I looked at the review copy I received with an eye to finding something new that might interest my kids.

Inside of "I Swear To Good You Are God At This"

I found a few possibilities. The entry on the Ambrose Collective, a group that specializes in mentoring students who want a career in the applied arts made me wish I lived in Michigan and could send my teenagers to one of their workshops.

I also liked the Do Good site, which showcases an iPhone app that urges people to do an act of kindness each day. My younger son was quite taken with the idea of suggesting his own “Do Good” idea.

And while it’s not an interactive site, I found Mysterious Letters fascinating. It’s a site whose creators are dedicated to writing to everyone in the world, one town at a time.

They first did it with Irish village of Cushendall and the next batch of hand-written letters went out in November 2009 to Polish Hill in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I’m hoping the idea might inspire my kids to put pen to paper, though likely they won’t write to a whole town. But a letter to their grandmother would be nice.

While I enjoyed paging through the book, I had to wonder why it would be necessary to put together a print project to publicize websites. My instinct is that this might not be as effective as a pure electronic creation. I asked Kevin Brown, the head of Holiday Matinee why he went with a physical book.

He said:

Going with a physical release was the intention from the start. While it’s true I’m obsessed with new media, there’s no denying I’m still very much attached to analog, physical products. From vinyl records, design/art/photography books to pop culture magazines-even with the rise of new technology, there’s something truly about holding, smelling and being able to run your fingers through something tangible. It’s a certain warmth that I like to think brings the content to life, especially the web-based features. Plus, I like the notion of flipping new media with something more traditional.

I can only hope that others are as keen on physical objects. I have a Sony eReader and I love its convenience. But, like Brown, I agree there’s nothing like a tangible object.

Last year and earlier this year, GeekDad spent some time making sure you were all aware of the best geeks to keep track of in 140 character form.

So, we are pleased to see that many Geek Tweeps and some good friends of GeekDad have made the final nominations for this years Shorty Awards. Over 250,000 nominations have been tweeted for The Shorty Awards to determine the six finalists in each of the 26 official categories. The winners will be announced on March 3, 2010 at the TheTimesCenter in The New York Times Building and we will be hoping a few of our geeky heroes will be among them!

Here is a run down of the Geek representation in the final nominations by category:

• Brand: Sesame Street @sesamestreet & Marvel Entertainment @Marvel
• Celebrity: Nathan Fillion @NathanFillion & Stephen Fry @stephenfry
• Customer Service: thinkgeek @thinkgeek
• Entertainment: MythBusters Official @MythBusters
• Government: NASA @NASA
• Humor: Mrs Stephen Fry @MrsStephenFry
• Literature: Neil Gaiman @neilhimself & Warren Ellis @warrenellis
• Science: Adam Savage @donttrythis

We wish these folks the best come awards night – and if you aren’t following these folks yet, get to it people.

There has been an explosion of location-based games and location-based social networking sites. I have been trying out a few of them because I think there are some interesting possibilities for interactions based on the serendipity of location.

As a parent, I think my life may be too mundane for these games. I hate to burst your bubble, but being a contributor to GeekDad does not turn you into a jet-setting, club-hopping superstar. My day is a mundane routine of work, picking the kids after school, commuting, errands on the weekends and some kid activities.

BrightKite

I started using BrightKite because a few connections invited me. It was an interesting mix of communications and locations. But it never caught on beyond that small group of connections.

I gave up using BrightKite after it kept insisting that the Boston restaurant where I was eating was actually 20 miles south of the city.

Foursquare

A year later I ran into FourSquare. It added gameplay to location publishing.

I’ll confess that Foursquare brought out my competitive streak. I wanted to get the “mayor” title for the places I frequented. I started mixing up my routine and went to new places just to become the mayor of more places. That earned me a Super Mayor badge. I even started going to the gym more often so I could get the Gym Rat badge.

But then the mundane took over. I was still going to the same places and kept my reign as mayor of most of them.

It was interesting, at first, to see where my connections spent their time. But then the mundane took over. Patrick was at Penn Station again. Ken was at Peet’s Coffee again.

Gowalla

I also dabbled with Gowalla. It seemed just like a FourSquare clone. (Or is FourSquare a clone of Gowalla?)

I didn’t find the gameplay as interesting because it did not bring out my obsessive, competitive streak. Fewer people I know were using it, so that also made it less interesting.

Like Foursquare, Gowalla can publish your location updates to Twitter and Facebook. I’ve come to realize that the gameplay of publishing your location in Gowalla or Foursquare is generally not very interesting in Twitter or Facebook. It just showed the mundane.

Own This World

Earlier this week I tried out Own This World. The game’s creator, Big Nerds in Disguise, sent me a free copy. They pitched it as a fun cross between Risk and Foursquare.

The object of the game is to conquer territories based on your location in the real world. As you move from territory to territory you acquire troops and resources that will allow you to conquer territories or attack other players. There is also an option buy your own world to play with your friends.

Hearing “Risk” caught my attention. The game has always been a favorite. My college roommates and I had an obsession with game, often playing deep into the night. Typically, Ed would take over Australia and build up an enormous army in Siam while the rest of us battled for territory.

