The Great Geek Manual

10. Clients initially mistake your documentation for a fortune when it falls out the box.

09. Your post-development support consists of handing over a link to the most appropriate programming forum.

08. Your code comments read like the voice-over track of an old episode of MST3K.

07. You maintain a Buddhist outlook on programming: all code must eventually be reincarnated somewhere.

06. You throw in large chunks of code “just in case,” but when confronted, the only “in case” you can cite is the apocalypse.
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Always be yourself… unless you suck.

- Joss Whedon

Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you had better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference.

- Charles Franklin Kettering

1941
Station WNBT, Channel 4 in New York City, broadcasts the first television program to feature audience participation when the studio audience plays charades.

1944
Thomas J. Watson Sr., president of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), presents the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) to Harvard University in a formal dedication ceremony, after which the system becomes known as the Harvard Mark I. It is only the second program-controlled machine, being preceded only by Konrad Zuse’s Z3. The system is the result of Professor Howard Aiken’s research into computation, and it was financed and built by IBM. The whole machine is fifty-one feet in length, eight feet in height, weighs five tons, and incorporates 750,000 parts, including 3,304 electromechanical relays and 72 accumulators. Unlike in Zuse’s earlier binary machine, the arithmetic is still fixed-point and decimal, with a plug-board setting determining the number of decimal places. Input-output facilities include card readers, a card punch, paper tape readers, and typewriters. There are 60 sets of rotary switches, each of which can be used as a constant register, like a mechanical read-only memory. It would perform at a rate of six seconds per multiplication. The system will most famously be used to create ballistics tables for the US Navy.

1955
Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the forerunner of the later Sony, launches a line of the first transistor radios in Japan.

1959
NASA launches Explorer 6 satellite from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida. It will return the first photographs of Earth taken from space.
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Film

• Movie Retriever makes a dubious argument as to Why GI Joe Movie Could Be Better Than Transformers 2.

Internet

• Jeremiah Tolbert offers suggestions on 10 Ways to Have a More “Interesting” Convention Experience.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Author Scott Westerfeld is making his book Uglies available for free.
• Interview: The Dragon Page interviews author Mike Carey.
• Interview: The Nebula interviews Mary E. Pearson.
• The Guardian picks the Top 10 Time-Traveling Stories.
• The plains of the moon Titan are going to be given names from Frank Herbert’s “Dune” series, beginning with Chusuk Planitia.

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Source: Tara Holland Flickr

Passion, it lies in all of us, sleeping… waiting… and though unwanted… unbidden… it will stir… open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us… guides us… passion rules us all, and we obey. What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love… the clarity of hatred… and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion maybe we’d know some kind of peace… but we would be hollow… Empty rooms shuttered and dank. Without passion we’d be truly dead.

- Joss Whedon

1181
A supernova is observed by Chinese astronomers in the constellation now known as Cassiopeia, and independently observed one day later in Japan. The star will remain visible for 185 days.

1753
Professor Georg Richmann of St. Petersburg, Moscow, is killed during an experiment with lightning, just a year after Benjamin Franklin’s own experiment involving a kite. Richmann had attached a wire to the top of his house and led it down to an iron bar suspended above “the electric needle” and a bowl of water partly filled with iron filings. Richmann was struck by lighting during a storm as he stood about a foot from the bar, closely observing the needle. “A globe of blue and whitish fire about four inches diameter from the bar struck Richmann’s forehead” with “an explosion like that of a small cannon.” His assistant, Sokolaw, who survives, is thrown to the floor, where he feels receives several blows to his back. After recovering, he finds burn marks and fragments of hot wire on the back of his clothes.

1926
The Warner Brothers studio gives the first public exhibition of the Vitaphone system for showing talking motion pictures. The exhibition features the first Vitaphone film, the silent feature Don Juan starring John Barrymore, which features a musical score and sound effects but no dialog, as well as several talkie short subject films featuring comedians and singers, and a greeting from motion picture industry spokesman Will Hays.
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