This seems to be the week of press releases. Usually I get 1 or 2 a month, but I’ve received 4 in the last 24 hours, what’s up with that?

In any case, Fallon Parrish (what a great name!) from ScienCentral sent me a press release on the re-launch of their web site. Not knowing who they are, I checked them out by navigating to their site and clicking the link to their About page. Guess what, their About page directed me to an advert that counted down for 10 seconds before sending me onto the About information. What the heck is up with that?

It seems they’re a production company that was co-founded in 1996 by scientist and CEO/President Eliene Augenbraun to increase the number and quality of science stories broadcast to the public. And they produce several features per week that air on ABC News local TV affiliates.

I found this recent example below that piqued my interest: “Wearing Red: An Olympic Advantage?” (if you can’t see the video in IE, try this link: Red Olympic Advantage). It’s regarding a new study that shows referees may tend to subconsciously focus more positively on competitors wearing red as opposed to other colors.

BTW, the full press release is copied at the bottom, just in case you’re into that kind of thing. 🙂

SCIENCENTRAL RE-LAUNCHES ITS WEBSITE
New York, NY – Monday, August 18, 2008: ScienCentral, specializing in
science and technology content, announces the re-launch of its news and
community website, www.ScienCentral.com. Visitors can now actively engage in
discussions with the ScienCentral.com community, easily share ScienCentral
videos and articles, and shop for science-related products without ever
leaving the website. Visitors of the site will now have full access to the
archive, which hosts over 1,000 originally produced videos with accompanying
articles.  With the re-launch, ScienCentral.com will feature a new online
series titled ³Street Corner Science,² where well-known scientists sit on a
street corner and answer questions from passers-by.

ScienCentral¹s mission is to increase the number and quality of science
stories being broadcast to the public.  ScienCentral.com is distinguished
from most other science websites by its large volume of originally reported
and produced science news videos. ScienCentral¹s independent news bureau,
ScienCentral News, produces several features per week that are not only seen
on sciencentral.com and competitor websites, but are also aired on hundreds
of local TV news stations, reaching millions of Americans.  Each featured
story is not just news — it¹s groundbreaking research on the medical,
environmental, and technological issues that affect daily life.

ScienCentral’s journalists have a track record of combing through the vast
amount of research published in any given week and picking the stories that
they think you shouldn’t miss.

ScienCentral has grown tremendously since its foundation in 1996 and
continues to grow by producing interesting, non-biased science and
technology content. ScienCentral is a small company with big ideas.  From
broadcast news to full-length features, ScienCentral not only knows how to
communicate complex ideas about science, it also knows how to tell a good
story. ScienCentral makes sense of science!

About ScienCentral: ScienCentral, Inc. is a production company that was
co-founded in 1996 by scientist and CEO/President Eliene Augenbraun to
increase the number and quality of science stories broadcast to the public.
ScienCentral produces science and technology content for television,
industry, and the web, in addition to working with museums and educational
publishers to develop multimedia educational products.   Current and past
partners include The National Science Foundation, National Academies of
Sciences, ABC News, Discover, The Franklin Institute, and the Institute for
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  Visit www.sciencentral.com
<http://www.sciencentral.com> for more information.
###
Contact:
Fallon Parrish
fparrish@sciencentral.com
212-244-9577 x106

Hailing Frequencies Open…
…on screen!

Here is a message from our friends at Cryptic Studios:

“Please join us at this year’s Official Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas for the first-ever reveal of the recently announced videogame Star Trek Online. The event will take place in the Gene Roddenberry Theater at 1:30 P.M., PDT on Sunday, August 10th at The Las Vegas Hilton (tickets required). We will also have a very special guest appearance by Mr. Leonard Nimoy!

For those who cannot make the show – we do not want to leave you out!

We will broadcast the event via LIVE webcast. Please continue to check in at www.startrekonline.com for more details on how to join the webcast.

Join the Star Trek Online community at www.startrekonline.com by Monday, August 18th for a chance to win a copy of Star Trek Online and a lifetime subscription!

Thanks,

Your friends at Creation Entertainment”

LAS VEGAS, NV
Thursday – Sunday
August 6 – 10, 2008
Las Vegas Hilton Hotel
Home of Star Trek: The Experience
3000 Paradise Rd.

Reader Eric Tse has expressed interest in participating on Geeknews, since I value a diverse background and he’s a geek of many interests, how could I resist? Here’s a little about Eric-

He’s a student in Vancouver, BC Canada and plans to study Criminology, he’s been a geek his entire life and says he always will be. Some if his interests are:

Video Games
Watching anime/movies/dramas
Listening to music
Coding (HTML/PHP/MySQL/C/C++/Java/Javascript)
Making layouts for websites
Linux
Macs
Getting things for free 😛
Making music/songs
Learning/Doing Magic Tricks

Welcome Eric, lets have fun posting geeky news.

“Open the Iris!”

Don Davis who played Maj. Gen. George Hammond on Stargate SG-1 died June 29 of a heart attack, he was 65.

