Overview

It is almost Halloween, and Stephen is ready all dressed up in his Starfleet uniform. In a week, we will be at the Halloweem RG where there will be plenty of punny costumes.

Stephen saw Amsterdam and thought very highly of it. Reflection of today’s society? Cautionary tale that we are going down paths we’ve already trodden? Hmm.

Recommendations

YouTube

Transcript

Alan: Helen, I am nowhere near as cool as you. Let me see if I can get a backdrop besides my incredibly cluttered office here.

Stephen: It’s almost Halloween. I dressed up. I should have done so.

Alan: I let’s see. I think we’ve already had the leaves. What do I want here? How about Dr. Who, old time doctor who

Stephen: maybe so trivia, guess what I was drinking earlier?

Alan: Carilion, Brandy, whatever. Scotty said to get . Sorry, ahead. No,

Stephen: this is Picard. I was drinking tea. Earl Gray Hot

Alan: Earl Gray. Hot. Exactly. Out of the trans, whatever that thing is called. .

Stephen: Wow. We’re up universes there, aren’t we ?

Alan: You do not. I have hardly. Real, like authentic costumes, I have a Dr. Hus scarf, but I don’t have the entire Tom Baker gig, nor for any doctor. And same with, I don’t have a Star Trek uniform. I don’t have a Star Wars Bobba fat outfit. I just have never done the full thing.

Stephen: And even if I, this is really all I have , there we go. But I got a good costume for We, so

Alan: very good.

And Colleen and I have we think we’ve figured out what we’re going to be. Sometimes we’ve been separate this time we’re gonna try to do a team costume and we have of a thing all going on. You know what, how can I spend $3 and 50 cents on this? You know what I mean? We tend to not I’ve never rented, Maybe I have, I think I might have rented like a Bunny’s suit at one time because I went to his Harvey Milk and I had to dress up as a.

Invisible rabbit, if you will, but aka is that .

Stephen: The one idea I had was take a bunch of smarties candies and put ’em all over my pants for smarty pants. Smarty pants. Exactly. That’s lowkey. You could eat it while you’re sitting

Alan: there. It’s funny that’s worth so again, for folks like not as in the know the reason that Halloween and it’s Halloween with an m is really cool is because it’s a big regional gathering for mea and it’s in Chicago, which is a very like, wonderful welcoming tons of activities, tons of quality people, Mensa group.

And they’ve been having this regional gathering on Halloween weekend for like 45 years now. I think it might be 44 or 45. And one of the highlights, because it is Halloween weekend is cuz it’s got a big costume parade. And instead of it just being, Hey, dress up however you want. One of the real themes they do is it should be a ton of some kind.

And so the endless creativity of crazy smart people, like I’ve been going since early nineties so I’m coming up on 30 years out of this thing. And how many it’s not, It, I, it’s just amazing.

Overview

There is some reminiscing about past tech and the skills we learned by doing it the old way that have served us well as tech progressed.

The new Werewolf by Night is out along with Andor and She-Hulk. Man some great stuff and way too much to watch. Game of Thrones new series is going strong and is interesting with George RR Martin involved. And the new Quantum Leap is going strong. And let’s add the new Interview with a Vampire and Let the right One in series.

It is fall, so plenty of opportunity to hike and enjoy the fall leaves.

Trivia

The Palmer method is the style of cursive that we’ve learned in school. What was the style taught before this?

Recommendations

Starved Rock State Park – Parks (illinois.gov)

Hale Farm & Village Car Meet | Western Reserve Historical Society (wrhs.org)

Watch Quantum Leap Streaming 2022 | Peacock (peacocktv.com)

Anne Rice Interview With The Vampire – Exclusive Series Coming to AMC+ (amcplus.com)

YouTube

Transcript

Alan: think I changed my backdrop from last time. Sorry. The fall. I love the fall colors. Yeah. Hi. I got my pumpkin shirt on. I you said you were gonna grab a shirt and I was like, man, I’m wearing a boring blue shirt. I need to get something much better .

I honestly, I, it’s nice that it’s getting cooler outside because I have all kinds of ultra comfy there and it’s funny, I don’t get cold.

