Ausiello's thoughts on Linderrman

Ausiello thinks that Malcolm McDowell will be Linderman on Heroes. I'd be shocked if it wasn't either Eric Roberts or Malcolm McDowell -- and I've seen people guess at both. Of course, at this point almost any new male actor old enough to be Linderman would have that sort of rumour.

But in any case, Heroes continues to have some really, really good casting.

More Heroes Casting

I'm interested to see that Malcom McDowell has also been cast on Heroes. I've been wondering about the casting of Linderman, and I was wondering if it was Eric Roberts. And that's what Kristin from E thinks. But it could be Malcolm McDowell's character as well.
I'll be very interested to see where things go over the next few weeks.

Franken For Senate?

I figure that if Al Franken is giving up his talk radio gig he's going to go for the US Senate here in Minnesota. He wouldn't be the strangest possible candidate for state wide office -- after all, we did elect an ex-wrestler and actor as Governor long before California brought in Arnold.

I figure it'll make for a very interesting campaign, at least. I saw Al Franken do a book reading a little over a year ago and I noticed then that despite his jokes, he was much more like someone who was looking at politics than as a comedian.

Pictures from space

I'm always amazed by the pictures from space that we're getting these days. They are even more fantastic than any sort of artistic image that we could think up.

Eric Roberts' heroes character is named

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Eric Roberts's Heroes character is called Thompson. So maybe he's not Linderman, or there's some press deception going on (which is always possible). It'll be interesting to see where it goes. (I still think we'll see Linderman before the end of the season.)

Eric Roberts on Heroes

I'm amused that following Christopher Eccleston to Heroes is the last actor to play the Master on Television: Eric Roberts.

I wonder -- is Eric Roberts going to play the mysterious Mr. Linderman? Of course, I wondered when the first Christopher Eccleston rumors were running around if that was a character he was playing. (Or Sylar, for that matter.)

Given some of Eccleston's comments in this interview I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that the role Eric Roberts is taking on is one that they had discussions with Eccleston about as well.

And I have a hunch that it'll be Linderman. Heroes appears to be a show that doesn't leave a lot of strongly hinted mysteries around for too long. And discovering more about Linderman -- who certainly seems to have connections with pretty much every character -- definitely looks like it is on the agenda.

Primatech Paper Company

If you're a hero in search of a paper company, Primatech Paper Company might be a place to check out...

It's interesting to see how more and more genre television shows are adding that additional piece of detail. I'm curious to find out what the invitation code is...

And it was good to see Christopher Eccleston show up on Heroes tonight as well -- obviously his appearance is something that I've been looking forward to since it was first rumored.

Sometimes you lose interest in a television series when it's off the air for a number of weeks -- but if anything, I'm more excited by Heroes now than I was when the last episodes ended.

Geni - Everyone's Related

Geni looks like it's a little bit different on the social networking front -- it looks like you can build your own family tree instead of connecting friends or co-workers.

The UI is pretty solid on it as far as I can tell as well.

you'll never die:

you'll never die is a web comic by a fellow Minnesotan that looks quite good and interesting so far. I'm excited by the idea of seeing the internet as a platform for comics, especially in forms that might be more difficult to discover in a comic store environment, and this is a good example of that.

Robert Anton Wilson

One of the Secret Required Works of any sort of geek subculture is Robert Anton Wilson's ILLUMINATUS Trilogy. It was one of those books that you read in college even though it isn't on any required book list. There's little that surprised me about something like The DaVinci Code, because the work was parodied decades earlier in RAW's work. The Church of the Spaghetti Monster and any other "fake" religion follows in the footsteps of Discordianism. If you're looking at the Lost Numbers, it is no surprise that 23 was a part of the sequence.

When I visited Emperor Norton's grave in San Francisco last year, it was because of learning about that historical character through RAW's writings. And naming the new dwarf planet Eris is practically a tribute.

He'll show up when you least expect him. And I don't expect that'll stop now.

[Boing Boing Obituary]

Building a SF Convention IT Infrastructure

I've worked on CONvergence for nearly a decade now, and one of the things that I'm now looking at is the information technology needs for a science fiction convention (and also for the related nonprofit)

Unsurprisingly, the SF community is filled with IT professionals -- it is perhaps the most common job category. But then you also have a wide variety of skill sets -- people that are partisans about one sort of technology or another.

You have several departments in a typical convention that might have a need for some sort of data storage need -- convention and organization membership is the first, but then you also have your programming and other event schedules, your art show, and your dealers' room.

You have two environments as well -- you have the environment of 360 or so days a year, where the convention staff is geographically diverse, and unlike a business environment, there's no way to really dictate what sort of operating system people may use. The other 3 or 4 days you are all at the same location -- but it's an environment that you set up there, and in some situations may have need to get at that data at all hours.

One of the other challenges is that your available pool of skills is limited to what you can have for free -- but that means that you don't really want to make something that requires very specialized skills. You need something that just about anyone with IT skills can pick up.

Technology really helps the modern convention -- I can't imagine how this would have been done in the era before e-mail. But many of the pieces in place right now are frequently of the personal computer era; using Microsoft Office applications like Excel and Access. To go buzzword happy -- and as such I deserve serious abuse -- what is the Web 2.0 convention IT architecture for a Science Fiction convention?

Right now I mainly have questions, and don't yet have answers.

The Joys of an Ice Cream Maker

One of the things we picked up this holiday season was a Cuisinart Ice Cream Maker, and I'm an immediate fan. My childhood memories of ice cream makers were the old manual hand-cranked kind; and while they're fond memories, it took FOREVER to make ice cream. And it was a lot of work, and messy as it was turning a crank, with ice and salt everywhere. I suppose that meant you earned the calories that would be in any result, but not something that you could really do with any regularity.

But this machine is astonishingly fast -- it's quick enough that you can start the machine running after dinner, and it'll be ready in a half hour or so -- just long enough so you've digested your main meal, and are ready for a dessert. And it is portable enough that you can bring it to a party, and it's not terribly expensive -- especially when you consider the price of your higher-quality ice cream.

Google Reader Trends

I was interested in seeing that Google has added some trends to google reader.

The most interesting piece for me was to see what feeds I added to my shared list the most.

The top ten over the last 30 days are:

1. Lifehacker
2. Robert Scoble's Shared List
3. Outpost Gallifrey
4. Boing Boing
5. Sci Fi Wire
6. Digital Spy
7. Nate's Shared List
8. Tech Crunch
9. BBC Entertainment News
10. Digg

What I found was the most interesting is that two of the items on my list are other people's shared lists. And they're the only two shared lists that I have on my subscriptions.

And as a reward to Lifehacker, I just received their book summarizing some of their best tips and tricks.

The Best Response

There's been more than a share of silly controversy about my soon-to-be Representative Keith Ellison's plan to use the Koran as part of his personal swearing-in ceremony. And he found a great copy to use. Thomas Jefferson's.

Totally classy.

Battle of the Album Covers

This is one of the more fascinating videos I've seen on You Tube in a while...