Davis’ final Stargate appearance is in Stargate: Continuum (pre-order the DVD here), the upcoming straight-to-DVD movie. He will also appear in the films Vipers, Woodshop and Far Cry. Back in the day he had stints in MacGuyver, X-Files and Twin Peaks.

He was one of my favorite characters on the show because he was a no-nonsense, humanistic leader with compassion and only went ‘by the book’ 98% of the time which showed he was amenable to innovation and having to break the rules once in a while to get shit done.

Here’s the SG1 Season-1 Profile of General Hammond.

I guess it’s a good thing I’m going to the Star Trek convention in a month and get one last shot at the ST: The Experience at the Hilton in Vegas.

This just came in through open channels, originating from Operations manager and director of marketing Chad Boutte at Hilton:

“Hailing frequencies open. We’d like to thank all the fans and friends of Star Trek, whose constant and amazing support we’ve enjoyed throughout our tenure at the Las Vegas Hilton. As we boldly go into the futures that await, know that we take your love of ‘Star Trek: The Experience’ with us. We share the memories of time spent in the most unique place in the Galaxy, and we carry those memories into our futures with us. Live long and prosper. Hailing frequencies closed.”

The show will end its run at the Las Vegas Hilton on Sept 1 2008.

Bummer. I wonder if this will move on to another location on the strip or just go away? I hope it’s not a sign the franchise is fading away.

To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

In the spirit of promoting Web Standards along with good semantic markup and proper hierarchy structures, April 9th is a day of nakedness for all webmasters to remove their style sheets from their website for one day.

If you’re a student and you have art skills, GOOG has a contest going on right now that enables you to get your doodle on their homepage for a day. Check out Doodle 4 Google for more details.

In the meantime, watch this neat little time lapse video of a google doodle being developed by one of their artists.

[youtube TOOY0xuQ3TU]

I’ve made two additional edits to the site as we launch ourselves into a new month/year:

1. The Comment form now allows you to subscribe to followup comment notification, it’s an opt-in per article. Simply check the box in the form and you’ll receive an e-mail for every comment made to that article moving forward.

This is thanks to the Subscribe to Comments WordPress plug-in.

2. Also, since I have a pretty good handle on the gawd awful volume comment spam and only the occasional splogger slips through, I’ve *disabled* the nofollow attribute to commenter. What does this mean?

It means that GOOG, Live, Yahoo and their ilk will register all links from your name back to your own site as well as links within the body of the comment. In WordPress, the ‘nofollow’ attribute is on by default to discourage spammers. Simply commenting on Geeknews with a link to your site will register in your favor if you track your pagerank or Technorati rank.

And this one is thanks to the NoFollow Free WordPress plug-in.

I’m looking for help to get GN to 2000 posts in 2008. Interested in taking a shot at posting your own content here? I’ll give you the keys and you can take her around the block, kick the tires and see if you’d like to ride shotgun with me next year.

Also, to celebrate 1000 posts, I have a couple of really old school geeky gifts I’ll send to the first two folks that comment below.

– Andy

Hey Folks!  Well, as you can see, it’s been a trying week for us.  But never fear, we are getting the site back to its normal geekiness, it may just take a bit of time.  We hope to have everything transferred to the new host in the next day, so keep an eye out for GeekNews coming back better and stronger than before!  You may have noticed that for the time being, we’re operating under an IP address….fear not, though; our normal GeekNews.Net name will be proudly displayed again ASAP.

Why was the site offline for the last 4 days? Simple. The host provider supernova.net thought it would be a good idea to surprise its customers with an unannounced upgrade to their systems early Saturday morning, no doubt thinking we’d all wake up and never notice the blip in availability.

That was Saturday. It’s now Wednesday morning. The site just came back online. Sigh.

The thing that irked me the most is that their support line voice mails and the bulletins posted on the web kept saying basically the same thing, that they expected everything to back online in 3 hours or 6 hours, day after day.

When they got to the point where they just had to fix up the naming server, I immediately FTP’d into the IP for Geeknews and started transferring the site over to Dreamhost where hopefully i can get everything migrated for the weekend to flip the switch.

Why switch to a new provider just for this? Welp, this isn’t the first time, nor second, nor third that one of my sites has been mysteriously offline for days on end, one time it was a week. I’ve been using their services since around 2002 but when you have family using their primary mail account from one of my domains, that’s a painful thing to deal with when they are affected as well.

I feel sorry for all the folks affected whose sites are their business. No doubt there’s a few pissed of pron pushers right now. 🙂

Registration for .asia top-level Internet domain names began last week for companies and other legal entities, giving corporations an opportunity to secure trademarked domain names without having to contend with cybersquatters.

Australia-based Instra’s AsiaRegistry.com was selling .asia domain registrations for $90 each.

Infoworld – October 09, 2007

This is a press release received from a new media company focused on delivering on-demand sci-fi, anime, horror to geeks, they’re called Illusion On-Demand.

For Immediate Release

ILLUSION ON-DEMAND, the first and only VOD channel dedicated to science fiction and fantasy, has officially launched in North America.

