Great Moments in Nerdery

Junkytown

Why yes, it’s a version of “Funkytown” played on old computer parts from the 80s.

Pancakes just got about 83% better

From Jim’s Pancakes comes the AT-AT Pancake.

Happy Programmers’ Day

Today is Programmers’ Day. How September 13th (and September 12th during leap years) was chosen to represent programmers is so nerdy, I’m still not entirely sure I understand it. What I do know is that this is probably the awesomest way to decide the day of a holiday ever. From Wikipedia:

The number 256 (2⁸) was chosen because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with an eight-bit byte—a value well known to programmers. Starting from zero, the 256th value represented by a sequential permutation of 8 bits is unsigned integer 255 or hexadecimal 0xff or binary 0b11111111. 256 is the highest power of two that is less than 365, the number of days in a common year.

Wondering what to get your favorite programmer? How abou this rad StarWars Moleskine notebook. All programmers like StarWars, right? That’s like a job requirement I think. Heck even non-StarWars lovers will dig the notebook.

Best Places to Work: Winner and Still Champion

Tomorrow’s Biz Journal contains today’s top Nerdery story: The Nerdery ranks #1 on the Best Places to Work list of medium-sized companies for the second year in a row. Yay, us (and please still buy a paper).

We’ve hastily stolen Nerdery front-end developer Frost Simula’s acceptance speech, lifted by permission earlier this summer from his personal blog.

Also well worth repeating is the late great Luke Bucklin’s famous “I told you so!” memo from when we topped last year’s list.

We take this cool-workplace thing pretty seriously. This is like winning the Super Bowl to us. Again. Somebody pinch me. More good-natured gloating to come.

P.S. We’re hiring.

It’s International Nerd Pride Day!

Every year it just sneaks up on me, probably because every day is Nerd Pride day at The Nerdery. I can’t believe it’s Nerd Pride Day already! Yes, this is the day to let your geek/nerd/freak flag fly in honor of the 34th Anniversary of the release of StarWars.

So how will you celebrate? Eat some Ramen? Give your glasses a good polishing? It’s also Towel Day so maybe you will celebrate by partaking in some Douglas Adams. If you’re of the book nerd bent you can check out this list of Ultimate Nerd Fiction on Amazon (though I have to say the omission of Microserfs or JPod by Douglas Coupland is an egregious oversight).

You like stats? Over at Nerd Approved there’s an interesting survey on geek(nerd)dom that includes this stat: “Putting high school stereotypes to rest, Modis’ survey found that nearly twice as many people would prefer to be called a geek (41%) rather than a jock (22%).” Nice.

While tooling around the Internet looking for other Nerd Pride Celebrations, I spotted The ten sexiest fictional nerds (you can find the 206 sexiest non-fictional nerds right here). If you like your nerds animated, I caught the 11 biggest nerd heroes to have appeared on The Simpsons.

Happy Nerd Pride Day! May you get to indulge in your favorite nerdy activity without any teasing whatsoever.

MacRecipes, nothing to do with Apples and everything to do with Angus

If you ever take a trip through The Periodic Table of Nerdery (and I highly recommend you do, because it’s funny and interesting) you will learn that many, many nerds look to Angus MacGyver as either a hero or favorite fictional nerd.

Now that you are armed with that knowledge, take a gander at the awesome that is MacRecipes. The website collects all the “recipes” MacGyver used to create the, er, inventions? I can’t think of a word for his creations, and danger-averting and/or crisis-avoiding mechanisms just seems awkward.

So yes, now, if you’re ever wondering how Mac stopped a sulfuric acid leak (chocolate bars), you’ve got a resource. However, there seems to be no recipe on how to create a majestic MacGyver mullet. My guess is it’s two 2 Salon Selectives Styling Mousse + 1 part Dippty Do, and just a touch of V05 hairspray for control and shine.

Today is Thursday and Friday comes afterwards

Okay Internet, have you feasted your eyes on this?

Rebecca Black’s Friday on Rock Band from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

That’s a few of our Nerds playing the infamous Rebecca Black song on Rock Band. Pretty fantastic, right? So how, you may wonder, did this happen?

Well, The Nerdery’s Ken Sykora was about a bottle in to a wine.woot delivery when the inspiration struck.

