Too Many Options

Am I the only one that is trying to figure out when it is best to tweet, buzz, status, blog, text, forward, share, or digg something? There are a lot of good choices, but it is almost getting to the point of work to try and figure out what medium I will use to pass along info. I think I'm hoping for one app to rule them all. Also, has anybody figured out a good use for Wave?

Guess who showed up at my house?

I found this a little while ago at my parents' house. My nephew was checking out the old toys, so I started digging through some of it. This is one of the best finds . . .

He still looks pretty tough.

More Iron Man News

I am probably way behind the geek curve here, but I just read that Iron Man has passed the test and the sequel is already under way. Also mentioned in the article are Thor and Captain America movies. Link to article.

Iron Man

Saturday night I went to see Iron Man and was not disappointed. I haven't followed the comics too much, so I'm not sure how true they are to them, but I thought the movie was awesome. The casting was very good, the effects were sharp, and I liked the story. Kris Tina liked it too even though she had NO desire to see it before we went. Thanks to Adam, we were able to convince the ladies to go - nice work.

I think Marvel is doing a great job of bringing to life its universe. Iron Man isn't exactly a household name like Batman or Spiderman, yet the movie pulled in about $100 million this weekend. Nice work Marvel. Let the summer movies begin - so far it's looking good. I fully recommend this movie.

Another good comic

Saw this one in the Sunday comics (click on the image to see a bigger version). Pretty funny. I just like the idea of the civil war re-enactment being crashed by Trekkies.

Origins of My Geekiness

More on how I'm a bit of a geek. I have been meaning to post something about this since last week: Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, passed away recently and While my friends and I never took to running around the Provo park with foam swords yelling "lightning bolt!", we did get into rolling dice and pretending we were fantastical people - if only on paper. As I recall, we never really got too far beyond setting up our character sheets ("sweet - a 16 on dexterity!"), buying our weapons and supplies, and playing the beginning D&D adventure, but it did have a big influence on me. I owned a set of green D&D dice for most of my life - just in the off chance that I would need to roll a saving throw from a spell or turn the undead.

So when I heard that Mr. Gygax passed away, it took me back to the days when I would pore through all the handbooks, monster manuals, and guides, trying to figure out how many experience points it would take till I got to the cool spells for my elf/ranger, what beast I might encounter, and how in the world could I incorporate a some cool weapon into my repertoire. I also just read this article by Adam Rogers who is an editor for Wired magazine (You'll have to read it to get the full effect, and there is a wicked-awesome flow-chart they put together to accompany the story). He posits that for many people D&D was the "gateway drug" for people's fascination with fantasy, science fiction and even computers. The doorway to geekdom, if you will.

I think Mr. Rogers is of a slightly older generation than I am, but it's an interesting idea. I don't know that to me it was the beginning point - I was already into Star Wars, fantasy novels (EarthSea trilogy anybody?) and Lord of the Rings type stuff. But D&D was cool in that you could take control of the characters and have more of a choose-your-own-adventure type of experience. The problem is that we never really got too far beyond the setting up. I think that part of the reason was that we had this sense that our new Nintendos would be doing all of the prep work and Dungeon Mastering for us which was the hard part anyway. Zelda may have started it off for us, but games now are way beyond what I ever hoped for in D&D. I do like a good RPG. Still, there was something simple and fun about rolling dice to see about an outcome.

I may not have been a big gamer, but I will always be glad that Jeremy Wilkins set up our first real game during recess in 6th grade. My fantasy world view definitely expanded, and I realized there was more to life than outdoor sports activities. I started to read beyond the usual young fiction into the more geeky stuff like Dragonlance. You should check out the article - it goes a long way to explain the significance of D&D to many. Plus it gave us that awesome D&D cartoon that would run on Saturday mornings. How can you beat that? Long live the geek.

New Star Wars Movie Trailer

I'm pretty excited about this . . .

Better Presentations

I found this tutorial on how to create better presentations. Mostly, it is for my own benefit:

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