In Own This World, you build up troops just by being inside a grid on the map.  They use a Google Maps mashup. You can attack anyone else with troops in the grid of your current location. If you have the most troops, the grid is yours.

Boston was largely vacant so I started building up my troops throughout the metro area. Actually, it was just more of the mundane. I built up troops just by going through my routine travels of the day.

Most of Downtown Boston is in one grid and someone else initially owned it. They only had a few troops. I amassed a legion just by sitting in my office. I also walked across the street, putting me in another grid which gave my dominion over Boston Harbor.

Giving my competitive streak, I took a long way home on my commute and brought some grids in Newton and Waltham into my dominion.

Will it or any of these location based games be able to overcome the mundane? I don’t know, but it gives me something to do while standing in line waiting for my coffee.

DONATE TO HAITI RELIEF THROUGH THE GEEKDAD GIVING PAGE!

We all know what has happened, and how desperate the need for medical resources is right now in Haiti. There are plenty of good avenues for charitable donations out there, and by no means to we mean to replace any of them, but all of us at GeekDad want to do our part as well. To that end, we have set up a donation page at First Giving in support of the medical relief organization MerlinUSA.

Merlin specializes in health, saving lives in times of crisis and helping to rebuild shattered health services. Merlin works within existing health systems to realize everyone’s right to accessible, appropriate, affordable health care. We are committed to helping build lasting health services which are used and championed by everyone. We are specialists in rapid medical response and rebuilding health systems, effectively taking countries from emergency to recovery. We are undaunted by the challenges of providing health care to vulnerable people living in the most difficult, forgotten and remote corners of the world.

We are determined to make health a global priority; giving people caught up in conflict, disaster and health system collapse the chance to lead healthy lives. We care or people at risk, for the lives of the people we work to save, and for the safety of our staff. We are accountable to our patients, partners, supporters and donors. And we keep our promise: to stay on, beyond the crisis, for as long as we are needed.

They were on the ground in Haiti in hours to help:

Merlin’s eight strong Emergency Response Team left on the first available flight to Haiti. Their initial task is to assess the most urgent needs, which are likely to be water, sanitation, shelter, disease prevention and restoration of basic health services. Our team is likely to concentrate immediately on distributing essential shelter kits, as well as medical equipment such as hygiene kits and blankets, supporting local health staff and mobilizing communities to ensure disease outbreaks are prevented. We are mobilizing all necessary resources now.

Now is your chance to donate to the relief effort (or donate again). Through our First Giving page, we hope to raise $15,000 in support of the relief efforts on the ground in Haiti. And as an incentive (not that we need any more than the desire to help people in a time of great need), for every $15 you donate, you’ll earn one change to win a geeky giveaway item. We’re still compiling the prizes, but to start we have a batch of seriously cool stuff from John Kovalic, and some rather significant gift cards from our good friends at ThinkGeek. This means we just need a thousand GeekDad readers to donate $15 each (but you’re welcome to donate more if you can).

UPDATE: The amazing John Kovalic has pledged that for every donation of $100 or more, he will send the donor an autographed and specially-doodled copy of the first Dork Tower compendium. How cool is that?!?!

DONATE TO HAITI RELIEF THROUGH THE GEEKDAD GIVING PAGE!

GeekDad UK Style

Spreading the family tech projects to other parts, GeekDad has been going in the UK for a few months now. There you will find more of the same GeekDad goodness, but with a UK bent.

It’s not all umberellas, weather-talk and gardening though, there is plenty of family life meets gadget writing. Recently we have been talking about Games that Fit Your Family, Homemade Light Sabers and Head-Cooling Life-Saving Crash Helmets.

If you want a little more island -living in your GeekDad arsenal then why not pay us a visit.

Here, then, is a revised list. Known-fake accounts have been removed from the list, and, where possible the correct account has been listed. In addition, unintentional oversights have been corrected. The list below before the break is of accounts that are either new or fixed from the original list; the remainder of the original list is included after the break (though some folks have been reordered for the sake of readability.

The Twitter list @cerebus19/geekymedia has been updated accordingly. Thank you to everyone who commented with corrections/suggestions. Please keep making them!

Logo © Rod Roddenberry

Lots of people sell off stuff that used to belong to their parents after their parents pass away. Some of those people, surely, donate the money they raise to worthy charities. But it’s safe to say that you haven’t ever seen an estate auction quite like this before, mostly because most people’s parents didn’t create and act on Star Trek.

Rod Roddenberry, who was Gene and Majel Roddenberry’s only child (Gene had two daughters from an earlier marriage), has decided to auction off some of his parents’ things to raise money for Haiti relief. Only a few of the items are overtly Star Trek-related; most of them are fairly prosaic. But I think it’s safe to say, for most geeks, a set of golf clubs (for example) does gain a certain amount of interest if you can honestly say that they used to belong to Gene Roddenberry.

