Results tagged “geek”

Despite the God-like powers of Mayor Gavin Newsom's bedroom eyes, large hands, and gravelly voice that managed to woo Terry Childs to handover the passwords to City Hall's system, administrators are still having trouble accessing some parts of the network, or so says Network World. Admins, it seems, are "still locked out of the city's VoIP system and LANs within the Sheriff's Department and the Recreation & Park Department." Zoinks.

With a whole lot of charm and little bit of pluck, Mayor Gavin Newsom managed to get the much-needed passwords from former IT nerd Terry Childs during a jailhouse visit last night. If you recall, Childs, City Hall's former network administrator , has been incarcerated since July 13 after failing to handover the correct security codes to his bosses after getting the boot. Newsom, it seems, had a secret meeting with Child last night, one so intimate that neither the District Attorney Kamala Harris' office nor the knew about it. Childs remains in jail with several felony computer-tampering counts on his head, with a reduced bail set at 5 million.

Terry Childs, 43, City Hall's computer network administrator, was arrested and charged with four counts of computer tampering this past weekend. Why? Well, according to the Chronicle, he "tampered with the city's new FiberWAN (Wide Area Network), where records such as officials' e-mails, city payroll files, confidential law enforcement documents and jail inmates' bookings are stored." That is to say, he created his eyes only a master password for the entire network. And after his supervisors triedfiring him for poor job performance? Childs decided not to reveal the critical password. It's a case of good old fashion job insurance, folks. Anyway, Child now sits in the clink rwith a $5 million bail. Alas, an IT geek from Pittsburg has finally -- finally!! -- brought the City to its knees. Bravo, Childs. Bravo.

• Beatropolis: Oh joy! Beatropolis has returned! (Not that they really went anywhere, but it always feels like forever when they're not around.) Anyway, Beatropolis' special brand of dance rock, live drum 'n' bass, and futuristic space pop will have you up until the wee hours of the morning. The Toy Soldiers (a heady nu-electrorawk mix of Flaming Lips, Justin Timberlake, and Hot Chip) and the Buttercream Gang (a local indie/post-punk/afro-beat band) also perform starting at 8 p.m. at Rickshaw Stop; $8.
• The Geek System: Starring Hard 'n Phirm , Reggie Watts, and " We have no idea what that last thing means--okay, some of that other stuff, too--but anything Kraftwerk-y is simply smashing by us. Starts at 10 p.m. at the Knockout; free.

Let's start with "Beauty and the Geek," and our rubberband-loving local Josh. Last week ended with the shocking addition of a new team featuring a male beauty and a female geek. First order of the night: pool party! And it was really boring! Let's move on to the challenge, which required the geeks to rap and the beauties to debate about current political topics. Apparently Josh's rap was so bad they didn't even bother to show more than a few seconds of him forgetting the words and jumping around on stage. Needless to say, his team did not win that challenge. As for the debating bit, his Betty Boop partner Hollie debated on the pro side of the Alaskan Arctic Refuge oil drilling debate arguing that cars can't run on canola oil, or whatever it is "hippies think we can run cars on." His team didn't win that one either, (the male beauty did). But it's all good, because they weren't picked to go through the elimination test, so Josh is around for another week.

As was pointed out by a reader last week, we do have a local geek representing the Bay Area on "Beauty and the Geek" this season. His name is Josh Bishop-Moser and he's a Mechanical Engineering major at U. C. Berkeley and president of the Rubberband Club. (We can't find a MySpace page for him; could he possibly not have one??) Unfortunately, we had to sit through 45 minutes of the two-hour premiere before we even got to see him, but compared to some of the other geeks, he's kind of cute. Except for the weird widow's peak 'do. And the hairy back. He introduced himself to the roomful of beauties (one of whom agreed he was cute), told them he was the president of the rubber band club, and then did a William Tell trick by shooting a plastic cup off of one of the girl's heads. He's definitely geeky, but at least he could take out a bully with a well-aimed rubberband.

The premiere offerings tonight are limited, with the 8 p.m. return of "Beauty and the Geek" on the CW being the only new show in the line-up. The show maintains its "hot girls, geeky guys" convention once again this season, but they will be adding one geeky girl and one hot guy to the "social experiment" this time around. That's right, this isn't a dating show, although there have been hook-ups in the past. Instead, the geeks try to expand the girls' minds, while the girls try to help the geeks up their game. Ha ha ha! Look how dumb the girls are! Ho ho ho! Look how socially inept the geeks are! Lather, and repeat. We have no idea if any of the geeks or beauties hail from the Bay Area, as their bios don't give out that info, but we hope so, because the reality TV locals pickings are slim this season!

Geek out! At Ask a Scientist SF, a monthly lecture slash happy hour with a guest speaker on some sciencey topic. This month's meet-up touches on everything you ever wanted to know about terra incognita, Antarctica, with Kurt Cuffey, a UC Berkeley professor of geography. Get there by 7pm to snag a beer and a seat. Axis Cafe, 1208 Eighth St., SF.

