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The photographer, Terje Sorgjerd, braved -25C temperatures, lugging 40kg of gear around the wilderness for a week. But the result is magical.

Just a nudge that our friends over at O’Reilly are doing something special today. For the Deal of the Day, they’re offering 50% off any O’Reilly, No Starch or Tidbits title and using all of the proceeds to benefit the Red Cross Society of Japan.

And don’t forget our own GeekDad page of geeky charities helping Japan!

We watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with the kids Friday night. It had been a long, long time since my wife and I had watched it, and all our fond memories of the movie put us in a mind to share it with the boys, because we knew a lot of the physical humor would appeal to them. What I didn’t remember was how truly good a movie it was. Sure, it’s a simple plot: High School Senior decides to take a hookie day from school, and gets his manically depressed best friend and his beautiful girlfriend to come along. They have a day full of adventures while the school principal plots to catch him, and exact the ultimate punishment – holding Ferris back from graduation (boy, that sure does date the film, doesn’t it?).

I’d like to posit for a moment that Ferris Bueller the character is a metaphor for the Buddha. Ferris lives life to the fullest, with an almost prophetic understanding of what life has in store for he and his friends, knowing that this one day could be their last together before college and adulthood grab them and turn then into new and different people, severing their adolescent connection. He pushes their limits, but treats them with an affection and wisdom far beyond his years. Plus all his mugging to the fourth wall helps reinforce the sense that Ferris is somehow in complete control of it all, omnipotent and omniscient.

What’s interesting about the movie is that though Ferris (played by Matthew Broderick in his youthful heyday) is the titular star of the story, he doesn’t grow or change through the film. In fact, the character who grows the most is Cameron, Ferris’ rich hypochondriac best friend played amazingly by Alan Ruck.

Cameron has a bad home life, with constantly fighting parents. His father, specifically, seems to love his prize Ferrari more than his own son, and it’s the adventure in the borrowed car that ultimately helps Cameron come to terms with his own depression and lack of direction.

Two cool bits of trivia about Alan Ruck: he was 29 years-old when he played the 18 year-old character Cameron (you couldn’t tell by his looks, but his acting chops certainly showed his maturity); and Ruck has the distinction of being one of the five actors to have played the Captain of the USS Enterprise in an official Star Trek property (he was Captain Harriman in Generations).

Also, a pre-Dirty Dancing Jennifer Grey plays Ferris’ uptight, slightly spoiled sister who spends most of the movie mad at her brother’s effortless flaunting of authority, but finds her own sense of self and happiness with the help of a police-station make-out session with a sage Charlie Sheen. Did you know she’s Joel Grey’s daughter? That’s so cool!

Probably the biggest question that came to my mind when watching the movie (other than whether it was really a good idea – we’d forgotten it was PG-13, and the language truly earned that rating), was whether Ferris was a geek. He obviously wasn’t a jock or a nerd (though he hacks the school computers to change his attendance – certainly a preview of call-back to Broderick’s part in Wargames), and indeed he had a very beautiful girlfriend (Mia Sara) and a certain cache’ in the student body (when it’s heard he’s home sick, the rumor that he’s dying and needs a kidney results in a school-wide outpouring of affection). But he seems like the smart, outsider kind of kid who would be into RPGs, and theater, and being outside of the mainstream. Maybe his level of comfort in his own shoes suggests he is the ultimate geek, aware and totally accepting of his outside status to the point that he becomes popular because of it. He is a geek to aspire to.

But maybe that’s too much analysis. It is just a movie, after all.

So, this being a geeky parenting blog, we’re down to the final question: should you share this movie with your kids? I’d say yes, but only if they are a bit older, or you’ve developed a good understanding with them about hearing adult language in films. Ferris Bueller is a fun movie for parents who grew up in the ’80s and for kids who will appreciate the physical humor and flaunting of abused authority, and it isn’t terribly dated in look or feel.

Wired: Funny, tightly-edited story, with a great performance by Alan Ruck.

Tired: Not much.

