Geek Issues: Star Wars, The Holy Trinity

I want to talk about the fundamental issues for geeks, at least for geeks who include# science fiction and fantasy. Most of us have some intense feelings about Star Wars, Doctor Who, and Star Trek. In my neck of the woods, discussions about Star Wars have a tendency to turn ugly. I saw this article on CNET recently about a documentary about Lucas work on the Star Wars series, The People vs. George Lucas. You can see the film's website here and the first teaser trailer here on Youtube.

I saw Star Wars the year it was released with my parents. I was two or three years old. It changed my life forever. It was one of the last things I remember that we did as a family. My parents separated the next year and eventually divorced. This film was a part of my story well before I was rolling d20s or reading Asimov. I saw it many times that year, and it was my constant companion throughout my childhood.

I saw The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as they were released in the theater. Like Star Wars IV A New Hope, I saw these films over and over. They just never got old. I had the actions figures, the X-Wing, a Tie Fighter, the Milenium Falcon and the Death Star play set. I even had the action figure case shaped like Darth Vader's head, which was probably a bad idea. Darth Vader gave me nightmares. Later I ran campaigns in the Star Wars role playing game that West End Games published. I still have the oversized Star Wars comic book that I got not long after seeing the movie.

I don't think George Lucas "raped" my childhood. Far from it. I owe Mr. Lucas a great debt and thank him for the things he created that changed my life. In my next post I want to compare the original trilogy and the prequels. I hope you'll join me.

Social Bookmarks and You

One of the things I'm looking at this term is how to make life easier for students. I've known about social bookmarking services like delicious.com, digg and stumbleupon for a while now but I'd never really taken the time to investigate them. Probably because I didn't have a need. I usually have at the very least my Macbook available to me when I'm on the road, but a few times this term I've been stuck without it and had all my very important (ha!) research on my browser here at home.

I started out using XMarks, which has elements on the client (your browser) and their server. I like the fact that they aren't married to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Apple. Unfortunately, I'm not fond of their UI, it feels cumbersome and difficult to use. When you're using their extension, it is a direct one-to-one sync - meaning that if you delete a bookmark on their server, it will also be deleted in your browser. It is still a beta product, that is still in testing, so perhaps it will improve in the future.

Currently, I'm using delicious.com as my go to social bookmarking site. It's uncomplicated and easy to set up hierarchies of files. It also seems to have a large user base, which is handy in a social service. It's currently my go to and you can see my links here. I have a lot of things for my Comp 2 class, and I'm hoping to put up some of the links we've been using in the perl scripting class as well.

I'll continue to update the blog as I look into other services, and as always I'm open to suggestions in comments.