I’m there, I have not enough surface area for the amount of mass that I carry so you don’t get cold. And yet there’s some things that just feel like, good on ya. They’re cuddly and soft and stuff like that. So I get to break out all the winter

Stephen: wear. Yeah I felt the same way. I’m like, Ooh, it’s almost time to wear sweatshirts and sweaters, which I get to wear for two months out of the year and really?

That’s it. Hey, sorry. You know what? Today is celebration. Tell me. It is a loveless day.

Alan: Ah the first computer programmer, the inventor of, Yeah, very cool.

Stephen: Okay. Bingo. Yeah. She worked with bas analytical computer like 200 years ago or something like that. Under

Alan: 50. Exactly. And I’m not sure if it’s anecdotal or not, but isn’t she the one that came up with debugging?

Yeah. They found a bug in the actual physical computer that was causing something to either short out or at least not work correctly. By her removing the moth , that’s where we actually got the expression for debugging a computer program.

Stephen: And she was the first female programmer, one of the first programmers so lots of celebration in that little simple, geeky day.

Exactly.

Alan: There’s actually a computer language ...

Overview

We talk about horror, sci-fi and comedy this week. Each of these is used to reflect society in different ways.

Alan attended the Just for Laughs comedy fest which is 10 days of non-stop comedy. Most of his experiences were good, but a few went overboard.

There’s a good discussion of horror and an upcoming talk that Stephen is doing with his co-host from Horror Lasagna.

And the Orville and other sci-fi is discussed in our weekly ramble.

Recommendations

The Simpsons Treehouse Of Horror Episodes – IMDb

James Bond music – Wikipedia

Welcome to Horror Lasagna | Horror Lasagna

Toronto | Just For Laughs (hahaha.com)

The Orville – Wikipedia

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:00] Stephen: Yeah. I figured it’s Halloween. This is like urban explorer, supernatural type, natural.

[00:00:06] Alan: You’re looking for let’s see, something that your relatives left somewhere in this structure, and of course you keep hearing noises that aren’t natural for that place. So I went with the fall changing here

[00:00:15] Stephen: Okay.

Yeah. I was, looking around it and seeing what I got, so I gotta get some more halloweenish ones.

[00:00:21] Alan: Exactly. Are you watching a lot of scary movies because, any number of, like all the online services have shocktober and Yes. Their Halloween, they got tons of stuff available.

They’ve revived old series. They’ve made like all. I need all the Jasons, all the saws, whatever else is available. They put together little packages of Yes. Of

[00:00:40] Stephen: Halloween. I have, and I’ve started clear back in September now, I mean I’ve been watching each week three or four scary movies and episodes of Crip Keep and Dark Side and Twilight Zone, all that.

In fact, that’s, it’s funny cause I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, I’ve been going through the Simpsons Treehouse of Terror episodes. Exactly. Okay. Which are fantastic. If people have watch ’em, I make it a part of my Halloween ritual. Now that, there’s 30, some of them, they do three little vignettes each episode.

and they’re just so funny in a very tongue and cheek, humorous way. They make fun of everything. The one episode I watched at the very end they were in the kitchen. They started imitating the Charlie Brown Christmas special at the end, where they start singing, and they always have.

Like the first episode they did the Raven from Poe and Barts the Raven. He goes, quote the Raven, Eat my shorts. Eat my short. I

[00:01:37] Alan: remember that from all the way

[00:01:39] Stephen: back. Exactly. Yeah. Colin laughs at that hysterically. That’s his favorite. And then they have the aliens that are always showing up and they do a, each year it’s they imitate something different.

One year.

Overview

Alan is going through the stuff in his parents house and it leads to a great discussion on visiting the past. This could be through books and video, but new methods like using VR.

Recommendations

Encyclopedia Britannica | Britannica

Philadelphia Museum of Art (philamuseum.org)

Surviving 9/11 – 27 Hours Under The Rubble (oculus.com)

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:00] Stephen: Brewer here. I think I almost chose that one too. I’ve got that one on my list.