[This post originally ran in 2009, but we repeated it here today in honor of Mr. Broderick's birthday.]

Every now and then, GeekDad gets a nice e-mail from a reader who has done something really cool. And this is really cool!

Mark Anderson is a Chicago cartoonist who spent two years designing and building a Lego spaceship for each letter of the alphabet (inspired, of course, by the X-Wing Fighter).

He says on his Andertoons blog:

When I was a kid growing up on Star Wars, I thought the X-wing was the best spaceship I’d ever seen. Of course the Millennium Falcon was great, and goodness knows the good old NCC-1701 was awesome, but the X-wing and its letter inspired brethren the Y-wing and A-wing (what the hell was with the B-wing?! It looked nothing like a B!) were just the coolest.

So later on as I got back into LEGO and was building spaceships I thought revisiting the idea of alphabet shaped ships would be fun.

It’s taken me almost two years (I have kids and a job after all), but now I’ve done all 26 letters of the alphabet in glorious spacey LEGO.

Check out Lego Alphabet Spaceships at Anderson’s Flickr site.

If you weren’t lucky enough to catch Paul at SXSW last weekend or at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre Monday, then you can catch this sci-fi-comedy in a cinema near you starting Friday. Here are the 10 things you should know about it.

(To see the trailer and find out more, head on over to the (fully Flashed-up) official site — after you’re done here, of course!)

1. What’s it all about, then?
Paul is an wisecracking alien who has been holed up in Area 51 for the last 60 years, but now decides it’s time to leave the top-secret military base. He ends up hitching a ride with comic book geeks Graeme and Clive as they start a road trip after attending San Diego Comic-Con.

2. Will I like it?
If you read this blog regularly, then I’m fairly confident in saying that you will. The movie was written by and stars übergeeks Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, whom you may know from or Shaun of the Dead or Hot Fuzz or the excellently geeky British sitcom, Spaced.

3. Will my kids like it?
If they’re old enough to get in, then probably. The film is rated R, as Paul likes his weed, and there’s a lot of swearing — and that’s British-style swearing, too. After meeting Paul, Kristin Wiig’s character, Ruth, rejects her strict religious upbringing and starts swearing like a trooper. Except that she doesn’t really know how to do it properly, so just strings lots of rude words together. There’s no mention of the c-word that I can remember, but her delivery of the medically correct term for that particular part of the female anatomy is genius.

4. What’s the geek appeal?
Are you kidding me? Pegg and Frost pack so many in jokes and references into the hundred or so minutes, that hardly one of those minutes goes by without a nod to Star Wars, Star Trek or some kind of alien (small ‘a’ intentional) movie. One of the best gags sees the queen of sci-fi, Sigourney Weaver, having one of her most famous lines thrown back at her. And there’s a bit of music hidden away in one scene that might take you a few bars to recognize, but you’ll laugh out loud when it sinks in. And, yes, it really is that person on the other end of the phone in that warehouse.

5. When’s the best time for a bathroom break?
I couldn’t really say for sure, but because of a few pre-movie beverages with my fellow got-a-rare-night-out Dads, I popped out twice and I don’t think I missed anything important. I did however earn the ridicule of my fellows for echoing Nick Frost’s character and his “child’s bladder.”

6. How’s the animation of Paul?
Paul is very believable and well-animated. Apparently Seth Rogen recorded all his lines and motion-capture during pre-production and was filming Green Hornet when production began. Joe Lo Truglio — who also plays Agent O’Reilly — stood in for Rogen on set and used videos of Rogen’s performance as a reference. Rogen then used some of Lo Truglio’s improv when re-recording his lines, so the character of Paul is a blend of two performances.

7. What about the special effects?
Other than the finale and a few explosions, there seem to be surprisingly few of them — especially for a sci-fi movie. No lasers, no spy gadgets, no ridiculous set pieces. Well, maybe a few, but the fact that they don’t stand out means they’ve been done well, doesn’t it?

