We all know what a tattoo is. They’ve been around for centuries and surely will continue to decorate the skin for centuries to come. Time only enhances them by adding vibrant colors and ink that shows up best under black light. While mothers have always cringed at the thought of their baby getting a tattoo, most of us know someone with a tattoo or two and some of us have our own. Recently, I had a couple more done, so I thought I would post them and some that other people have that are equally as geeky.

I’ll go first

Above is a photo showing all my ink. Almost 3 years ago, I got a parallel port tattooed on my back. That’s the port in the middle that is a little lighter than the rest. I have been in love with computers since the first time I was on one in the early 80’s and it’s something I am very passionate about. Years ago, I wanted to get a bar code, but by time I got around to it, everyone else had one, so I opted for a parallel port instead. It was my first and when it was done, I immediately started thinking about what else I wanted done. Life kept me busy and I eventually started thinking about it again and worked out what I would want next. Last weekend, I headed to Americana Tattoo and added to my collection. The bottom row is a FireWire logo, followed by two FireWire ports. At the top, I finally got my bar code. I figured I shouldn’t care what everyone else has and did it anyway. However, I did make it a little more original. I used an online bar code image generator to generate a Code 128 barcode. I chose this standard because it’s easy to scan. The bar code should actually scan as “Joe” and the numbers underneath it spell out “Joe” in binary. These tattoos are just a small part of a much bigger plan.

Other geeky and nerdy tattoos
There’s a ton of geeky tattoo photos out there on the net, but I just grabbed all these from the Geeky Tattoos pool on Flickr. I had been planning a Matrix port tattoo to go with all my other ports, but I think it needs to be just a bit lower than the one below. I love the Tank Girl tat, because I’m a big Tank Girl fan. Of course, there’s the binary and the HTML-like tags (which are also on my list). Finally, there’s a bigger version of the FireWire logo, proving I’m not the only one crazy enough to ink that into my skin, and the “OMG LOL” tattoo, which has me thinking, well, “OMG! LOL!”.

Now I have questions for you.
1. Do you have any ink? If so, how many, what are they, and where on your body? (picture links are welcome)
2. What’s the geekiest (or your favorite) tattoo you’ve seen?
3. Any plans for geeky tattoos?

For quite some time, there’s been a parallel universe online with a ton of users and no real competition. Second Life was, well, your second life… a place to get away from the “meat world” and be someone else for a while. It still is, but now they have something to worry about. There’s only a few possible companies that have the resources and expendable cash to throw their hat into the ring. Google is one of those few and they’ve tossed their hat in with their own virtual world, Lively. It’s not much of a surprise that they’d play in this still very open arena. What did catch me off guard is the lack of publicity from a company positioned to turn the virtual worlds crowd upside down.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t really tried Second Life, but it’s not for lack of trying. I actually thought it looked pretty cool (and still do), but I couldn’t get it to install. Not only would it crash over and over again, but I found myself more frustrated just trying to get through to their support. Ultimately, I never got a response and gave up. Lively has its own problems, which I will get to, but it’s also still just in its infancy.

Get your new virtual life
What do you need to get started? Not much, really. One of the great ideas that makes me like Lively right off the bat is that it runs right in your web browser. The advantage of this is that it doesn’t suck up all your computer’s memory or require a powerful machine to play. Aside from a modern web browser, all you really need is a Google account and some free time. The Google account isn’t a bad idea, anyway. If you don’t have one already, you will be prompted to create one.

When you sign up, you create your Lively username that people will see and enter a couple other boring details. Then you get to dive right in and create your second you. This process begins with the selection of an avatar to represent you. The pickin’s are still pretty slim, but not horrible. One thing I found pretty interesting here was the ability to become male, female, or have your choice of a few different animals. If you ever wanted to live life as a pig, now is your chance.
Once you’ve chosen your avatar type, you need to refine it with some details. Start with a hair style and move on to your choice of pants, shirt, shoes, etc. When you’re all done, you’ve got this fully dressed avatar, ready to mingle with the crowd - or walk around aimlessly, clicking on things. The avatar options and finer detail choices still leave a lot to be desired. The selection process is pretty simple and the option variety is OK for the initial launch, but I really hope Google is working on rolling out more options as this thing grows. It’s still pretty new and too many of us look alike.

