Monday, November 1, 2010

Why Can’t All Teachers be Like This?

I saw this video on Gizmodo.com today and I knew I had to repost it here.  This clearly a teacher that is passionate about what he does and a great example of how to Geek properly.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Free, Easy and Extremely Useful

Dropbox is not exactly new, but I just got around trying it last week.  The idea is simple, you sign up and you get 2 free gigabytes of online storage.  There is a small program that you install on your computer that creates a Dropbox folder in your documents.  Any file that you put in the Dropbox folder is synced with your online storage, which is available by signing into their website from any computer on the internet.

In addition to being available on their website, your files are automatically synced to any of your other computers with the Dropbox program installed. There are also apps available for Android, iPhone and Blackberry to access your files on the go.  You may also share individual folders in your Dropbox with others if you need to give someone access to a file that is too big to email.  2GB is not a huge amount of space, but there are higher capacities of storage available if you are willing to pay.  Signup at the link below and receive an extra 256 MB of free storage for being referred from Baregeek.com.



Monday, September 13, 2010

The Unsung Heroes of Geeks

An article posted over at Gizmodo.com reminded me how lucky I am to be married to my wife.  The common misconception is that you need to find someone that shares your interests.  In reality, comment interests are good, but all you need to do is find someone that is willing to put up with your geekiness.  If you get lucky, you interests may rub off on each other and you can both enjoy new things.  No, I am not quite ready to pickup a crochet hook, but my wife now enjoys playing video games with me and will try eating just about anything at least once. She trusts me to take things apart around the house and even when she has no clue what I am doing, she asks questions to learn and is supportive.  Check out the original article here.  If you can relate to the feeling that the commenter had in the article, you too just might be a Geek.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Time to Come Clean

I play video games and I enjoy it.  The truth is, many of you do too.  Unfortunately, video games have a fairly negative perception by some people and the media in general.  The overall feeling is often that they are childish, a wast of time and tend to be violent.  Yes they can be violent, however so can movies and books; it is up to parents to set limits as they would with anything else.  As for the waste of time, studies have shown that video games can improve hand eye coordination and problem solving skills.  If you don't believe me feel free to use Google, I spent enough time doing bibliographies in college that I refuse to always do so on my blog.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

My Culinary Secret Weapon

And now for something completely different.  I like to cook almost as much as I like to eat.  However, I am not much for following cook books.  I prefer to raid the pantry, make a mess, and give it a go sans recipe.  More often than not, it works.  My wife and I are usually pleasantly surprised, but also disappointed, because I usually cannot reproduce my accidental success.

One of the things I have learned from my chaotic culinary creations is the ability to mix and match flavors.  I have a better understanding of what goes well together as well as a gift to know what flavor is missing from a dish after a taste.  More often than not, proper seasoning is enough to bring out the best in the most bland of bites .  However, for the especially flat flavors (I promise, I will not try to cram any more alliteration into this post), I have a secret weapon.  Vinegar.  It comes in many colors, flavors and sizes, but generally speaking, the acidic punch of vinegar will brighten the flavor and bring the dish to a  whole new level.

Friday, September 10, 2010

The BareGeek 2.0

Back and better than ever!  I started BareGeek.com as a project that I was extremely excited about.  I had material, I had ideas and I had the drive to make it happen.  Unfortunately, I got very busy with work and completely lost my drive to keep writing.  On top of that, I was disappointed with the overall design of the site and was not getting much in the way of readership.  In all honesty, the information I presented was helpful and occasionally interesting, but overall rather dull.  Don't get me wrong, some of the topics were fun, but it felt too much like a computer self help column.  This not what being a Geek is, nor is it what I set out to do.

Starting today, you will notice a whole new look and feel to the site, but even more than that, you will notice a whole new take on the content.  The fact that my most widely discussed article was on a slow cooker should have sent off warning bells in my head.  Yes I am a computer geek, but I am also a food geek, a gamer geek, a movie geek, a camera geek and a nature geek.  My interests are not restricted to computers, so why should my writing.  I set out with the idea that geeks come in all different flavors and then proceeded to pigeonhole myself into being a computer geek.  Don't get me wrong, I still want to provide tips and tricks like I always did, but I also want to broaden my scope.  With that, I hope some of my other partitions of Geekiness will interest you if the computers did not do the trick.  After all, we all are geeks about something.

As always, please make BareGeek.com a regular stop on your internet journey, take a break to comment and share the love!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Why did I get a DSLR?

On the heals of my last post, and prior to my full review, I wanted to talk a little about why I decided to get a DSLR camera.  With standard point and shoot camera's getting so much better and so affordable, why would you ever get such a large and pricey camera?  To be honest, a few years ago I would have been asking myself the same question.  However, the more I learned about them, the more I saw how much others enjoyed DSLR cameras, the more I realized it is a hobby that matches my personality quite well.