[00:00:08] Alan: that’s I’m. I’m just back from a long time in California. I was there for the longest time. My I mentioned before, four listeners joining late. My father passed away in February. My mom is in a memory care facility.

I go out there once a month to visit with her and make sure she knows that she’s loved. We also have been working on the house. They had a beautiful house in an area called Heney Hills and Oceanside, and they had, they were, they are, or were 89. So they have a lifetimes accumulation of stuff.

And I take, after my parents, they have, they had lots of books. They had a house filled with interesting stuff. And unfortunately the exercise of getting ready to maybe sell the house is, are we gonna sell some things? We who’s gonna take what home. We actually had the brothers together for the first time in months.

And we did the divvy two days ago, we actually, I had taken pictures of all kinds of stuff in the house and posted them, sent them up to everybody. So everybody could go through and say, Of all the paintings. These are the ones that I want of all the paintings, sculpture China books music, all that kind of stuff.

The reason that I’m, presenting the library today is because my dad had tons of stuff and I guess a little bit like me eclectic taste. He wasn’t just a science fiction fan. He had science, he had war history. He has had he loved maps. And so has a whole bunch of Atlas and geography and geology books.

I know they’re very different, but his taste ran to both and the heartbreaking thing is I already have grown up. I got lots of books. I took. So good thing about, how my brothers worked it out is that we are different enough that there was hardly any contention, there wasn’t, oh, everybody wants the magic coffee pot or whatever else it might be.

So I have their insights, the pred Botanica and by have meaning. We had to actually rent containers. We had to do research into the U box and the pod and the Zippy shell and all that kind of stuff, and find out who moves to Bloomington where my brother is and who moves to where I am. My older brother didn’t want that much cuz he just moved to a smaller house in Florida and is not looking to outc crowd himself.

You know what I mean? But like I’m really to. Because I really want the encyclopedia. Botanica it’s a very cool thing. There’s a book called the, no, it all, that where a guy actually read it from start to finish and then to be the smartest man in the world, that kind of thing.

These are the encyclopedia. One of the first things my parents bought when we were young was the EB.

Overview

We talk about some sciency stuff with our universe and other universes and then we delve into made up universes in our favorite comic books and movies.

It all started with Alan reading Ready Player Two, the sequel to Ernest Klines ready Player One – and Stephen talks about using the Oculus.

And all this future tech is altering how we think of others and our world – which will change again when we go to other planets and meet other beings.

Recommendations

She Hulk Season 1 | Synopsis, Cast, Credits, Latest News | Marvel

Samaritan (2022 film) – Wikipedia

Watch The Gray Man | Netflix Official Site

YouTube

Transcript

So hi, Alan, how are you? It’s Hey, it’s

[00:00:34] Alan: through the miracle of modern, relentless, geeky technology. We are three time zones apart. And yet this year sounds like it’s in real time. So thank you, digitization and electrons, for making this miracle, it’s funny around the world. It seems that people do conferences with India, right?

Regularly people talk with folks in the middle east and the far east and Europe, and it just is like making a phone call. And I just think that’s really

[00:00:59] Stephen: cool. I really feel I’ve let the geek cred down. I’ve got an Oculus and I haven’t done one of these on the Oculus yet.

You can, hook into your desktop. You can hook into zoom now. So I really need to do one with the Oculus, that’s

[00:01:15] Alan: very cool. I’ll tell you, it’s funny. I know we have a list of things we wanna talk about, but never it’s I just started reading ready player two. There’s a, as there’s a very cool book ready player one by Ernest Klein.

If I remember, right? Yeah. That was made into a great movie. One of those great Roger rabbit type movies where Steven Spielberg is the guy that like nobody in Hollywood and video games and everywhere wants to say no to the guy, because they know that he’s so talented and that he will treat your creations with respect.

So if you saw that movie, it was every video game character ever, especially in the climactic battle where it was look at. I gotta pause the screen, like every second to just not miss everything that’s going on. This is it. I What a wonderful sequel. It’s one of those things where within the first five pages, you immediately go, I’m in, I’m backing this world and I wanna see what happens next.