Walking, talking, dancing and fighting
Lively, just like any richly interactive experience, takes a bit of learning and some getting used to. Some things are intuitive and others aren’t. For example, to interact with a person or object, you just click on it. Simple enough. Try looking around and simple may not be the first word that enters your mind unless you enjoy flight simulators. Eventually, you get used to it, but it still doesn’t feel natural. What is pretty simple is the ability to drag yourself around. Click on your avatar, hold the mouse button down, and drag in the direction you want to go. Take it slow, though. You’re walking, not teleporting.

Once you’ve got your moves down, find a quiet corner and practice your animations. You can dance, applaud, body slam someone, flirt, you name it. Just right-click on your avatar and you are presented with a pretty healthy list of options.

Meet others and make friends (or enemies)
I met someone right away in Lively. I didn’t catch his name, but he beat the hell out of me while I was choosing pants. Rude, sure, but definitely not surprising. Any time you enter an environment in which anonymity is commonplace and even encouraged, you can expect to find people who never aged past 12 years old. The beating wasn’t as bad as the general demeanor of a lot of the people. In my first visit, Lively was only days old and it was full of these types of people. When I went back tonight, there were more rooms (including one called “Fight Club”) and a lot more people, most of whom were acting much more mature.

Getting to know people is pretty easy. Just walk right up, click on someone, and start chatting. You can send a private message by “whispering”, or you take a completely different approach and just start dancing with them. One thing I hope they add is the ability to ignore everyone else for a bit while I discover items, dance with someone, etc.

So far, I like Lively. While I may not have a lot of time for it, I can see myself relaxing in a new environment for a while after a long day. The installation process was very simple and impressed me after Second Live let me down, but in the few times I’ve played with it, it crashed twice after I closed the Lively tab in Firefox. There’s a lot more to learn and a lot for Google to add and improve upon, but it’s a nice start.

Try out Lively for yourself and let me know what you think or share things you’ve discovered that I haven’t found yet.

Here’s why the partnership between Entrecard and SezWho is important for bloggers everywhere, and something all bloggers should be taken advantage of.

1.) Your blog will get more comments. Under the partnership, when bloggers leave you a comment, they will receive Entrecard Credits, the micro-payment currency that allows you to advertise on 14,000 high quality blogs. If there’s one thing bloggers thrive on, its comments. Comments are the blood of a blog if the posts are the organs. So it’s no wonder that any system that is going to get your blog more comments just rocks.

2.) The comments will be high quality comments. Since low quality comments don’t get rewarded with any credits, people won’t waste their time and energy leaving poor quality comments. People who take it upon themselves to comment will make sure to leave good, relevant and valuable comments.

3.) It will get you to leave more comments. Let’s face it. We’ve all been in the following situation: We’re reading a blog post, we have a slight desire to chime in and comment, but laziness takes over and we click away or x out. With credits on the line though, we’re all the more likely to actually leave our comments. Not to mention it might put you on a mission every day to go out and comment. Commenting is one of the tried and true powerhouse methods to drive traffic to your blog and develop a reputation. Any system that is going to effectively get me to comment more often rocks.

4.) Credits!! It’s no secret why we want credits. We want them so we can advertise on the 14,000+ blogs in Entrecard. So you can either go dropping cards until your fingers hurt, or you can start commenting on some blogs!

5.) Check me out. One of the coolest features of SezWho is that you can “check me out”. Just by clicking a link, you can see all the comments someone has left from all over the blogosphere. How cool is that. Ok, so it doesn’t really have anything to do with the Entrecard partnership, but I wouldn’t have installed SezWho if it wasn’t for the Entrecard partnership, so it gets on the list. I love seeing what other comments people have left on other blogs. You might not understand how cool it is until you try it.

6.) Reduced bounce rate. Entrecard traffic used to mean someone dropping their card and leaving your site. Every now and then someone would subscribe, or comment, or click an ad. But now, now at least 50% of the traffic is commenting. THATS HUGE! My bounce rate has dropped like a rock. Awesome. Nobody likes a high bounce rate.

7.) BACKLINKS. Every comment you leave is a backlink to your blog. So by leaving a few comments every day, your slowly and steadily building backlinks to your blogs. And you’re earning credits while you do it. Nice.

8.) It’s Viral. When a lot of people start commenting your blog now, and other people “check them out” from comments they’ve left on other blogs to see where they’re commenting now, a huge mass of viral traffic will follow them… directly to your blog. That may not make much sense at first, but you’ll see what we’re talking about.

9.) School of blogging. More than anything, what this motivates us to do, is to learn how to write posts that are more inviting of comments. It also motivates us to learn how to leave the best comments we can -and how to be valuable contributors. For only if bloggers find our comments useful, do we get credits. And only if we write our posts well, will bloggers comment. The whole system really is quite genius in how it works like that.

