In another long running example of how much I relish celebrating my outer geek, my family have a tradition of weekly Star Trek nights.

We usually order pizza so no one has to cook and our energy is reserved for more important activates like making (and drinking) Gin and Tonics, and laughing lovingly at the techno-babble.

We have recently acquired the Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter from Think Geek, and will now be cutting our pizzas in futuristic space battle style.

I took some photos of her maiden voyage with my father at the helm:


The Enterprise ended her mission that stardate after having crash landed into an olive crater on a pizza asteroid orbited by a G&T satellite in the midst of the cardboard-box nebula.

Scotty would not have been happy with the state we'd gotten her into. Luckily it was only a short distance (made on impulse drive) to the nearest starbase and we got her cleaned up in no time.

In way of actual review: Geek values aside (which are both obvious and awesome) the pizza cutter is sturdy, has a nice feel and weight to it and cuts perfectly. In fact it's probably fairly easy to cause damage with it, so it should be kept away from children and extremely drunk or stupid people.

This year I finally had the opportunity to attend Sticky's zine fair, Festival of the Photocopier. It was held in the Melbourne Town Hall this year, a truly beautiful building, as the fair has outgrown its home in the Degraves street subway (where Sticky is located). It was wonderful to see the whole room filled with zine tables. The crowd was a perfect size too, not too crowded, but lively. So it was heaps of fun without the need for jostling. Which was great, because I suck at jostling, I'm too polite. ^^;

My favourite zines are always tiny ones because I'm addicted to cute things, and usually comics or densely illustrated creations on account of my visarts background, so naturally I was enchanted by Joy Serwylo's stall of gorgeous miniature Willo Press books. I got the Miniature Vegetarian Cookbook for Minimalists, a folding world maps book and a concertina photo book called Street Art of Melbourne; all beautiful little treasures. Here's a photo of the bookcase on her stall (taken with permission), and the miniature books I bought.




Another of my favourite purchases from the day is the Little Book of Bearded Chaps by Mechelle B. The artwork is charming and its construction design makes it extremely satisfying to page through. That might seem like an odd comment, but I'm such a geek that I really love nuances in the physical reading experience as well.





I also picked up the newest issue of Ben Hutchings' mini-comic series, Comic of Smallness, which never fails to make me laugh (Ben of course does heaps of other awesome comics too), comic fans should check out his blog.

I expect I shall now also be collecting the comic adventures of Echidna Dirigible from Australiadelphia Press. I do love the gentlemanly banter and prickly storyline. I picked up issue#1 and even signed myself up to their email list, something I rarely do.

Unfortunately I can't be in Melbourne again next February (which has always been the problem previously), but now that I have attended and confirmed my assumption that the event is incredibly fun, I will definitely be making the effort to return again in the future. In the meantime, I’ll just have to haunt Sticky as much as possible.

I felt like drawing robots today.
This is my favourite. I call him Tybot, the typing robot.
Heh-heh silly ^^;

Recently, I was sent to a library to do some work for a project I'm the research assistant on. It was brilliant. I love libraries, and because I was there on behalf of a university I was very kindly given a backstage pass to the closed stacks, a pile of reader slips and free reign.

As you walk along the stacks there are lights to turn on, but when you first walk in it's all dark and creepy and awesome. I quickly discovered that I am quite a fan of awesomely dark, creepy, book-filled places, so I usually only turned on the light for the shelf I needed at the time.

Here's a reader's shelf slip in use:

They mark the spot a book has been taken from to make it easier for the librarians upon re-shelving.

Here's a photos of the stacks looking into the darkness rather than the light. Rather fuzzy, cause my camera just isn't good enough, but I love the photos anyway ^^; Click to enlarge:

Today I needed about 700 rows of MS Access data structured into HTML table code for a flat-file database I'm working with.
I am likely to be the only one in the world bat-shit crazy enough to want to do that sort of thing in the first place, but I thought I'd share anyway ^^;heh.

It's actually a relatively simple process.
First I cut and pasted the data I needed into Excel.
Then, at the end of the first row I created a formula using the ampersand and quotation marks to edit the html in around the data. Even including some line breaks where I wanted them.

Eg: For a row with the first 3 cells ROBOT MONKEY PIRATE you could do something like this...

This formula:
="<tr><td>"&A1&"</td><td>"&B1&"<br>"&C1&"</td></tr>"
Would give you this html:
<tr><td>ROBOT</td><td>MOKEY<br>PIRATE</td></tr>

Which, if you put inside table tags, would give you:

ROBOT

MONKEY PIRATE

So, then I double clicked the dot at the right hand bottom of the cell to copy the formula all the way down the list, and cut and paste that column to where I needed the data.

I actually put it in an empty php file which I called up all in one shot inside the table tags using an include function but you could equally as easily paste the whole thing straight inside a html file if you wanted to and didn't mind the bulk.

...I am such a geek in such incredibly unnecessary ways. haha.