And it’s just kinda like a video game just when you think you’ve, you’re like conquered and completed the quest, oh, here’s a hidden room off to the side. And then here’s another riddle and another prize to pursue. And so he’s so good at capturing, like what makes those video games so addictive and playable computer games, et cetera, is there’s always UN UNES incremental advances and new mysteries.

And, but that what you’ve learned and used, and you use your current armor and go forward, you hope that’s gonna be enough to go to a ...

Overview

We talk briefly about our weekend, which includes a talk that Stephen gave. this leads to a long discussion on education and whether its working and what we can do to fix problems.

Recommendations

https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

https://superchargeyourkids.net

https://horrorlasagna.com

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095288/

AFI’S 100 YEARS…100 MOVIES — 10TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

http://www.cleveland.us.mensa.org/

YouTube

Transcript

Stephen: Oh, there we go. Oh, there we go. Had to give myself a reminder as to what I need to talk about today.

I got my Harry Potter shirt on cuz it’s close to Halloween, which is wizard.

Alan: Let’s see, let’s get that. I got yeah. Okay. Sometimes I forget. I, despite having a, honestly like a 12 port USB thing I sometimes have to swap cables because something require going directly into the back of the mini instead of going through, even though the USB thing is powered and everything, there’s just some shenanigans going on as to whether it detects signal correctly.

And so often I have to swap between. The camera and microphone that I use for our sessions and my relatively new super it’s not, I no longer use the super drive. It’s been slightly superseded by a guy I got from other world computing, cuz it’s supposed to handle every kind of blue Ray, every kind of DVD, Moe type stuff.

But what I’m discovering is it doesn’t handle everything hardware wise. It does, but there’s multiple DVD players out there. But now that we’ve gone on to blue Ray and blue, remember it used to be, you had to know whether it was plus or minus back in and that kinda stuff. It seems that now based on protection and based on format though, I thought there really was one standard.

But as any number of places say, we’re standard, but then we added a few enhancements and if you don’t have those things, so besides QuickTime, which is a pretty standard handles everything thing for the Mac. I have VLC media player, which really is an open source one that seems to handle everything, but you have to go download specific AACS libraries and a config file, depending on what language you are.

So it’ll display menus correctly. And even though I follow the directions, go to the right places, put those libraries, put those files into the right libraries on my machine. I couldn’t watch the next DVD in the Dexter series because the AACS is acting up somehow. It doesn’t like how I have it configured.

So I just, I hate getting to that weird point of it should just work. And yet now they’re starting to differentiate between things. And even though I’m willing to do the research to look things up when you do it, just like it says, and then it doesn’t work. I don’t wanna troubleshoot the troubleshooting.

I don’t wanna have to keep taking deeper

Overview

There’s a lot of talk about travel. Including picking your own hunk of meat at a restaurant and taking your towel.

Besides that, the Sonder hotel in Philly was better than it could have been. Check last weeks episode.

And to afford the travel – make good investments. This week, Alan attended the Motley Fool conference.

And here’s out tip of the week – if you sign into your Roku or other streaming on the hotel television, make sure you delete it before you leave.

Recommendations

https://www.fool.com/

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Products-g60795-a_contentId.1179776144286871+268263061-Philadelphia_Pennsylvania.html

https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/david-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Wolf

https://mensamindgames.com/

YouTube

Transcript

Alan: There we go. Got nice little rainbow ha for you today. Yeah, there you go. You find the pot of gold. Exactly. Being’s biggest lip.

let me do a couple things here. Save this and get out of it. I often try to return as much memory to my system as possible so that there’s no. Oh. And then I stopped responding.

okay. I

Stephen: think we’re good. You all good? All right. So kick off our discussion. I had an interesting revelation this past week, past couple days.

Alan: When you mention that, I was curious as to what would it, what would merit the word revelation? Let’s hear

Stephen: it. Yes. and I figured you’d like that. As an apple guy, you pretty much buy your machines.

And that’s what you get that this is what you have a couple choices of memory and processor, you don’t buy parts and put it together that that’s oh, that’s

Alan: You can they’re opening things up now, but for a long time, it was closed and only all a authorized dealers and stuff like that.

