Are you a Nerd? Of course you are, you're reading this.

You always knew you were a nerd, but just what kind are you? As always the Internet comes to the rescue with a fun quiz.

My results may not be typical, use with caution.




(via Marc A. Murison)

Celebrating Epiphany at Epiphany on Epiphany

Yesterday was the feast of the Epiphany. Epiphany of our Lord in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania is the parish I attended when I was growing up. They celebrated the end of their 50th (Jubilee) Anniversary year with a mass by the bishop and a dinner party later in the evening. It was a good time.

The stained glass window in the background is a cool picture of the nativity with the three wise men arriving to do homage. I took a much better picture last year.

This holiday is the occasion to sing "We Three Kings". Bonus if you can name the kings without reference to this blog, google, wikipedia or friends. Put your answers in the comments.

Another freezing night on the creek

Slowly but surely the waterfall chokes with ice. It only has one more night to freeze since it will warm up to 50F on the weekend. Days that warm usually undo any freezing on the creek from the day before.

It's cold when the waterfall starts to freeze

This is the begining of what will be a beautiful ice sculpture produced by Mother Nature herself as the waterfall starts to freeze on the creek.

Ice on the Shellpot Creek

It was 18F this morning which explains why the creek will be slowing down. When the creek freezes you know winter is here.

Traditional Holiday Flambé

At our house we celebrate special holidays with a breakfast that consists of Eggs Benedict and this Bananas Flambé. Usually accompanied by Mimosas. It is a good start to the New Year, but please flambé responsibly.

Happy New Year with fireworks

Happy New Year with some (tiny) fireworks at the stroke of midnight. Some traditions include banging pots and pans. What noise did you make to ring in the New Years?

Returned Christmas gift that don't work. What is the Jeopardy DVD home game?

I am a big fan of the Jeopardy TV show. I fancy myself good at trivia, since I have proven over and over again that I don't know anything important. Thus when Alex Trebek recommended the Jeopardy DVD home game, I made sure that Santa knew that's just what I wanted.

Santa came through and left the game under the tree; I was so excited! This game comes with a box that is inserted between your own DVD player and the TV using RCA composite video inputs. This is the start of an issue since my DVD player has an HDMI hookup to my TV but it still has the old-fashioned hookups. It also comes with wireless buzzers, ahem, signaling devices, that had me chomping at the bit to get this thing going. The setup of the game requires you to program the controllers with the remote of your DVD player and then you use the signaling devices that came with the game to do the rest. The Jeopardy box comes with a wire to an IR emitter that must be positioned correctly near the IR receiver on your DVD player to work. Oh, and by the way your DVD player better support closed captions for the game to work. This is where the troubles began.

Tryout 1: I have an OPPO DV-981HD upconverting DVD player to get me 1080p input to my HD TV. Luckily it still has regular video input so I put the DVD machine between it and the TV and got to programming. Unfortunately I have just found out after many months that this DVD player doesn't have closed captioning. Just press "title" or "subtitle" you say? That didn't work either. Some searching revealed that many of the new digital DVD players don't have closed caption. I love my OPPO player, it works great for me and has a great picture on the TV. No great loss for me, but a big problem for the game. On to DVD player two.

Tryout 2: Glancing around at the TV console and components I noticed my neglected Xbox. That thing plays DVD's doesn't it? So I installed the Jeopardy box between the Xbox and the TV and got started. I should mention that I have many extra cables (even for the non-standard Xbox), so this wasn't a problem for me except for the endless threading of the cables in and out of the entertainment center. This time I made it a quarter of the way through the programming. The game refused to recognize the up arrow on the Xbox DVD controller. Skipping that step left me with a game that still wouldn't work. On to DVD player number three.

Tryout 3: Upstairs in the exercise room we have a Proscan DVD player that is so old that it wouldn't play the Desperate Housewives DVD's or my copy of Being John Malkovich. I had already given it up for lost so I knew that I needed a new DVD player for this room. We will return here in a minute.

Tryout 4: Did you know you can get an Insignia DVD player for $30? Now I do. I grabbed two of these (one for Jeopardy, one for exercising) and raced home to try it out. I opned only one and tried it with the Jeopardy system. No closed caption so no programming! I returned one since it wasn't playing well with the jeopardy game, but now we can watch DVD's while we are exercising. I was ready to give up on the Jeopardy game, but...

Tryout 3 redux: In my desperation I tried the Jeopardy DVD in the ancient Proscan DVD player. It worked! I unplugged that player and got it downstairs. Once again I installed the Jeopardy box between this DVD player and the TV. Then a miracle occurred, I made it through the programming of the remote. Left arrow, Up arrow, Right arrow, Enter, and we were good to go. Let's play a game. Well then it froze up on the way to the menus. I took out the DVD and carefully cleaned it with only strokes across the disc, not in circles around. I blew some compressed air into the player to get some of the dust of years out of it. We fired up the game again and got a game started! I was losing and I blamed it on the speed of buzzing in on the controllers but we checked and they worked, I was just slow.

Impressions of the game: The game is slow and the answers (questions) were only multiple choice. The game doesn't show all of the dollar values under the categories so you don't know whether you are finished a category or not. Don't believe the demonstration video on Amazon, game play is slow and tortuous except for the frantic pressing to buzz in. We made it through a round of Jeopardy and then the game froze up again on the first question of Double Jeopardy. We then packed that game up and returned it to Amazon. There is a help site by MGA, the maker of the game, that doesn't offer much more advice than how to position the IR emitter of the jeopardy box onto your DVD player properly. That wasn't our problem.

This game had so much promise. As we printed out the return slip "Santa" finally read the comments on the Amazon site. They are uniformly negative and seem to have been written in a drunken rage after hours of failure to set up the device. Most folks were unable to program the box and the rest found that the game froze up all the time. Even the youtube comments under one person's video of playing the game express the same frustrations. The game costs $60 to $75, and we know that DVD players can be as low as $30 why didn't the just make a game with DVD player built in that might actually have worked or been preprogrammed. (I am not the only who thought this.) Oh Alex, you have let me down on this one. I guess I will just have to take the test and get on the show if I want to play.

A new hope: If you would like some Jeopardy questions and trivia to keep you entertained in the absence of a good home Jeopardy game there is the Jeopardy archive maintained by fans of the show. You can also go to the official Jeopardy website. There is a new online search scheduled for late January. Are you in?

Sci-Fi Sounds quiz

Neatorama points to this Sci-Fi quiz.

Your Score : 85 credits
You're an extreme sci-fi geek! You're probably wearing your very own homemade TRON costume right now!

I only earned 85 credits, but I thought I knew more than that. There are some pretty old movies references in there. My dad would love this one.

Fixinng the bubbling spring

Work crews are out at the water cover to fix the leak. I wonder if it a leak or broken water main or if there really is a difference.

The test will be if I can turn into my street tonight or if they need to turn off the water.