With an initial programming lineup of 21 shows and content blocks including series like “Strange”, “Venus Rises”, “Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere”, “Day of the Triffids” and “Shadow Star Narutaru”, Illusion hopes to attract sci-fi hungry fans to their video on demand lineup.

For Halloween Illusion is offering a special lineup which includes the anime features “Kakurenbo: Hide and Seek”, “Black Jack: Infection” and “Ichi: Zero”; along with a special edition of Illusion’s “Top 20” featuring Debbie Rochon (Fangoria Radio) and Arthur Suydam (Marvel Zombies). The chills continue with Troma’s “Def by Temptation” (starring Samuel L. Jackson) “Night of the Living Dead” and a Halloween episode of the original comedy series “The Action Room”.

Coming to Illusion in November are premieres of the updated classic “The Quatermass Experiment” (starring Jason Flemyng, Mark Gatiss and Doctor Who’s David Tennant ) and a VOD airing of Mamoru Oshii’s “Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer”.

More information is available on Illusion’s new website www.illusiontv.com which is home to a broadband video player, information about the entire Illusion programming lineup, event announcements, a weekly news blog and online content like Manga from Central Park Media and previews of Thomas Jane (The Punisher) and Steve Niles’ (30 Days of Night) Bad Planet Comic book series.

Illusion is currently available in twenty states and is free to all digital subscribers. National expansion will continue through 2008 as more affiliates add Illusion to their VOD services. A complete list of affiliates is available online at illusiontv.com.

About Illusion On-Demand

Illusion On-Demand is a brand of Illusion Television LLC, a limited liability company based in New York City. Illusion On-Demand is the first dedicated VOD (video on demand) science fiction & fantasy network. Illusion Television was founded in late 2006 by partners Dekker Dreyer, Caitlyn Darr and Jamison Ousley

She’s Geeky started as an idea between women working in technology. If you’re a woman working in tech or just a very geeky girl, they want you to attend and socialize, build a network and learn side by side with others just like you.

Their goal is to provide a forum for women to exchange skills and learn from women in diverse fields of tech, discuss topics about women and tech, connect the diverse range of women in tech/ computing/ entrepreneurship/ funding/ HW.

Topics at this 2 day event range from ‘Dealing with Analysts to ‘Nonprofit Technology Sector Overview’ to ‘Speakers training and the importance of speaking in leadership’ to ‘Hardware Hacks by Women’. They have a Proposed Topics page for more subjects.

Many topics still need to be nailed down and are tentative, but I gotta say that if I was a girl geek in technology I’d think seriously about attending. And for such a small fee you gain so much!

Where?

  Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.

When?

  October 22-23

  Start Time: Noon on Monday

  Ending Time: Close 6pm on Tuesday.

  They will have evening ‘entertainment’ on Monday night.

Cost?

  $125 until Sept 30, $175 after

Go to the home page for all the ‘about’ details.

Sun says it’s slashing jobs *again* before the end of the year in an effort to return to profitability.

This is a damn shame.

Contact me if you work for Sun, or any other software manufacturer, and are being laid off or *fear* you will be laid off. My team at work needs C/C++/C# developers, especially if you have Test skills or are willing to learn Test theory.

editor @ geeknews.net

Job posting on Career Builder: Link.

Description:
Title: Web Developer (must have secret clearance)
Job Type: 3 month contract (could go shorter)
Salary: $20k per month
Location: Iraq
Start date: ASAP with 2 weeks training (one in Washington DC and another in Ft. Bening GA)
# of Openings: 1
Summary: A principal Department of Defense agency is looking for programmers, developers or coders to code, support field deployment and maintenance of a new database application which will be used by Army units in Iraq. Scope These are full-time positions (12/7) located at one of the major US Bases in IRAQ. Deployment will be period of 3 months. Training on the application software will begin prior to deployment and will take place in Virginia. These positions are available for full time employment or for independent contractors. These positions are available now

Requirements:
-A Department of Defense secret clearance within last 24 months
-Willing to work a 3 month contract in Iraq at US military bases
-2-4 programming experience preferably with JAVA or HTML
-US Citizen
-Knowledge of database systems preferably SQL
Plus:
-Familiarity with military networks and systems is desired, but not required.
-Relevant military background ( e.g. hands-on engineering background in S6 or G6 shop or MOS 25B or 74B is desired but not required.)
-AS or BS Degree in Computer Science minimum

If you’re qualified then this really is a great deal. Just because there’s a skirmish going on in the region, don’t let it weigh too heavily in deciding whether to take on the job and the adventure. Ajaxian has some interesting comments on this.

If you know CSS/XHTM and some PHP, then Authentic Jobs has another great opportunity to travel to Baghdad as a Front End Developer.

[via reddit / ajaxian]

You may recall the “$100 laptop for children” or ‘One Laptop Per Child’ initiatives being pushed in emerging markets that would educate the masses and help bootstrap a nation’s efforts to modernize.

Welp, looks like the kids figured out an alternative use for the internet besides learning. 🙂

Link to the Reuters article.

[via Wafflebox]