The brainchild of Milo Yiannopoulos, this calendar showcases the IT pioneers of London. There are 24 of them, all stripped down to their skins. Of course, laptops and cables have been strategically situated in order to cover up some areas – leaving things to the viewer’s imagination. Yiannopolous says that, with the release of the calendar, he aims to debunk the popular misconception that geeks are unattractive people. (I say preach it Milo!)

He also aims to help a specific charitable organization in India, called Take Heart India. This group provides funding for training in IT and business for disabled people in the said country. While it started out as a joke, the idea bloomed into reality, and Yiannopolous is now aiming to sell 5,000 (at least) copies of the calendar.

The calendar comes at a very affordable ₤10 at Firebox. I was going to buy a dragon calendar (maybe for another post) but perhaps I should get this one as well. You can never have enough calendars anyway, right?

Photo courtesy of The Telegraph

You should check the full article out, but here’s a tiny glimpse of what’s in store for you. Needless to say, they’re the ones that made my blood flow more quickly.

Twitter’s Fail Whale – who does not recognize this creature? Twitter has received a lot of flak for its intermittent service, although we have to admit is has become much better. Still, the fail whale has earned its place in history.

Firefox and IE – I use Chrome now since Firefox started to crash on me all the time about a month ago, and I haven’t used IE since forever, but these pumpkins still look awesome, don’t they?

Reddit – I love how they used a reddish hue for the lighting inside the pumpkin. This alien is cuter than ET, in my opinion.

Apple – of course. I could have thought of this myself if I didn’t see Mashable’s write up first (yeah right). A geek pumpkin fest will not be complete without an Apple carving, don’t you think? Maybe you can use Steve Job’s face for a more unique carving?

All photos courtesy of Mashable

Neumont University is one of the best schools for computer science today. To back this statement with figures, the LA Times recently noted that 90% of graduates from the university have jobs within 3 months of graduation. More so, many of them land jobs with big companies like IBM and Microsoft. So what seems to be the problem?

The grads are “addicted” to their computers. Some have a different smell. The Escapist details these complaints:

The smell’s just part of a bigger problem. Companies that have recruited Neumont graduates have been pleased with their computer skills, but have complained that the students lack basic social skills and suffer from computer addiction.

And the fix?

To fix this Neumont’s administration is taking drastic measures by forcing students to shut down laptops in class, start social clubs, and take at least three classes in interpersonal communication before they can graduate.

I just find the whole issue hilarious. Leave them geeks be. If they wanted to socialize, they wouldn’t be who they are. If they wanted to start social clubs while attending college, they would probably have gone to another university.

The media has unfairly portrayed the geek as socially inept individuals with questionable taste in clothes and an unhealthy obsession with science fiction and games. Even though that there really are some geeks like that, to generalize all of them is unfair and frankly quite prejudiced.

But apparently, a site called Daily Candy realizes that there can be a decent hunk haul from the geek heap.

The site has launched its Get With a Programmer contest that seeks to find “the hottest tech dude in all the land.” The winner (basically the person who nominates the winning geek hunk and the hunk himself) will get an HP Mini 1000 XP Edition with a 60Gb hard drive.

Time to look around at your circle of friends.

My first impression of Home was not that great. Even though the initial loading time was bearable, connecting to it was a hassle. I got connection errors the first two times I attempted to log on and when I finally did, I had to wait for a download of a small file.

I finally got to the character customization screen, which was quite easy to use but because of the limited number of hairstyles and clothes Home looked more like Cloneworld to me. I know that this is still in beta but hopefully for the final release more styles will be opened for users. I don’t really care about the clothes as much as personal appearance since I’m just a T-shirt and jeans guy anyway.

Controlling my avatar was very instinctive and the preprogrammed movements can be quite funny at times especially the dance moves. One niggle I have is that every time you go to a certain place outside your “home” you’ll have to download it initially. This can be quite a disconnected experience. It’s a good thing that you also have a “download in background” mode but then you feel like your avatar is under house arrest because it can’t do anything without downloading the file first.

I downloaded the plaza to my PC and had my first Home “interactive” experience. I nice girl from Texas (Whiteturtle, hope I got it correctly) talked to me (my handle is indie2004) and we got to discuss some stuff about the music that we listen to. But here’s where the potential catastrophic problem of Home lies — a bunch of guys started buzzing around Whiteturtle and began typing some initially innocuous stuff that slowly turned nasty. In addition to this, some guys with a headset were also saying some inappropriate things to her. The big discrepancy of females and males meant that most of the guys start acting like peacocks on Viagra trying to get the attention of the girls. I don’t know what they wanted to happen — it’s not like you can really hook up with anyone virtually. Even the Playstation 3 is not that powerful to do that. I made some asinine comment about their behavior and these two guys started harassing me verbally. If Home had been like GTAIV, I’d have been beaten up already. Some kind of moderation is desperately needed inside Home’s virtual world. But with the high rate of tweens and immature college-types this is going to be a big problem for Sony. I hope there’s going to be a room for the more civilized PS3 owners to mingle.

Overall, Home was a shallowly interesting experience. It really is like Sims Online but for those who want decent conversation, it may be hard to find it. What you’ll find though are a lot of rude people.

Here’s hoping that Sony sells a very expensive Kratos power pack so I can smite down those foulmouthed idiots.

Just heard that MySpace has released Profile 2.0. If you’re a MySpace user, a majority would shout “Yeee haaaa” because true it was a bit cumbersome to make a decent looking profile page on MySpace thru Profile 1.0. I’ve seen some just resign to “live with it”. The minority would I guess be a huge fan of the status quo, saying that it was all good. That it made MySpace a little edgy because of it. Well… ok.

MySpace took notice of these two sets of users and has said in their blog that Profile 2.0 is an option. If you want it, go for it… if you’d like to stay on 1.0 then it’ll be there for you for a long long time. And you can switch profile versions any time. How’s that for convenience.

You can’t expect to grab some of Profile 2.0 features to Profile 1.0 though… it’s all or nothing.

Check it out… I’ve heard raves about the ready templates available.

Here’s a snippet from their dev blog:

At midnight we launched Profile 2.0. (You’ll see the link for it on your Edit Profile page and in the profile menu drop down ‘Customize Profile’.) Almost everything we add to MySpace comes from the feedback I receive from users. The new profile 2.0 is based on requests I’ve received for several years about what users want. We did beta test launches of 2.0 to smaller groups around the world. Now it’s ready for everyone!

Ok, now who says we geeks are exclusive to geeky ideas :)

The Shelter Cart is a design by Gregor Timlin (with Barry Sheehan) for the Design Boom Social Awareness award 2006.  With the usual street people in mind, these designers have thought of a great way to combine the cart and the needed shelter.  Homeless folks gathering used empty cans of soda have lesser things to worry about now.  When they’re all through with their day-jobs, they flip the cart and viola (!) emerges their temporary shelter for the night.

What I’m not too sure about would be how clean the innards of the cart is after a full day of collection.  With that behind, at least this certainly raises awareness about street people and the daily challenges of finding shelter.

The Lazy Geek Cushion

I’ve been trying to find a product that will give me a new way to work.  Because I use my PC most of the time (like about 5-8 hours a day), things hurt… ok, my butt hurts! :)  This furniture sports 5 available angles for comfort.  Check it out:

Now isn’t this something you’d like to use from time to time?  I know I would.  Of course this doesn’t only work with PCs too… you can also use this while reading a book, watching TV or just simply snoozing in the park or somewhere nice.

Sold for US$86 right here.