My family doesn’t have a whole lot planned for Family Day this year. We’re in the midst of a major home reno (work began a few weeks ago and walls on the main floor start coming down on Friday), so we’re a little limited in what we can do at the moment. Moving is always a pain, but I’ve discovered that this is possibly worse -much of the house still has to be packed up so it’s not really accessible, but there’s a generous smattering of drywall dust everywhere. My poor hard drives… It’s snowing right now, so I think we’ll grab the sleds and walk to the local toboggan hill for an hour or two. I also have a LEGO Millenium Falcon set sitting in the van (no, not that one) that we might tackle. Maybe some assemble-your-own nachos, a roaring fire, hot chocolate and a movie will round the day out. If I have enough energy and I can find the cookie sheets, I’ll bake enough cookies to be able to throw a few containers in the freezer and keep me going through the coming “no oven or stove access” weeks. Then it’s back to packing up what’s left of the kitchen and looking forward to a few weeks of nightly BBQing…

Family Day at the ROM. Image from the Royal Ontario Museum.

If you live in Ontario and you’re looking for some last minute ideas for family activities today, here are a few possibilities:

• Ottawa: The Museum of Civilization and the War Museum are offering free admission for kids under 18 (one child per adult) today. Winterlude is also underway.
• The Toronto Zoo is offering free admission on Monday for kids under 12 who bring a valentine for their favorite bug (one child per adult). The Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is including Mesozoic Monsters with museum admission
• Victoria Park in London is offering a free Family Day Skate, all day on Monday and Circle R Ranch is holding an open house with free hay rides and hot chocolate.
• Waterloo Public Square in Waterloo has a free family skate along with a food fair, magician, music, face painting and additional activities.
• Geeky dads and moms in Hamilton might want to check out the Family Day Toy and Collectible Show/Sale that promises Star Wars toys, action figures and plenty of other interesting ways to spend a little money (admission $2, kids under 10 are free).

Geek Love

While some may argue that Valentine’s Day is nothing more than an excuse to support the greeting card and floral industries, I really thing it’s a great idea to have a day set aside for making sure you take a breath from the day-to-day routine and acknowledge the feelings that made you a geek parent in the first place.

Hopefully those feelings include love. They do for me.

I happen to be lucky enough to be married to another geek, which means she gets a lot of the same things I do. I wouldn’t be the person, and especially neither the geek or the dad I am, if it weren’t for my wonderful wife Robin. I love you!

I’d like to welcome the other GeekDads, and any of our readers who want to, to leave messages in the comments for the geek loves in your life on this special day.

Photo © Shannon Conrad

So, there are only two days left until Valentine’s Day, and you’re stuck for something really romantic to get for your significant other. Or maybe you have some ideas, but find yourself frustrated with the difficulty of finding something that meets your (and your significant other’s) geeky sensibilities as well as your romantic ones.

Well, you can stop worrying, because Etsy seller Shannon Conrad (aka rubygirl) has had the great idea of creating interlocking LEGO rings. These sterling silver rings look like the top and bottom of a 2 x 2 LEGO brick, respectively, and will fit together (though not click into place like the plastic pieces). This seems like it would be an ideal gift for a couple to buy together, and each give the other one of the rings — thereby making it less necessary for them to arrive in time for Valentine’s Day, too.

The rings can be made in any size and cost $125 (shipping is free). If you’re not interested in the pair of rings, you can also get just the top ring (for $70), on which you can evidently build with real LEGO pieces — it comes with a few, but it seems to me it might be fun to change them out based on your mood, and how cool would it be to put a minifig on it?

Hat tip: Craftzine.

Image: www.thetimetravelerswifemovie.com

In a year when the top chick flicks involve vampires, it’s hard to say what makes a geeky chick flicks stand out from the rest of the genre. But it’s safe to say geek women are drawn to films with intelligent dialogue, an interesting premise, a strong female lead and a leading man who’s quirky but charming. (Good-looking doesn’t hurt either.)

Here are five of my personal geeky romantic favorites, in five different categories: separated by time; separated by death; shades of the supernatural; fun and silly adventures; and alternate realities. All are out on DVD, so you can pick out one or two of your favorites, open up the chocolates and snuggle up in front of the home screen with your favorite geek:

1. The Time Travelers Wife

Sure it’s got time travel paradoxes galore. (Would the main characters have become a couple if the time traveler hadn’t begun wooing his future wife when she was just a little girl and he was a mature man who had already known her for years?) But the movie won my heart by incorporating many of the novel’s best little throwaway lines into the script. (I especially love the scene where Eric Bana cracks wise while bursting out, Hulk-like, from some way-too-small effeminate clothes he’s pinched to cover his time-traveling nakedness.) Still, it’s the chemistry between Bana and Rachel McAdams that makes this a love story of the first order. (For what it’s worth, my husband even concedes this is one chick flick he found interesting enough to stay awake through.)