The last of our slightly less-than-timely coverage of the Alternative Press Expo, which took place last weekend, focuses on folks telling their sequential art stories in a longer form. Which, as much as we love the other stuff, is really what we dig the most. We focus on Ted Naifeh, Dave Dwonch, Joseph Costirlos, Von Allan, Jaimel M. Hemphill, and Javier Gonzalez.

Friends of SFist, Charlie Anders (Writers with Drinks) and Annalee Newitz (whose Techsploitation column we read each week with the Weeklies) have a new anthology out called Tonight, contributors will be reading at City Lights (261 Columbus Ave. at Broadway). The book is a collection of first-person stories by women working in tech, science, game design, and other male-dominated "geeky" fields like tech law and even comic book writing. And of course the book has its own blog! (7pm)

The big news yesterday, which hit our feed reader right before our wifi crapped out, was Google CEO Eric Schmidt driving down the 101 to Cupertino to join Apple's Board of Directors. Considering some of the trouble Apple's been in lately -- suppliers suing newspapers over reports of overworked employees in China, a less-than-stellar environmental record, stock option backdating scandals -- could this be a way for Google to outsource all the evil they're supposedly not going to do? Oh right, this is about taking on Microsoft, kinda. Apple certainly loves to talk trash about Windows.

Hello on your puzzling adventures, Perplex puzzlers! We're hoping they lured you to our site out of your competitive spirit of gamesmanship, and we'll keep you with our obsessive coverage of most things Bay Area.

that we want to kill anyone and everyone that makes a "something on a something" joke. But then we realized that there was no way we could ever win this fight, and, hell, if you can't beat them, we might as well join them. And with that, you have the theme of this weeks' Gothamist network post.

On Saturday night, we went to go watch Raiders of the Lost Ark at Dolores Park. We love the idea of seeing movies in the park and couldn't think of a movie more perfect for such a showing. But as soon as we got there, we realized that in seeing the movie outside at the park, we were going to have to deal with our least favorite aspect of communal events, that being other people. We hate other people.

Video geeks are descending on San Francisco this weekend for Vloggercon 2006 (or 'video blogger conference' if you're not a fan of tech neologisms). It was inspired by Webzine and the original Vloggercon in New York City last year. The daytime events at the Swedish American Hall are booked solid, but tonight there will be a "Meet the Vloggers" event at the Apple Store which is open to the public (likely followed by drinks at the House of Shields), and there are plenty of other satellite events.

Hey, remember when SFist Rita asked for Manuel Jiminez' thoughts regarding The Daly's call for Bush's impeachment at the Board of Supervisors? Well, Manuel went and responded! There's nothing that SFist loves more than people actually paying attention. Left in SF notes that the work at Bernal Park starts tomorrow (and links to a Bernal neighborhood blog we hadn't seen before). Josh Wolf heads to a the federal building for a grand jury appearance in vain. And if you thought the Dykes on Bikes trademark case was over, think again.

Stacey over at Contraversion links to a hilarious spread in the New York Times magazine. The picture you're looking at is not the work of some photoshop geek. That is a real tattoo on the arm of a real chef who obviously adores Alice Waters. Why? Chef Nino Mancari of Delaware's Fish On! explains: ''I wanted to do a tribute to American food...'Eventually I'll get James and Julia, and with Alice it'll be the holy trinity.''

Art critic and photographer Claudine, who has been something of a modern-day Chalfant or Ahern by cataloging photos of graffitti pieces throughout the city, left a comment in our Get Ur Geek On: Warbussing EssEff piece where we had posted a picture of his trademark frog on the mural space at Galeria de la Raza. She tipped us to a debate about the piece over at Flickr brought on by a posting at the gallery shop taking Ribity to task for defacing the billboard space, which often features some pretty exciting work (and is often tagged by others as well). The post reads:

After the discovery of the holy grail of Bay Area coffee last week, it's a good time to sit back and take stock of why we do this. And how we go about it.

It's been a while since our last Get Ur Geek On, so we've got a lot of hottness today and will use a bullet list, power-point style, because our attention spans have begun to shrivel in inverse proportion to our abdomen's expansion:
• Dan Gillmor, the last top tech writer standing at the San Jose Mercury News, has decided to leave the Knight-Ridder corporate family to become a 'Citizen Journalist.' Is that a fancy term for unemployed blogger? [From Slashdot]
• PowerLight, of Berkeley, has installed the world's largest solar array in warm, sunny Germany. SuperaffenT****nturbogeil, naturlick! [From SFgate]
• Apple can't keep up with demand for Mac computers, so you better get your butt down to the Apple Store and grab what you can, or your relationship will founder on the rocks of the iRiver. [From Cult of Mac]