Star Trek – Engage!

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling

I embrace all things geek, but I believe that with this blog post, I’m taking that love to a whole new level.

Earlier this year I had a massive knee surgery. As a result, I spend several months laying on my couch, working on my computer and watching reruns on TV. Over that time I discovered Star Trek: The Next Generation. After a few episodes, I was hooked. More importantly, so was my wife!

I grabbed the complete DVD box set and within a few weeks we had watched all 178, hour long episodes. I think that officially makes us “trekkies“.

After we watched all of the episodes and the TNG related movies, I was still hungry for more. I picked up a copy of “Make It So: Leadership Lessons from Star Trek The Next Generation”. The title says it all. A leadership book based on TNG. To be honest, it was a major let down, but I still wanted more.

As luck would have it, one of the largest Star Trek exhibits ever was going on display just 20 minutes from my house, and practically next door to the university I attended.

The exhibit ended up being way sweeter then I could have imagined. To my surprise,  most of the items were from The Next Generation. In my opinion, the most amazing thing in the exhibit was the re-constructed main engineering. It looked perfect! We were able to walk around in it and play with everything. It was awesome. I really wish they allowed pictures to be taken. I wanted a picture of me modifying the warp drives in the worst way. At least I can say that I got to see it.

When Halloween 2010 rolled around, I know just what I wanted to be, Captain Jean-Luc Picard! Amy wanted to be a Vulcan science officer. I wasn’t going argue with that! I have to say that the bald cap and pointed ears worked well for us. My make up made me look more like Data then Picard. Maybe I’ll join my love of Robots and Star Trek and go as Data next year.

The Star Trek Exhibit in Riverside, Ca is running until February 2011. I highly recommend seeing it.

Rubik’s Cube, my new favorite thing

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling, video

In my quest to embrace all things geek, I’m surprised that is has taken me so long to fall in love with this staple of geekdom. I am of course talking about the Rubiks cube.

I never had a rubiks cube growing up, sure I played with them but never at any length of time, or the intention of solving one.

The company that I currently work for had a developers conference and had some rubiks cubes with the company logo printed on them. After the conference, some of the left over cubes made their way into the hands of @BoringGeek, @LMajano, and myself. Nothing could have been crueler then handing some engineers a puzzle like a rubiks cube. I’m not going to lie, I physically lost sleep trying to solve the cube, but I had fun doing it.

I eventually broke down and started doing research on the rubiks cube and how to solve it. The more I learned about the cube, the more interested in it I became. I realized that solving the cube required pattern recognition and the implementation of algorithms through a series of motions. It was at that point in my mind that my computer science mindset kicked in and I started to make the cube do what I wanted instead of being surprised by what happened. I was in control of feeding the variables into the function and the function would produce a predictable and consistent result.

I can now solve the cube consistently, and typically around 3 minutes, a far cry from the speed cubing champions of the world, but I’m still proud of myself and continue to have fun solving the cube.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGUWBwg1JDo[/youtube]