2. Truly Madly Deeply

Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze may have been there first, but this is the dead-husband-comes-back movie for the geek crowd. First off, you’ve got Alan Rickman as the dead husband, Jamie. Severus Snape he’s not, but Jamie is still a whiner lacking in social skills. Even in death he’s too self-absorbed to ask his widow Nina (Juliet Stevenson) before inviting all his dead friends over to hang out. Sound familiar, ladies?

Gerard Butler (with his shirt on) and Emmy Rossum in The Phantom of the Opera

3. Phantom of the Opera

You pick your ghoul, I’ll pick mine. I’m actually not a big fan of Gerard Butler, who plays the Phantom, and Emmy Rossum as the ingénue with the big voice may be a little too readily led astray by her guardian, the diabolical Miranda Richardson. But the kids and I enjoyed reading the novel so much that I was willing to give it a try. First I was grabbed by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music, and then by the setting – the Paris Opera, with more dark nooks and crannies than you can shake a stick at. And who wouldn’t want a candelabra-lit lake passageway in their basement?

4. Pirates of the Caribbean

When this one came out I was more than happy to take the kids to the theater. Johnny Depp is sexy even at his most ridiculous. Even Geoffrey Rush had a certain Captain Hook-like appeal (nothing against Orlando Bloom, either). Why is this film geeky? Well, I have a theory that what made this movie work was the Keira Knightley character. It’s her dream to be a pirate, and the story is told from her point of view. Without Elizabeth, it’s just a story of a bunch of smelly drunk guys and some skeletons.

5. Minority Report

I love Minority Report. It’s got that whole Tom Cruise/Steven Spielberg/Philip K. Dick thing going for it, to the nth degree. Talk about scifi world-building – Spielberg made this movie extra creepy by using futuristic technology that was actually not that far away. (How long before the signs in The Gap start talking to you through your iPhone?) Maybe it’s not really a love story, but it is about a man and his family. And to us GeekMoms, that’s as sexy as it gets.

Image by Ernesto Lago; used under Creative Commons Attribution license.

Repeat after me: “I hereby resolve that in the new year I…”

1. Will faithfully read every new xkcd, Penny Arcade and of course Dork Tower strip as it appears. If the joke in a strip is too esoteric for me, I will of course promptly Google it and subsequently pretend that I understood it immediately.

2. Will play with and encourage my kids to play with LEGO, since it is after all the best toy in the world. If I don’t have kids, I will simply have to play with LEGO myself that much more.

3. Will introduce at least two new geeks to the music of Jonathan Coulton and/or Paul and Storm. If they for any reason don’t like them, I will try hard not to accuse them of not being true geeks.

4. Will try very, very hard not to be jealous of geeks who make it to San Diego Comic-Con or Penny Arcade Expo, if I’m unable to go to either.

5. Will try very hard to make sure my kids spend at least as much time reading as they do playing video games, even if that means occasionally buying or borrowing cringe-worthy novelizations of High School Musical or something similar, because even reading something lousy is better than not reading.

6. Will try very hard not to run out and buy an Apple iTablet, or iSlate, or whatever it ends up being called, as soon as it comes out. I will if necessary repeat this mantra to myself: “I don’t need it just because it’s new and cool.”

7. Will watch every new episode of Phineas and Ferb, with or without my kids, because it is the most awesomely geeky cartoon show currently on TV.

8. Will not try what I see on MythBusters at home, but will do everything possible to encourage my kids to (safely) examine their (and everyone else’s) assumptions with a skeptical and scientific eye.

9. Will not get into arguments with other geeks about the age-old PC vs. Mac or Windows vs. OS X vs. Linux questions, because nobody ever wins religious debates. [Reprinted from my resolutions from last year.]

10. Will, #9 notwithstanding, eagerly get into arguments with other geeks about the relatively new iPhone vs. Blackberry vs. Android vs. jailbroken iPhone question, because it hasn’t quite gotten to the point of being a religious debate… yet. And because such arguments often include trading phones for a few minutes, which is a lot of fun — especially if you can quickly figure out how to switch the other person’s phone’s display language to Russian.

If you haven’t yet, you should check out my fellow GeekDad Curtis Silver’s 12 Geeky New Year’s Resolutions.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Roanoke Ball Drop

The Science Museum of Western Virginia in Roanoke, Va., is located on the fourth and fifth floors of a downtown building with an atrium. For New Year’s they encouraged kids and adults to line the stairs and balcony walls and drop balls to ring in the new year. To make it more kid-friendly, the drop was at 12 noon. They said there were 11,000 balls and having seen the chaos that ensued, I can believe it.

We were stationed on the ground floor, where I hoped my Superball-loving Geeklet would get a good view of the big bounce. While the folks up top had the fun of dropping balls from five stories up, we had the wild experience of being inside the ricochet zone. Yep, I took a couple of hits, but it was worth it — especially when we started scooping up the balls.

