Posted earlier this month at The Guardian UK's Tech blog. Interesting. I'd probably put this in a different order, but the only author that I think should have made the cut is Greg Egan. How could geeks not love his stuff?

And it was cool to see The Watchmen make the list!

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
11. Snow Crash -- Neal Stephenson 37% (37)
12. Watchmen -- Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons 38% (37)
13. Cryptonomicon -- Neal Stephenson 36% (36)
14. Consider Phlebas -- Iain M Banks 34% (35)
15. Stranger in a Strange Land -- Robert Heinlein 33% (33)
16. The Man in the High Castle -- Philip K Dick 34% (32)
17. American Gods -- Neil Gaiman 31% (29)
18. The Diamond Age -- Neal Stephenson 27% (27)
19. The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson 23% (21)
20. Trouble with Lichen - John Wyndham 21% (19)

Labels: tech

From the "Internets are Cool" dept.

I recently got an email from the folks who run Frenchwave, a French Lightwave website. They've translated my two-part quickie tutorial on using RLA format renders in After Effects. This is the third time one of my tutorials has been translated, which is pretty cool.

Even though I post these a couple of years back, I'm glad that the RLA tutorials are still being used, and by an international audience no less.

For the record, the other two languages are Italian and Russian.

The French tutorial link can be found here.

Labels: after effects, lightwave, Newtek, tutorial

From the "How stupid are some users" dept.


M was having problems with a crashed computer in her company's phone room. They use really old systems that run a bare bones linux install, but even though they're dirt cheap to replace, she decided to take a look inside.

Being pretty savvy a sniffing out computer problems, M was torn as to what the problem could be, but not because she couldn't see the problem.... quite the opposite...





Could it be the green pencil below?





Or the empty bag of salty snacks...





Ultimately, I think it was the what APPEARS to be a chocolate bar jammed into the floppy drive.

Labels: fun stuff