On June 1st, 2009, a fire in our neighbor’s basement spread to our home causing total loss. For information on the relief and (hopeful) rebuild effort, visit http://basinroad.com.

I was recently reminiscing about my geeky childhood when I came across a memory about my first robot. I was overjoyed to get Verbot for Christmas one year, and tried desperately to make the dern thing follow my prepubescent voice commands. My only real solid memory is frustration at it not doing what I told it! But I do have vague recollections of getting it to pick up something and move around while clinging to it. Or maybe I’m just remember the commercial.

Oh Verbot, where are you now? Some landfill somewhere I imagine.

Some of you may know I’m a moderately big Star Trek fan. Yes I’ve been to a convention. No I didn’t go in costume. Yes I’ve watched all episodes of the original series and Next Generation as well as all the movies. No I haven’t watched all the episodes of the decidedly crappier Deep Space Nine, Voyager, or Enterprise series.

I should also point for disclosure that I took a 48 credit course in college whose overarching theme was Star Trek. We used the show as a jumping off point to study sociology, screen writing, spacial physics, cognitive psychology, and many other related subjects.

Of particular interest to me was how the original series could run for only three seasons but make such a huge impact. After 1969 when the show ended, there wasn’t anything else (with the exception of a cartoon) until 1979 when the first movie came out. Yet in those 10 years the ethos of the characters and storylines grew and developed into one of the most popular mythologies of our time. How did this happen? Fans. The fans continued the adventures of the characters through unofficial “slash” stories and conventions.

So I was naturally excited that they’d come out with a new movie. All the other movies were pretty lame, starting with the abhorrent Star Trek I, which came out shortly after Star Wars and looked like a pitiful imitation, and ending with the attempt to bring the TNG cast onto the silver screen which never really panned out.

This latest movie though, they did a number of things right. Here’s my bullet-point grading of Star Trek 2009:

• Relative to other Trek movies: Great
• Relative to TV series: Really Good
• Compatibility with existing storylines and “science”: Great
• Acting overall: good enough
• Overall rating as a standalone movie: average-good (two stars on a four star scale, three stars on a five star scale)

I thought the writing was good to Star Trek standards, especially in the campy humor that only makes sense if you’re already familiar with the ethos. They did a good job making the storyline fun and accessible to everyone, dumbing down the complexity enough while still building on the epic timeline of, let’s face it, one of science fiction’s most revered characters: Spock.

I think they modeled this movie mostly after the original series, minus the presence of a Gene Roddenberry-esque omnipotent creature. Roddenberry always tried to introduce the concept of something larger than us, in more control than us.

For our main characters, they did a great job setting them up. The legendary James Tiberius Kirk especially. None of the prior movies or TV series really gave us the back story we needed to understand why Kirk got to captain the best ship in the fleet. Knowing that he’s a Will Hunting like smarty pants really helps to understand his position in Starfleet.

Overall, I give it a big hearty thumbs up, from an insiders perspective. For people who don’t know the entire Star Trek context, it’s a good science fiction movie with plenty of fun action, although much of the humor predicates on knowing some back story of the characters (Scotty in particular made me LOL).

I’ve always wondered about this one and I finally looked it up. Turns out my confusion is well-founded:

The Anchorage Daily News has reported that Royal Caribbean cruise ship “Serenade of the Seas” has a crew member infected with H1N1 (Swine Flu). The crew member became sick on May 2nd. According to the 2009 cruise ship docking calendar the Serenade arrived in Juneau on May 8th after leaving Ketchikan on the 7th. She continued on to Skagway on the 9th, Petersburg on the 10th, and then moves on to Sitka (12th), Prince Rupert (13th), and Vancouver on the 16th.

For more information about the geography of H1N1, try this flu-tracker map.

Laurie Garrett gives a detailed look at the state of healthcare and community response to potential pandemic. This video is from Feb 2007 and focuses most on the Avian flu but is quite pertinent. Her primary bottom line is that defenses should be arranged at the community not individual level.

Not long after FriendFeed went live with realtime social networking they rolled out a feature that lets you search and subscribe to the Twitter followers of any Twitter user.

Naturally I used this for my own Twitter username first. But then I discovered it works for pretty much any username. So I decided to give it a real test. Here’s how I created a FriendFeed list called “Scoble’s Minions”, and subsequently got locked out of FriendFeed.

First, in FriendFeed go to http://friendfeed.com/friends. Click the Twitter button and enter the Twitter username whose friends you want to search for.

After a good while of the spinning progress circle I’m given a screen where I can select which folks I want to subscribe to:

And the list I want to put them in:

Warnings, Caveats, Etc:

• First of all, I have no idea why anyone would want to do this with a user like Robert Scoble, unless you want to introduce a ridiculous amount of noise to your stream or if (like me) you’re just playing around.
• Keep in mind while it adds the users with open feeds to the list you create, it sends a request to those with private feeds. When they accept, it will automatically put them in your Home feed. For me this was a little annoying since my Home feed is tuned to just have the people I want in it. So I had to do some cleanup.
• I’ve noticed a SIGNIFICANT change in the speed of the Add/remove friends screens in FriendFeed, especially when editing friends on my Home feed list. In fact it became nearly impossible to remove people from my Home feed. I sent Robert a DM asking if he has similiar slowness.
• I wonder if doing this can be considered abuse? Perhaps FriendFeed didn’t intend it to be used this way. I’m not sure.

One thing that is for sure, after enough banging around FriendFeed became downright non-responsive. Looks like they’ve blocked the IP address I was using during all my testing of this. Oops!:

UPDATE: My IP is no longer blocked by FriendFeed.