Image by Ken Denmead.

From the entire GeekDad family, here’s hoping 2010 (Y2kda? MMX?) is better in every unit of measurement you can think of! Here are a few things we’re looking forwards to this year as well:

• GeekDad 2.0: Hopefully will roll out in the 1st quarter sometime. New community features, with the chance for members to submit their own blog content!
• The release of Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share: Available for pre-order on Amazon now, hits stores on May 4th.
• Maker Faire Bay Area: May 22 & 23, with a GeekDad booth full of fun and prizes. There will also be an official Maker Faire in Detroit on July 31 & August 1, and one in New York City September 25 & 26. GeekDad will be trying to have some presence at both of those events as well!
• Wired Holiday Store: Everyone seems to have been happy with our participation at the store this season, and we’re hoping we’ll be back with even more fun next year!

Those are what’re within 1 standard deviation of being certain events. I’m sure there will be more, so stay tuned!

This season, I didn’t jump into the sentimental pool alone. My annual date with a few tears of joy included a viewing with my 9-year-old son.

For me, IAWL is about more than idealism and friends coming through in the clutch. The experience also includes watching a long shot of Jimmy Stewart at a train depot as he shifts through several emotional states without saying a word. It’s recognizing the slice of cinema history where theatrical conventions are dominant but deep focus allows you to see detail in the background activity across the street. It’s early sci-fi, dealing with a multiverse and otherworldly interventions. Sharing this richness with offspring is a rite of passage I’ve awaited for a while. I saw IAWL as a gateway drug to Citizen Kane and Wages of Fear.

It didn’t go as pictured.

Carter made it through the movie, but sometime around the christening of Mr. Martini’s new home he asked why this was considered a Christmas movie. Like everyone else, my boy noticed and lamented Uncle Billy’s misplacement of the B&L’s eight large, immediately rendering that plot device implausible. Dead tired from a full evening already, my son later cried himself to sleep about a lost opportunity to read instead of watching a movie he didn’t like. I felt like the Mr. Potter of parenting.

I’ll admit, if I made my initial decision to watch IAWL based on the classic movie trailer, the Frank Capra signature storytelling wouldn’t be a part of my annual repertoire. I had to discover it for myself, in my own way: as a clip in Joe Dante’s Gremlins. By the mid-1980s, I was anticipating the New Year’s Eve televised broadcast on PBS. It grew on me.

I expect it will grow on Carter, too, but in the meantime he offered a few suggestions on how the movie could be improved:

Film it in color. I should have eased him into black-and-white movies all with a viewing of Pleasantville. My youngest son only recently ended his ban on live-action television shows by becoming a fan of Mythbusters. Similarly, my eldest prefers technicolor to the ancient aesthetic. IAWL did get the colorization treatment in 1986, but I refuse to point that out. In this family, that’s not how we roll, son.

George Bailey shouldn’t talk like a gangster. I’m a bit baffled how the guy who played Jefferson Smith and Elwood P. Dowd could be mistaken for a two-bit hood. Jimmy Stewart’s voice has become a caricature over time, and maybe that’s what my boy sensed. When asked who should play the lead, Carter—who clearly hasn’t seen Less Than Zero—suggested Robert Downey, Jr.

Bedford Falls wouldn’t be that different. According to my son, no single person can make that much of a difference as to change a town from having only one neon sign to having hundreds. Plus, shouldn’t Mr. Gower be dead by the time everyone starts singing Auld Lang Syne? Carter may have a point about the dynamics of time and social networks, but it’s difficult to get Clarence’s point across to George if the only noticeable change in Pottersville is the snow.

Hurm. Maybe we’ll try again when he’s a teenager and there’s a version of the movie on the Wii. Hee Haw!

The Arduino Duemilanove Microcontroller Board (image: Arduino.cc)

Every year people make the same ridiculous New Years resolutions that they know darn well they won’t keep. Lose weight, exercise more, eat better, quit smoking, stop fishing illegally off private docks and so on. Yet when March rolls around, they are still sitting on a dock with a fishing pole in one hand, a bag of cheetos in the other and a cigarette hanging from their lip. I’m speaking rhetorically, but you get the drift.

We all make resolutions that are outside our range of being and generally boneheaded. So how about this year we make some resolutions we can actually keep? So with a little idea help from my Twitter pals, I’ve come up with 12 geeky New Years resolutions that for the most part, I actually plan on keeping.

Go to at least one ‘Con’ this year. Last year I made it to zero cons. This year I plan on going to no less than three. All in Orlando. Megacon, Star Wars Celebration V, and Nerdapalooza. I’ll see you all there right?

