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The town I’m from has two historical distinctions. It is the birthplace of Nauga-hyde (my dad used to say that if you went by the factories at night, you could hear the cries of the little baby Naugas; I was young and stupid and believed him) and it is the place where Charles Goodyear first [...]

Fifth grade, my dad came home with a treasure-trove. He had  somehow gotten to be friends with a guy who was making a book-based-air-combat game (this is what people in search of gaming did before there was a computer in every home, folks) involving complex rules and charts. He had already designed a series of [...]

That was his name and job description. They used to play the late 60s cartoons in the late 70s on channel 5, WNEW, in the afternoon. This and the Spider-Man one, with the theme song everyone knows. (Does whatever a spider can!) While Spider-Man offered more heroic action, this was always the cooler show. It [...]

A screencap of my Gmail. Friendster is still out there, alone and friend(ster)less, but still hanging on. That’s almost kind of charming. Good for you, Friendster. For those of you who aren’t aware, Friendster is to Facebook as the Atari 2600 is to the X-Box360/Playstation3. It was the first friend-based networking site of any note, [...]

Big Jim and his P.A.C.K. used to piss me off. These big, ugly, uninviting dudes who looked like prison-rapists would invade my comic-book reading experience as a kid with their gross full-page ad. Nothing looked fun about this. It was like the dicky toy-executive guy from BIG who didn’t understand what kids actually liked from [...]

Sorta.  See, there’s a mechanism by which most cells in the body cycle their proteins that’s not present in the way brain cells work. The brain cells use a heretofore unknown mechanism. Turns out a specialized enzyme specific to this function is present in brain cells and keeps them vital and functioning over long periods of [...]

Computers and automation make everything easier. Like stalking! Do you use Facebook Places, Foursquare and Twitter? Do you have a vaugely tech-savvy obsessive ex-boyfriend/girlfriend or sworn enemy dedicated to your destruction? If you have answered “yes!” to both questions, you should hope that they don’t become aware of a free Geolocation Information aggregator with the [...]

Holy Awesome-Internet-thing, Batman! Google’s informal corporate motto (that, being a business, it doesn’t always quite live up to) is Don’t Be Evil. They try to do and fund things that they don’t have to that are cool and awesome, if not necessarily immediately able to be monetized. One of these things is the scanning and indexing [...]

I was a devoted Channel 5 WNEW watcher as a little kid. I remember when I was in the hospital, age 3, with a ruptured appendix that led to a host of complications, having them wheel over a TV to my bed and enduring the pain of sitting up, just for a chance to catch [...]

I do not follow baseball, so I only know Jose Canseco as the twitchy, hulking  behemoth from Celebrity Apprentice.  And now, I know him as a real life supervillain, in the mold of the Fantastic Four’s arch-nemesis, Dr. Victor Von Doom. From Dr. Doom’s Wikipedia page: Doom’s calculating and strategic nature leads him to use [...]

  Nerd. It is a term that has been diluted by inappropriate self-declaration. The most non-nerdy people will gleefully proclaim, “Oh, I’m such a nerd!” if they, say, can give you a recap on the series arc of LOST or if they used to watch Buffy The Vampire-Slayer for a season back in the 90s. [...]