“My significant other isn’t always as privvy to the viral videos that we nerds take for granted,” Ken said. “So I was sharing with her the greatness (ironic greatness I guess) that is Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” For some reason she must have also been living under a rock because didn’t quite understand the concept of ‘Rick Rolling’.”

It was during this YouTube education session that in the perfect drunken state of mind that Ken made a connection between “Friday” (the song), Friday (the day), our Bottlecaps, Rick Rolling, and our monthly-ish Rock Band sessions post-Bottlecap. 

“It was this series of connections that made me realize what needed to be done,” Ken said. So Ken went to work.

“I yarrr’d the mp3 off of the interwebs, threw it in the Reaper (the official Rock Band Network editor), and just started making things happen,” he said.

“RBN files are essentially just a big midi file that maps perfectly with a set of .wav files,” Ken said. “Then I put it into a compiler called Magma which produces the files used to play a Rock Band track.”

The screen shot shows Reaper (left) with the the harmonies up, and the compiler on the right. This is not the first RBN track Ken has authored, but he said it is the first track he’s done with vocal harmonies.

Click the screenshot to embiggen

“I sent a proof-of-concept to the band (Gillian, Justin) [Editor's note: you must click to see Jusin's profile pic & title. Also, in the video Sara rocks the vocals.] with just the single vocal track, and they were both quickly and enthusiastically on-board.”

Ken said the hardest part of the whole project was getting done quickly while managing to keep it a secret before the Bottlecap.

“I had to keep myself from tweeting the videos to YouTube that I’d been making to show the progress,” he said.

“It was also fun, fun, fun, fun, trying to drop subtle hints on Twitter about how everyone was about to get Friday-rolled,” he said. “I tweeted the “Friday” video, and made a ton of references throughout the day.”

So how as playing it?

“It was on no fail mode,” Ken said, “Since I’m obviously not the author of the song, there was no way for me to split out the tracks in typical Rock Band style (where if the drummer screws up, the drums stop playing). So there’s no way we were going to fail and even if we did the music would still keep playing. It was basically a really glorified, epic, karaoke track.”

And what was The Nerdery’s reaction?

“It’s hard to tell from the video (the crowd is really dark and you can’t hear them), but everyone loved it,” Ken said. “It got huge applause at the end, people were shouting encore, and the actual team that was giving the Bottlecap were shaking their fists at me. When Matt Albiniak got up to talk he said to everyone ‘man… how do you follow that?’ Which was particularly great for me because if you know Matt, you know that he hates pop music, and is totally a music snob.”

Ken said this kind of project is a prime candidate for being done again, should the appropriate song come along and that he’s secretly hoping whoever owns the rights for “Friday” to give him the full quality tracks and let him submit this to the official RBN store.

Mark your calendar: May the 4th & other upcoming nerd holidays

Load up the Google Cal or iCal or Outlook or if you’re old-fashioned the Paper Calendar, and mark down these very important dates in Nerdom. If for some reason the video embedded below doesn’t want to appear for you, you can watch it here.

Happy Pi Day

It’s Pi Day. Yes that day every year where we celebrate math nerdiness. Even Time Magazine agrees in this Q&A about Pi day.

So how do you celebrate such an auspicious occasion? You could brush up on your Pi fun facts. You could make a Pi shaped pie using this recipe from Serious Eats. You could send a Pi Day ecard. You could buy yourself or your favorite nerd a Pi necklace. Or you could listen to this musician’s musical interpretation of Pi to the 31st place.

We are Nerdery (and also N Corps)

We doubled-down on announcements today: First, we are indeed The Nerdery. Surely we can’t be serious? We are serious, and don’t call us … Sierra Bravo, anymore, please. From now we’ll answer our phone only as The Nerdery – unless of course you’re calling for The N Corps, a sub-brand we also announced today.

The N Corps is all about the kind of work our formerly-named company started out doing, like systems integration and process automation and database cat-herding and helping manufacturers and distributers trying to run their business on old legacy systems and green-screen computers – yeah, it’s pretty sexy stuff to roll up the ol’ sleeves to help IT and operations staff at companies trying to (ooh-la-la) preserve their investment in business systems.

Companies trying to grow despite their tech limitations will call The Nerdery, and respectfully call us The N Corps, and we’d be real jerks to not help them, what with us being uniquely qualified and all.

To recap: As The Nerdery and The N Corps, we’ve officially become what we already were. This is perhaps better explained at http://www.nerdery.com/releases/55 or even http://www.ncorps.com.