Watch three geeky trilogies back to back to back. One thing I never had time for this past year, or the years before, was performing the ultimate geeky movie watching trick. Watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, followed by the Matrix trilogy and capped off with the original Star Wars trilogy I own them all. There is no reason I can’t make this happen on a good three day weekend. (h/t @timlav)

Learn and use Arduino to make something cool. With lots of LED lights and wires and perhaps an actual function, like a binary clock or something. I dunno. The range of interactions and controls that can be created using an Arduino board are nearly limitless. Up to this point, I haven’t gotten into coding and electronics much but with it’s open source environment and damn cheap price, how can I not? (h/t @frankiebit)

Continue to support independent artists by not buying their music. At some point in the past we’ve all been slaves to the corporate music empire. This past year saw a rise in independent artists, especially in the nerdcore genre. Most of it, you can listen to or download for FREE. The artists are literally giving their music away to build a name for themselves, the way file sharing was intended to work. Then if you like it – you buy it and support a starving (really, they eat Ramen three meals a day) artist. Head over to Scrubclub records for a plethora of fantastic tunes (my personal favorites are The Bear Necessities by Benjamin Bear and Next Gen by Dr. Awkward) and Hipsterplease.com for bi-monthly podcasts featuring the latest in hip, geeky music. (h/t @scrubclub)

Keep up with my monthly comics. Times were tough this year, so it was hard to keep up with my pull bag at the comic book store. It would sit there for weeks, months, just waiting to be picked up. For next year, I added comics to the household budget, so there will be no dust on my Detective Comics.

Stop using Star Trek catch phrases in general speech. I’m guilty of this one. How could I not be? Star Trek has given us some great catch phrases over the years. The most notorious in my lingo being, “I’m a doctor dammit, not a (insert profession here.)” Another that needs to be limited is using “make it so” when talking to sub-ordinates at work. Eventually, they will rise up and go all Borg on you. Assimilating your office and desk supplies and leaving you locked out of the building for overusing sci-fi terminology. (h/t @onnabugeisha)

The GeekDad book – Buy it! Buy it now!

Get a geeky book onto a bestseller list. Since I’m yet to finish a book, I’ll dedicate this resolution to GeekDad’s editor in chief, Ken Denmead. His book, Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share drops in May. I suggest we all flood Amazon with pre-orders and put a book about geeky D.I.Y. projects on the bestseller list.

Defy the Hype. Every time something new and super cool looking or sounding is announced, the geek community goes super nuts and usually, so do I. This year ended with the hype surrounding Avatar. Looking forward to next year, the hype surrounding the Apple Tablet is already starting to swirl. The best thing you can do to fight the hype is to read as much tech and geek news as you can, learning about the hyped item before it becomes hype. Therefore, you can still be excited about the item, but you don’t have to fall into the hype hysteria that everyone expects. (h/t @hipsterplease)

Finally purchase and construct the LEGO Star Destroyer or Death Star II. This has been a resolution of mine for several years now, ever since LEGO started releasing the Collectors Edition sets for their Star Wars line. The Star Destroyer, while the largest and most impressive of the two sets, clocks in at about 3100 pieces while the Death Star II comes in at about 3400. Either one is a challenge and looks like hours of awesome.

Indoctrinate the kids on the classics. Every year the kids get a little bit older, so every year I pass on another classic movie, book, toy or artifact from my childhood to them – based on age. They’ve got the Atari, they’ve seen Flash Gordon and have read plenty of comics. So what’s it going to be this year? They are reading more, so getting them started on sci-fi master Heinlein might be a good idea. While Stranger in a Strange Land will have to wait until they are full on teenagers, Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is a perfect entrance into sci-fi novels. When it comes to movies or television, I think it’s time for some Red Dwarf. At least the first six seasons. (h/t @jennywilliams)

Go Green, geek style. While I probably won’t be building my own compost bin or making compost tea like some fellow geekdads, I’m open to checking out alternative energy saving ways to charge my hand-held devices. I can even install a cooling program on my PC to help it run a bit cooler and conserve electricity. Since I live in Florida however, I probably won’t be turning off any fans. (h/t @twid)

Stop being an FPS snob. When it comes to gaming, I play a lot of FPS (first person shooter for you n00bs) games. From the Call of Duty series to Rainbow Six, Halo and so on. There are a lot of good games out there for all the systems I own (Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii & DS) that I’m not playing because I claim I don’t have the time. Dragon Age: Origins is supposed to be a fantastic RPG, and Scribblenauts for the DS is one of the most innovative games of the year. Maybe I don’t have the patience, and that takes me right back to a typical resolution. Practice patience, when gaming. Especially with the Wii. Outside of bowling, I haven’t touched the thing.

I’ll let you know on Twitter during the year as to how I’m doing on my resolutions (and one has to wonder, how did Matt Blum do on his resolutions last year?) Until then, have a happy New Year! Welcome 2010!