There’s a wide variety of items, from a script of Majel’s lines as the ship’s computer for an episode of The Next Generation to several collections of assorted books. The auction is being run via Facebook comments, so you will have to have a Facebook account to bid. 100% of the auction’s proceeds are promised to go to HaitianHero.com (a site run by Jimmy Jean-Louis, better known as “the Haitian” on Heroes, and who is actually Haitian).

The auction is scheduled to end at 11:59 PST on Friday, January 29. New items are being added to it every day, so check back between now and then in case something new strikes your fancy.

Robots + Monsters

More than two years ago I blogged about Robots + Monsters, the brainchild of artist Joe Alterio, selling geeky custom illustrations to raise money for good causes. The program had been on hiatus for a while, but in light of the recent events in Haiti, they’re back.

The destruction and human suffering wrought by the earthquake in Haiti has touched us all, whether we have a personal connection to the country or not. Robots + Monsters is committed to helping to alleviate the suffering of the Haitian people by partnering with the humanitarian group, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).

Obviously we have our own donation drive going here at GeekDad, but considering what has happened, you can’t give too much, nor in too geeky a manner.

Visit Robots + Monsters.

Erfworld: The Battle for Gobwin Knob

Okay, I know, “Geekiest Comic Ever” is a big claim to make, considering there are other comics like “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.” But I had to get your attention somehow, right? And Erfworld is incredibly geeky in a fantastic way. (As opposed to geeky in a sci-fi way.) Here’s the plot: in the magical realm of Erfworld, the Overlord Stanley the Plaid has basically killed off all his warlords in battle due to poor strategy. His spell-caster Wanda suggests they buy a spell which will summon the perfect warlord from anywhere in the universe, a military genius who will save them from certain defeat. So they cast the spell and who should appear but Parson, an overweight strategy gamer from Columbus, Ohio.

Parson reminds me a little of the character Eli Wallace on SGU. Here’s a man-child who is obsessed with spaceships and science fiction, and he finds himself on a starship hurtling through space. Yes, it’s a bit worrying and, yes, they could all die. But he’s on a frikkin’ spaceship! Parson is a bit like that, only with a gaming obsession: he finds himself inside a world similar to his strategy games. And while it takes him a while to accept that it’s actually happening to him, he quickly warms to the task and starts plotting strategy. (And this even after he realizes that Stanley the Plaid is, to put it bluntly, the bad guy. Parson doesn’t mind.)

Riding a "dwagon" to Gobwin Knob.

The comic was originally published online under a Creative Commons license, and you can still read Book One: The Battle for Gobwin Knob online. (I will warn you: when I first went to check out Erfworld to see what it was about, I wound up reading the entirety of Book One in one sitting, staying up until about 2 a.m.) There are all sorts of tongue-in-cheek allusions: from Charlie’s Angels to the Eyebooks, magic books which the characters use to communicate with each other via a system which is, well, instant messaging, complete with a “Quack” noise when a new message is received.

The sound effects are absurd and hilarious: from the “Fer-Durrrp!” of the bugles to random words reinterpreted as onomatopoeia: “Golem!” for the appearance of, well, Golems, and “Decrypt!” as the sound of somebody being raised from the dead. The names of things are cutesy: “dwagons” and “gwiffins,” and they all look cute, too, even the giant vicious teddy bears. But then, in the midst of all the adorable stuff a warlord gets an arrow through his head, or a giant marshmallow peep gets bitten in half by a dwagon. The artwork is a good match for the writing, with its own mixture of bitter and sweet.

Android users, scan this barcode for the Erfworld app

It’s hard to describe the breadth of geekiness contained in Erfworld; I’m not even a strategy gamer but it sucked me in. And now, thanks to Robot Comics, it’s available as an app for the iPhone, iPod touch, or Android phone. The first episode is available for free, and later episodes will be available for $.99 each, released one per month. (Book One will be broken into 13 episodes, and the first two are available now.)

And for those of you who have already read Erfworld Book One, Book Two is now well underway on the website.

Wired: The best sort of humor: one that satirizes and embraces its subject matter at the same time. Robot Comics’ app has an easy-to-use interface and allows you to read Erfworld on the go.

Tired: You may not want to wait a month per episode once you start reading.

From now until February 8, followers of the official MythBusters Twitter feed will have a chance to enter their Superfan Sweepstakes to win a trip to Comic-Con 2010 to meet the MythBusters in person. The official rules for entry can be found at the official MythBusters website — all you have to do is follow @MythBusters and tweet a specific phrase, and you can enter once per day for the duration of the sweepstakes.

But wait! That’s not all. As part of the promotion of this sweepstakes, you can enter to win a MythBusters T-shirt from us at GeekDad. In addition to the sweepstakes rules, you’ll need to also follow GeekDad’s official Twitter feed at @WiredGeekDad, then tweet “I’m following @MythBusters and @WiredGeekDad, and you should, too! http://bit.ly/59PJmU” (the link points to this article).

We’re not yet certain exactly how many T-shirts the folks at Discovery will be sending us, but we’ll be choosing randomly from everyone who is following both accounts when the sweepstakes ends and has tweeted the above message before that time.

Check out the promo video for the sweepstakes below.