I spent part of my weekend stalking through the nerd mines, keeping a watchful eye out for anything inappropriate. There was the usual blogger drama of some crazy small business owner pretending to be two people, but most of the nerd mine caverns were quiet.

Well, as quiet as you can be when everyone is screaming “Obama!” over and over again at one another.

Since I long ago shook off my shackles of nerdiness and wandered, blinking, into the sunlight, I was pleased to enjoy two days of really nice weather this weekend. I’m happy to say that I got some time to ride bikes with my crew. I made sure to stay away from the park, however, as that’s the last place you want to be when the sun returns to the skies.

Piedmont Park on the first nice day of the year is to enjoying a sunny day what bars on New year’s Eve are to sport drinking. It’s amateur hour times twelve.

Also great for kids.

It is a requirement in Atlanta for all straight single girls to own a dog. I’m not sure when that law got passed, but spend any time at all talking to single Atlanta ladies and you will reach the same conclusion.

Further, girls are also required by law to never train their dog or admonish it in any way so that it can be as unruly as possible when the first sunny day of the year rolls around. They must also ensure that they have as long of a leash as possible so that their animal can annoy people and interact with other dogs in a twenty foot radius at minimum.

This leash typically takes the form of a plastic handle attached to a spool of black nylon cord which makes a perfect invisible barrier sure to rip a cyclist off his bike by the neck. Or at least, the cyclists foolish enough to think that a dog and a person 20 feet apart are not bound together by a cord.

If only they made these for kids. Haha, just kidding! No one would ever be so… oh.

Well, at least I am not in any current danger of having kids. Just to make sure, I put on a condom every morning whether I intend to have relations or not. You just can’t be too careful these days, and besides, I have the ones that protect endangered species.

I’m not sure how the condoms help endangered species, but as anyone knows, questioning anything that has to do in any way whatsoever with endangered species or the environment is worse than sin, and is punishable by severe beatdown.

And that, my friends, is science.

When I was but a young burgeoning hermit, back in the dawn of time — or, more accurately, the late 90′s — I lived in a thatch-roofed hovel in Birmingham, Alabama.

The hovel complex had a swimming pool the size of a large bathtub, but I never saw a single person swimming in it. This was due to it being filled with what appeared to be liquid doom, as opposed to water. A family of frogs seemed to enjoy the doom, however, and plopped wetly around in it.

My street was named Rhodes Circle, so I took that as free license to refer to myself as a Rhodes Scholar.

Unfortunately, this bit of subterfuge was dismantled by widespread ignorance of what a Rhodes Scholar is. No one knew or cared. So I claimed instead to be a golf ball denter, and all was well.

I had just purchased my first “cell phone” and I also had a “pager”. I was quite impressed with myself, and the phone almost fit in a jeans pocket for easy carrying. Unfortunately, the antenna became dislodged over time from being jammed into a jeans pocket for which it was slightly too large, but I overlooked that as a minor inconvenience as I had no one to call anyway.

Yes, back in those dark days it was so expensive to make a cell phone call that one hesitated to use them even in emergencies. Thank goodness the handsets themselves were large and weighty enough that one could usually just bludgeon into submission any problems that presented themselves.

I had a friend named David. He liked playing chess and being a gigantic nerd just as much as I did. He had long black hair and a dark complexion thanks to some southeast Asian heritage, but for some reason most people thought him to be a native American. He would occasionally talk sarcastically about himself and his tribe.

I admit it, I was jealous. As an adopted white guy, I belonged to no one.

“Dave,” I reminded him, “You are a tribe of one.”

“You have angered my people.”

He liked to fold his hands with his fingers intertwined except for the thumbs and index fingers, which game together at their tips. I hated playing chess with him because we were even in skill, but he was much more patient than I was.

Anyone fond of such a seemingly-mystical hand folding technique as his surely possessed great reserves of patience.

David stood atop a cliff overlooking a wide, flat canyon. More accurately, we were smoking cigarettes outside a coffee shop on Highland Avenue, but a slight breeze did lift his hair a bit. Plus he had that zen hand thing going.

He spoke of a mystical file format known as the “MP3″. I had never heard of such a thing, but he said that some wizard in a far off Scandinavian land had found a way to compress music files so that they were around a megabyte per minute of audio, rather than the ten megabytes per minute of a WAV file. I was intrigued, and endeavored to find out about said magic files.

David had the technology to make his own CDs. This practice is commonplace now, but at the time it was like someone having the ability to print out their own snapshots. Wait, that’s now commonplace too. Well anyway, it was amazing, and it started my love affair with the MP3. As someone who typically scratched a new CD within 30 minutes of purchasing it I was glad to now have a way to listen to music without having to re-buy albums all the time.

Technology has moved on in the ten years since then, and the rising tide of bandwidth is now lapping at the shores of the movie industry. Where it would once have taken weeks to download a movie, now most people can download a full-length DVD feature in less time than it takes to watch it.