8. I’ve heard about some religious issues, what’s that all about?
The character of Ruth Buggs seems to have been made a strict creationist to act as a polar opposite to the fact that the main character is from outer space, and her turning “to the dark side” provides some of the film’s funniest moments, as she realizes that everything she has been brought up to believe in is in fact (maybe) more fictional (possibly) than the stories she was (probably) forbidden to read. And her stereotypically over-the-top father does need to be there to advance the plot at times.

9. Do I need to sit through the credits for a bonus scene at the end?
There a nice little montage of the heroes’ triumphant return to Comic-Con as the credits roll, including the obligatory Slave Leia shot, but when the photos are done you’re good to go.

10. Will I want to see it again?
Yes. And again, and again — if only to try and spot all the in jokes that you missed the first time! Superbad’s Greg Mottola’s direction is adequate, but it is missing some of the visual flare that Edgar Wright could have brought to the movie if he hadn’t been too busy with Scott Pilgrim at the time. The score by David Arnold is nowhere near as exciting as Daft Punk’s Tron: Legacy soundtrack, but adds to the tension when required. Pegg and Frost make such an excellent double act, and the rest of the cast perform very well alongside them.

Top notch fun, I loved it! As part of the PR rollercoaster, there’s an iPhone–Android app out that lets you Alienate yourself, and a specially shot video clip over on Collegehumour.com featuring Pegg and Frost in top form recreating Star Wars as Threepio and Artoo!

And for a little extra reading after you’ve seen the film, check out this spoiler-tastic interview with the cast.

Ken, Matt, John, Michael and Russ chat about PAX East, Japan, and the 4-year anniversary of the blog. Enjoy!

Special thanks to our sponsor Maphook, the location-based social network for geeks!

GeekDad.com is the parenting blog at Wired.com, edited by Ken Denmead, Matt Blum, Jonathan Liu and Chris Anderson. It is a community of like-minded geeky parents writing about our experiences raising our kids in the digital age, and about our obsessions with technology, family-friendly projects, and pop-culture. The GeekDads podcast is a bi-weekly discussion of anything and everything that impacts us as geeks and parents.

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These are not all the possible signs — not by a long shot. But here are ten that can be telltale indicators (and perhaps badges of honor as well):

1. You named your children any of the following: Luke, Leia, Han, Lando, Aragorn, Arwen, Bilbo, Frodo, Starbuck, Ash, Buckaroo, or Dent Arthur Dent.
2. You haven’t vacuumed the living room for fear the Lego bricks might break the Roomba.
3. The description of your home theater setup includes the words “RAID array.”
4. Your kid’s college fund is based on your comic book collection (props to Kathy C.’s earlier post on Signs You’re Married to a GeekDad).
5. Family trip destinations almost always include “-con” in the name.
6. Your daughter considers herself a self-rescuing princess.
7. Your son practices the tenets of chivalry and/or IDIC at preschool.
8. Your babies’ names are already secured as both domain names and Twitter handles.
9. March 14th and September 22nd are considered special holidays at home.
10. Episode IV comes first: it’s just good parenting.

These are not all the possible signs — not by a long shot. But here are ten that can be telltale indicators (and perhaps badges of honor as well):

1. You named your children any of the following: Luke, Leia, Han, Lando, Aragorn, Arwen, Bilbo, Frodo, Starbuck, Ash, Buckaroo, or Dent Arthur Dent.
2. You haven’t vacuumed the living room for fear the Lego bricks might break the Roomba.
3. The description of your home theater setup includes the words “RAID array.”
4. Your kid’s college fund is based on your comic book collection (props to Kathy C.’s earlier post on Signs You’re Married to a GeekDad).
5. Family trip destinations almost always include “-con” in the name.
6. Your daughter considers herself a self-rescuing princess.
7. Your son practices the tenets of chivalry and/or IDIC at preschool.
8. Your babies’ names are already secured as both domain names and Twitter handles.
9. March 14th and September 22nd are considered special holidays at home.
10. Episode IV comes first: it’s just good parenting.

Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad.

Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website.