Stephen: That’s right. Okay. So I talked about my computer parts. I bought, I got a good deal. I got some a couple generation old stuff, whatever which I’m still working on. Just haven’t had the time and I did get it together and it wasn’t responding. I’m like, oh, great. What did my hook up correctly?

It’s not like I have five places. Everything goes into one spot, but the processor did not have pins. It just has flat contacts. So you can’t put it in and bend

Alan: pins. That’s cool. I guess they’ve fixed that, which was, we mentioned a couple times ago that was like the most nervewracking part of doing in the system world was one pin gone and I just blown hundreds of bucks,

Stephen: you know what I mean?

But the problem was there’s four positions that it could fit in and the very helpful documentat...

Overview

We’re old guys. we have (hopefully) some wisdom to go with our experience. What we don’t have is the quickness needed for video games nor the desire to waste our time dealing with things we don’t have to.

Seems to have become our topic for each discussion today.

First it’s playing video games with millenials. Then its hotel and fast food expectations. Then its our coffee pots.

We reminisce about collecting and how that has changed – maybe not for the better in all aspects.

Recommendations

Maybe not a recommendation – https://www.sonder.com/

https://www.netflix.com/title/81150303

YouTube

Transcript

Stephen: All right. Good morning, Ellen.

Alan: Good morning. We’re at the moon landing, huh? It is August.

Exactly. I it’s just, I have this, all these backgrounds available and I rotate amongst them and that’s its own kind of weirdness of oh, I repeated this one. I don’t wanna use the same one.

And yet yes, moon landing. I think I actually have changed it since what it, the real date was and stuff like that. But this just seemed like optimistic and Hey, there’s our beautiful blue marble there’s so much going on nowadays with, we only got the one planet we’re not ready to go terraforming, Mars, that escape yet.

Stephen: So there, there was a cartoon based on a comic book that I used to love called the. And there was a bad guy that wanted to blow the moon and his response was, whoa, you can’t do that. Or they wanted to blow up the earth. I’m sorry. They wanted to blow up the earth. He goes, whoa, you can’t do that. Where would I keep all my stuff?

that’s pretty very tongue and cheek way of looking at it. Me, I’ve got the same background and it’s because guess what? The parts and technology for putting your computer together is way different. And for some reason I’m not getting anything coming up on my put together computer right now.

So I’ve

Alan: gotta get it used to be, it just, they kinda worked and it fit and then you turned it on and, oh my, oh no. Yeah.

Stephen: So I’m dealing with that. I got my, I got a hard drive and I looked at it and said, this is just a really big USB stick. Where do I put this? and there’s new connections to

Alan: put in there, SSD.

Exactly. I think I mentioned Colleen. SSD in her MacBook air has gone south. And I have done, I have all kinds of tools. I have tech tool pro and drive genius and things like that. And they kept on fixing it and stabilizing it, but then it didn’t stay stable. And so I kept, I was feeling really foolish and guilty over, Hey, hon.

I fixed it up and now I gotta go to California. And then two days in she’s dead in the water. So luckily besides her laptop, everybody has a phone nowadays. She has a work laptop as well, but all kinds of stuff that you do on your home laptop, if you really divided your life, you don’t wanna start mixing between, you don’t wanna on a work laptop. You don’t want co-mingling of personal files and stuff like that. So I bought an SSD. I’m sorry if I went through a little bit from a place called other world ...

Overview

As summer winds down, we discuss some of the events we’ve been going to and some still to come. Summer’s are always busy, and we try to enjoy everything about it.

Alan had a talk at the Akron Geek Fest, but it was kind of a bust. Not to worry – we both are giving several talks over the next several months.

Recommendations

https://www.akronlibrary.org/geekfest

http://www.lakewoodartsfest.org/

https://www.beckcenter.org/shows/somethingrotten

http://www.gamepuzzles.com/

https://www.clevelandmetroparks.com/news-press/2021/june-2021/asian-lantern-festival-returns-to-cleveland-metrop

The Sandman – https://amzn.to/3CaGivm

UPCOMING TALKS

Regional Gathering

http://chicago.us.mensa.org/weem/

YouTube

Transcript

Alan: A new shirt for the birthday. I got a nice, and it’s this dark green looks black on screen. Yeah. But that’s have things very muted here. I need to have face glow instead of side light or whatever else might

Stephen: be happening. Yeah. I told you I got all the parts from my new computer and I haven’t got it together yet because I was an idiot.