Content encrustation at its finest

And then there’s the much different experience of pirating a movie versus legally renting or purchasing it, as this info-graphic describes. Note that I didn’t make this image, I found it linked on Digg and have no idea of the creator. They’re probably being tortured as I speak.

One of the most arrogant and annoying things media companies do is what I call content encrustation. Sometimes people don’t really mind their content being encrusted, as evidenced by the fervor over Super Bowl ads.

The game, in that case, would be the content and the money-generating advertisements surrounding and permeating and being superimposed upon the game would be the encrustation. I think people enjoy that style of content encrustation for a simple reason: Because the standard of advertisements appearing in the Super Bowl is high. The rest of the time, corporations are seemingly content to drill you with whatever crap they have lying around, relying on repetition to move product rather than cleverness.

The only problem is that now, thanks to the Internet, consumers have been exposed to encrustation-free content, and they’re hooked. Oh yeah, baby, we’ve had a taste of the sweet stuff.

Personally, I think content should either cost money and have no encrustation, or be completely free and have some. If it costs money and is encrusted, that’s like getting a kiss and a punch in the nuts at the same time. That may be fine for some, but I would be hurt physically as well as emotionally.

My point is not that pirating movies should be legal, but that the people who make them should find a way to make money without a lot of encrustation. I know you can do it, guys, and I’ll be there with my wallet when you get it all figured out.

I have hope for you!

As you know, I posted yesterday about the horrors of the Nerd Mines. This apparently stirred some great evil that was lurking deep below, because I have spent much of the previous twelve hours hacking away in the dank recesses of the very same.

The good news is that I have surfaced, thanks to Chris, with a nugget of awesome. I have a new hosting provider. You may notice that loading my web page is now a touch faster than receiving an entire Mellville novel by carrier pigeon, although no less tedious once it arrives.

When you’re deep in the confusing caverns of nerdiness, you need a beacon to light your way. Previously I relied on the wisdom of Sidewalk Tomato, but it has hurried away to be a beacon to someone else, or possibly a meal to some form of city animal.

Thankfully, a new learned oracle has appeared before me. Here’s a sample of the wisdom of srslyThisisLane:

I just stood there gazing upon that dead moon. Then I realized I was sans pants and my neighbors had probably called the cops again.
1:32 PM Feb 16th from web

You don’t really get much more prophetic than that. The best thing about my new oracle is that there is a real Lane, who is mortified by the revolting things “srslyThisIsLane” has to say.

Somehow this is all related to Georgia Tech, which is to our local Nerd Mines what Rome was to… uh.. Rome. The only difference is that Romans wore togas and fought in the coliseum and Tech nerds wear tee shirts and play video games.

They also ride bikes, though, which is how I know most of the ones I know, and thank god for that.

Otherwise I’d be without an oracle for spiritual guidance, and that’s no way to live.

As a recovering nerd, I feel its my duty to be a liason between the filthy, revolting world of nerddom and the normal one. Toward this end, I peruse sites like Reddit and others in order to keep my finger on the simultaneously fat, skinny, self-conscious and anonymous pulse of nerdy doings, much as an older brother might occasionally venture into his younger brother’s room though he is quite aware of how horrible it is in there.

He knows this, of course, because he was once every bit as horrible himself.

Note: artist's conception. Actual nerd mines far more disgusting.

Now if you imagine that there is not one but a myriad sea of little brothers in the room, and that they have been left unsupervised with limitless news and porn, as well as shelves of movies and commercial music to shoplift with impunity, you will have constructed a fairly accurate metaphor for the internet, except that it should be someplace much more filthy, dark, and creepy than a room in a family home. I’m thinking of something more like an abandoned mine shaft.

However, it must be said, occasionally the brand of humor down in the nerd mines is pretty funny, so my motives for descending into them aren’t entirely selfless. I like a chuckle now and then.

This morning I put on my hardhat and headed under ground, where I was confronted by uproar and commotion among my nerdy little brothers. It seems that two gentlemen on a bus got into an altercation, and the nerds are stirring up a mighty cloud of cheeto dust in their fervor over the video of it.

The problem is that they can’t just be content to poke fun at the people in the video themselves to one another. They have to take it to an extremely creepy and inappropriate level by searching out the people in it and harassing them in person. This includes the poor girl merely sitting on the bus listening to her headphones, probably on her way home from school.

I don’t know this for sure, but I can only assume based on the messages flying around that one of them has gotten his grubby hands on her facebook account already and is creeping her out as we speak. It makes me ill.

What’s worse is there are precious few among them with the stones to actually walk up to a cute girl and flirt like a normal person, so instead they will befriend her and then post endless whining and crying a year later when she asserts, correctly, that they’re just friends.

Nerds, I love you, but get it together!