzzy Runway. Just like the Cheesy Chick, it’s got a removable laptop pouch. The main compartment though has a zipper closing and there’s a zipped pocket on the front. This bas also comes in four colours: oatmeal, black olive, dirty brown and black.

I fell in love with these bags the first time I saw them and they’re exactly what I want. With each of them, even when your laptop is in it, there’s still enough space for all your gadgets and other girly stuff. And they’re not too bulky to lug around with you. Besides that, if you don’t want to carry your laptop with you, the laptop sleeve can be removed and you’ve got more space for other stuff. Handy, right?

Although it’s not a laptop bag, another Crumpler I like is the Boiler. It’s a small glamma bag, as Crumpler likes to call it, perfect for your basic carry alongs and gadgets. Besides the larger compartment in the middle, it’s got two zipped pockets on the sides. The Boiler comes in five colours: black olive, dark olive, silver, red and dark purple.

There are more bags on the Crumpler site, but these ones are my favourites. I’m still trying to decide whether I should get the Cheesy Chick or the Fuzzy Runway; they both look great and meet all my requirements, although I find the colours of the Cheesy Chick better.

By the way, there’s finally a Crumpler Store in central London (in New Oxford Street). It’s smaller than I expected, but then you don’t really need that much space to showcase those bags, do you? If you want to see some real life Crumplers, it’s definitely worth checking out. For buying these bags though, you’re better off at Amazon or other online shops; most of the time you can get them a whole lot cheaper.

I linked to this project about a week ago, but We Tell Stories is interesting enough to dedicate a complete post to it. The idea of We Tell Stories is to tell Six Stories by Six Authors in Six Weeks inspired by Six Classics, with each story using a unique presentation form. It’s created by Six to Start in partnership with Penguin Books and at the end of the six weeks there will be a contest to win 1300 (!!) Penguin Classics.

The first story The 21 Steps came out two weeks ago and is written by Charles Cumming. It’s inspired by The 39 Steps, but you haven’t had to read that to understand this story. The story is told through Google Maps, showing the places the character goes to and giving the reader the ability to follow his journey.

The second story came out this week and is called Slice. It’s written by Toby Litt and is inspired by The Haunted Dolls’ House. It’s about a girl named Lisa, nicknamed Slice, who had moved to London with her parents to separate her from bad influences. Her story is told through her blog, her parents blog and their Twitter feeds (Slice and her parents).

The next four stories will each be coming out in the next four weeks and I’m curious to see what type of form these will be in. So far it’s been interesting to see these different type of methods of storytelling and it gives the stories a whole other perspective.

Besides the six features stories though, there is a cleverly hidden seventh story with more ARG elements, inspired (of course) by Alice in Wonderland. The first clue that there was a seventh story is through this blurb when you sign up for the Google Group:

Over six weeks, six authors will write six stories designed for the internet, from Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid to prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller authors Nicci French.

The six authors featured on the We Tell Stories site are: Charles Cumming, Toby Litt, Kevin Brooks, Nicci French, Matt Mason and Mohsin Hamid. So what story was Naomi Alderman working on? It’s also interesting to know that Alderman was the lead writer for Perplex City, a previous ARG the founders of Six to Start were involved in.

If you want to catch up on the seventh story, check out this forum. A lot has happened already, but I don’t think it’s too late to join all the fun. I know I’m going to try and figure it out! Let me know if you’re playing too; it’s always good to join forces.

Interesting links for March 29th:

• Six Earth Cities That Will Provide Blueprints for Martian Settlers [Colonizing Mars] – Yes, we need to study these cities very closely. The experience we gain while building these cities, will help us so so much when we colonize Mars.
• Top 10 April Fools’ Pranks for Nerds – A couple of these pranks are funny, but I can’t help but wonder is this all they could come up with? What are nerdiest pranks you’ve pulled off?
• 59 Of The Coolest Toilet Signs Around The World – Some of these I had seen before, but there are a couple of cool designed ones between them.

I’m doing this the wrong way around, aren’t I? First blogging about an event from yesterday and then about an event from two days before that. Heck, if I have time, I might even blog about Barcamp Brighton 2, even though that’s been already two weeks ago.

Anyhow, last Tuesday I made my way to the 18th Girl Geek Dinner, this time held at The Knights Templar. The main theme was SEO (search engine optimisation) with all speakers supposedly talking on this subject. Juddith “deCabbit” Lewis held a great talk explaining the basics of SEO. It was actually an hour long presentation she uses for her clients, cut down to only 15 minutes. I would have liked to hear the full talk, cause that would have been so much more interesting than the stuff that came after that.

The second talk was from Sheila Farrell about Semantic Markup and Organic SEO. I don’t want to be too harsh, but seriously all I remember from this talk was “tables are bad, tables are bad, it’s geeky to use tables (??), but tables are bad”. The third presenter was McVitte, the CEO of Texperts, talking about the mobile search perspective. Texperts is a mobile search SMS service that allows users to text a question to a (human) team of experts who text the answer back. The talk was okay, but wasn’t as technical as I was hoping it would be.

The food was sponsored by Latitude and as sponsors they were allowed to give a small 5 minute business talk. I have to applaud them though for foregoing the marketing pitch and just wishing us a good time. We need more sponsors like that! There was more than enough food (mainly fried finger food) and by the end most platters weren’t even finished. The wine on the other hand went very quickly, although most people only had one glass. I shouldn’t complain; it’s better than having to pay yourself.

The main problem with this event was the venue. While The Knights Templar is a great pub, it’s not quite suitable to hold an event like this. We were in two small upstairs rooms, but upstairs meant half a level higher in a sort of balcony overlooking the rest of bar with all the hassle and noise reaching us. Yeah, that’s not that great when you have an event with speakers.

Next to that, the two rooms were connected with a small dark doorway and the presenters were forced to stand somewhere in the middle, so that people in both rooms could kind of see them talk (actually from where I was sitting I didn’t see anything). The rooms were supposed to fit 50 people, which might have been able if everyone was standing and all the tables were moved aside. As it was though (with everyone sitting at the tables) there wasn’t that much space at all; I barely left my seat only because there wasn’t any room to maneuver around.

It wasn’t the best Girl Geek Dinner I’ve been to, but as usual it was great fun meeting up with some old friends and some new friends. The next Girl Geek event is going to be a joint Geek Dinner and Girl Geek Dinner event with a surprise mystery speaker on April 26th [Upcoming]. Before that though is another Geek Dinner event on April 7th with David Terrar with a talk about creativity and the current education system [Upcoming]. So set the dates in your calendars, people, and I’ll see you there next time!