10.) And the final reason why the Entrecard SezWho partnership is important for bloggers is… drumroll please… it’s gonna keep us blogging. Let’s face it, if we pour our hearts out into post after post, only to receive zero comments, its a blow to our motivation and our drive. Without the support of commentators sharing their feelings, thoughts and opinions on our blog, well, why blog at all, right? Why build a baseball field if no one is going to play ball on it? There are 100 million more blogs now than there were five years ago. That’s 100 million more blogs competing for comments. That’s pretty intense. But with Entrecard and SezWho, you don’t have to worry about finding people to come comment on your blog. All you have to do is focus on writing quality content, and let the Entrecard community take care of the rest.

So there you have it. The top 10 reasons why the Entrecard - SezWho partnership is important for bloggers, and why if you’re serious about blogging, you should be using Entrecard and SezWho to catapult your community to new heights.

I’m not a Radiohead fan, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be one. It’s just not my taste in music. I will, however, be subscribing to their blog or newsletter or whatever they have as soon as I’m done with this article. After they created a huge buzz by giving fans their album “In Rainbows” at whatever price the fan felt was fair, and now this House of Cards video, I just have to see what else they’re going to do.

They’re not sharks, but they’ve got lasers
What I’m talking about is lasers… a whole lot of them…. to make a music video without cameras. That’s right. We all know that lasers are cool and can be made to do some neat things beyond just being functional, but the band has taken creativity to a new level, blending artistry with technology and innovation to invoke oohs and ahhs from fans and non-fans, alike. Just take a look at the video below and see what I mean.

How it works
Even better than putting out a cool new video in a fun new way is showing how it was done. The whole thing was accomplished with a couple technologies, but with no cameras at all. The two technologies used to form live 3D views of the action were a Geometric Informatics product called GeoVideo and Velodyne’s LIDAR.

All of the close-up shots were handled by the GeoVideo:

GeoVideo is a high-resolution (over 600,000 triangles per frame) 3D geometry video acquisition system that provides 3D surface geometry data recording capabilities at 180 frames per second with real-time rendering for previewing geometry video data. The 3D geometry video data is immediately available for recording. Each video frame is captured with texture information that is aligned exactly point for point with 3D geometry.

To produce all the exterior scenes, the LIDAR gathers points with a couple groupings of lasers:

The HDL-64E operates on a rather simple premise: instead of a single laser firing through a rotating mirror, 64 lasers are mounted on upper and lower blocks of 32 lasers each and the entire unit spins. This design allows for 64 separate lasers to each fire thousands of times per second, providing far more data points per second and a much richer point cloud than conventional designs. The 64 lasers are employed with each laser/detector pair precisely aligned at predetermined vertical angles, resulting in a 26.8 degree vertical FOV. By spinning the entire unit at speeds up to 900RPM (15 Hz), a 360 degree FOV is inherently delivered. Regardless of the spin rate, 1.5 million data points (i.e. pixels) are generated each second, providing an exponentially richer point cloud than ever before possible.

Both technologies are pretty awesome and you can poke at the final 3D viewpoints here. Hit the play button, wait 5 minutes, and then click and drag on the view to alter the perspective. Try the up and down arrows on your keyboard to zoom in, too. You’ll get a better feel for how it works that way.

Give us a remix
Finally, the only thing cooler than showing off their new video and then telling us how it was all done is providing the point data and the tools to remix it. Including myself, over 2,000 people have downloaded the remix materials to make their own version of the sure-to-be-viral music video. The goal is to create your own version of the video and submit it to their House of Cards YouTube group. I think it’s a wonderful idea to inspire others to create and share. So wonderful, in fact, that I decided to poke at it myself.

Once I downloaded everything, I found that it’s nothing more than position/intensity data read into the Processing application by a small script. Being a programmer, I went straight for the code. When in doubt, change values one at a time. That’s what I did. I started randomizing things to change colors and pixel positions, but it gets interesting when you start replacing values with the aptly named frame counting variable, frameCounter. Just replace the last value (255) in the stroke() function call with “frameCounter” and watch the face fade in as brightness increases from zero with each frame count. Below are some screen shots of what I accomplished in about 30 minutes with some light tinkering in the code. I haven’t opened the data files yet.

Now play around with it yourself and see what you can make it do. If you do play, be sure to link to your images or videos from the comments below.