I thought I took the case out and I couldn’t find the screws and stuff. So I took it all the way back, which is like an hour drive and exchanged it and came back and here they had put the screws in a box and put it in the hard drive bay, which I’d never seen before. So

Alan: I it’s the case. Exactly.

Stephen: Yeah.

So then I was putting this one together and I was like, oh, the little IO shield dust guard in the back where you plug in everything, I left that attached to the old one. So I called ’em up and they have it waiting for me. So I still haven’t gotten it together

Alan: an hour, drive a penalty

Stephen: each way. Yeah.

So good thing I save money is I can spend it on gas, so happy birthday to you. And so summer’s winding down. We, we’ve got just a couple weeks left. Kids are going back to school this week, next week so there’s I suggested, Hey, let’s talk about events, cuz you mentioned a whole bunch of things you’ve been to and we got some things coming up, but this past weekend you were at the geek Fest in Akron Akron library.

So it sounds like you had an interesting talk so

Alan: it’s yeah let’s just dive into it. The geek Fest itself. I had not heard of it before. You said you’ve actually been there, so that’s cool. It’s been going on, I think for 3, 4, 5 years, but I just wasn’t aware of it. I had used the form they had online.

That was for getting a booth to say, Hey, I don’t wanna run a booth, but I wanna give you a talk. Here’s the topics on which I could speak. Here’s my, my specs, I’ve been at Kent state and at Baldwin Wal...

Overview

Even though we don’t cover all our chosen topics, we flow between talking about tech topics quite nicely. Stephen just got a new computer to put together and Alan got a new Apple Watch.

In between we discuss old computer games with new tech and we discuss using car tech in ways that hasn’t been done before.

Oh, and what about companies using tech to control their products to a degree that seems unreasonable.

And what would a discussion be without throwing in all the great new shows coming out or the ones we’ve missed and need to binge.

Recommendations

Micro Center – https://www.microcenter.com/

Apple Watch – https://www.apple.com/watch

BMW Seats –https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/bmw-clarifies-its-rules-around-subscription-based-heated-seats-and-it-s-not-quite-what-you-think/ar-AA10bSAV

HP – https://news.softpedia.com/news/why-hp-can-remotely-disable-printers-if-you-cancel-a-4-99-monthly-subscription-528922.shtml

Civ 3 – https://civilization.com/civilization-3/

GOG – https://www.gog.com/galaxy

Doctor Who – https://www.doctorwho.tv/news-and-features

YouTube

Transcript

[00:00:00] Stephen: Ooh, nice tie dye shirt.

[00:00:02] Alan: Exactly. You got the tie eye going. I there’s a lot of tie eye when I wear it it’s not really about concealment it’s not quite camo. Someone just commented online about, Hey girls ladies, when you wear pink camo. Exactly. What are you doing? Hiding among the flamingos or what’s the point of yeah.

[00:00:20] Stephen: Oh, Hey whatever let each their own right. Met our, a word in the universe nowadays. So I really wanna hear about this new apple watch, but I’ve got an exciting, fun update for myself. so I still got my same background. I’m still in the corner in the hallway at the moment. Okay.

You

[00:00:42] Alan: said you were working on the home office and so I was expecting to see new things. I didn’t change my doctor who yet, so I guess we’re still yeah, ,

[00:00:49] Stephen: it’s a busy summer so I do have the office I’ve been working on getting that cleared out. I got nice new air conditioner in there, so I don’t die.

I was gonna put up a scientist Skynet south I was at Microcenter last night, helping my cousin find a laptop for his grandson for biomed. He’s going in the third grade and they give these laptop requirements and I’m. Why did these third graders need a $600 laptop? Whatever, especially when there’s been several efforts to get like a hundred laptop available.

[00:01:21] Alan: know, A long time ago,