Express your inner Geek
Graham Linehan, writer of the peerless geek sitcom, the IT Crowd wants our help in providing props for the third series of the comedy programme, which he's just finished writing.
The IT Crowd has always been spot on in using authentic props on the show, with great bits of hardware and general tech/geek references.
Writing on his blog (where else?) he's asked the audience to contact the production firm behind the show to suggest items.
I fancy volunteering the following from my own personal stock of IT and geekiness:
A Dragon 32 computer
The first issue of Amiga Format
A Sony Trinitron from the early 1970s
A 7inch single of Jean-Michel Jarre's Oxygene IV
Anyone else fancy offering up some suggestions?
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~07~RS~)
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I love this sitcom!
I'd like to see a Doctor Who's T-Shirt, or at least a reference to Doctor Who.
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an old BBC computer would be awesome, and a shot of Moss playing "tea shop" would just be the icing on the cake for me!
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Re. Paul Freeman-Powell
Or an old BBC computer with a big Prestel modem. The type that drops connection if you run down the stairs outside!
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A photo of a 1980s Alan Sugar complete with massive perm.
A copy of Unix in a Nutshell.
A PlayStation 2 (yes, 2) running Linux
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Last time I was in the States I saw someone wearing a T-shirt that said:
c:\dos
c:\dos\run
run\dos\run!
I laughed, wife didn't get it. Sign of a good geek joke.
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Any t-shirt from www.thinkgeek.com, or anything from them really, try the usb powered missle launcher, or the powerball (imagine Moss trying that!), or ...
Screensavers, how about the classic flying toasters or fish tank, or hook up an Amiga to show the juggling balls demo?
Nothing says Geek more than a pc case mod with liquid cooling and neon lights, get someone like Ben Dorn to hack you one up.
On the bookshelf the complete set of O'Reilly books, a box of Windows 3.11 for Workgroups, and a boxed copy of openSuse Linux lying around :-)
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A Sinclair Spectrum, any Star Trek/Stargate/Dr Who/Matrix stuff, boards from ancient computers, O'Reilly books. A Tux penguin? PacMan/Tetris etc games. Look forward to seeing the new series!
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I think it would be ace if they had a copy of ms office 2008 on like a hundred floppy discs.
Origional gameboy with Tetris would be hilarious.
The new series is going to be amazing!
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They could also have my Daring Fireball.com T-shirt. Totally geek!
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Surely the book Neuromancer by William Gibson
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Ditto the "O'Reilly" books.
Also, Wrox books, too.
Couple of Quickshot joysticks lying around.
Some sort of "All your base are belong to us" reference.
A modded Xbox (v1) running XBMC streaming music/DiVX.
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Oh, and a PS3 displaying the Folding@home software!
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Moss should also take a piece of rack-mounted server equipment, place it on his desk, and power it up - thus drowning out all conversation in the office.
This happens all the time at my place, when people need to "perform testing", and don't want to rack the equipment in the server room.
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Sorry, but they're not having my 'BOFH' mug.
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I think Roy should have a 'RTFM' sign on his desk...
Oh and a 'Jesus is coming, look busy' mug.
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I had a few ideas that were based on a retro mobile handset I saw for sale. The product I saw was an old bakelite black telephone handset with coiled flex and a standard Nokia mobile phone connector. The kind of "modern retro" products I would like to see are:
Electric window buttons in a car replaced by electric winders.
An Ipod with big plastic play, rewind, fastforward and Stop buttons.
A widescreen LCD monitor that only displays in old IBM orange monitor text.
A Large 1970s SLR camera that is also a Telephone.
etc. etc. etc.
G_U_F
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Moss should have a pencil case
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As a mid-twenties geek I find the use of legacy technology some what low-brow, similar in ilk to "put a man in a silly hat and let the audience applaud" american comedy effect as seen in the likes of Friends, Everybody loves raymond (I'm yet to find some one who can actualy testify to this!!), or Will and Grace. Im more of the mind that a few round of yelling gibberish such as "DO A BARREL ROLL" or "If it exists, there is porn of it" might do more for the modern (younger) geek demographic.
Sure throw in a BBC micro, a ZX81 specy (spacky), or even a Epsom dot-matrix printer to help show the love-of-legacy thing us geeks suffer from oh-too-much.
But really, filling a room with tech stuff a geek does not make.
Personaly I still think Nathan Barley was a far better hit on modern tech-savy culture, but then again maybe i just like Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris WAY too much :)
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All the episodes should be named after Jet Set Willy rooms and the storyline should be dictated by the title of each episode
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The the spirit, or maybe a character who wont go into the dark which is explained as a fear of Grue.
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Start voting for your favourite mousemat...
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I had a friend that knew all the words to Tales from Topographic Oceans by Yes ...... but did he understand them.
I think the relative merits of the card punch versus the paper tape punch needs retrospective examination.
7bit versus 8bit bytes ... discuss
Universal Turing Machines were always useful in the 60/70's as a theoretical framework within which to discuss such issues as "Can a Program prove itself correct".
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They should have id cards on cords around their necks preferably with IBM or UNIX logos denoting that they've attended some seminar... all the ultra geeks in my office wear them like battle honours.
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He definitely needs a stylophone to compose techno music on in his break.
don't forget the stress ball in the form of a miniature ounch bag and other desk accoutrements such as a miniature nelson's cradle or one of those things you have to move really carefully to get balls in holes.
Every time he opens his drawer you need to see a small area of a Rubik's Cube, a guilty secret.
They should use one of those huge tapes you always see on computers in old films and TV programmes as a tea tray.
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Re. Nathan Barley
Double Bluetooth!
(Still gets me everytime)
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Oh please, please, please, let there be an old BBC b with the opening screen of Elite forever rotating in the background....
Or possibly you could have them trying to write midi tracks on an Atari 1040ST.
Ahh those halcyon days when 8Mhz seemed fast!
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Remember the fun you could have with the BBC Micro's speech synthesyser, trying to make poor old Kenneth Kendal say rude words?
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I think there should be Doctor Who's hand in that container before it 'grew' on a shelf somewhere and definitely one of the limited edition Dark Knight hologram posters given out at the Preview screenings. The 'Marry me Lara' T-shirt is also a good one.
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I think "all your base are belong to us" needs to be written or displayed during an episode of the IT CROWD
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A Nascom 1, unfortunately mine is long and the first 10 years of Byte magazine my wife persuaded me to through in the bin!!
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Oh I do love to see a modded PC case, with liquid cooling tubes all going everywhere. And a keyboard with worn off keys, that is teh geek!
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There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Theres 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who dont.
;) gEEx
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#6: Roy has worn a couple of ThinkGeek T-shirts, but most of his wardrobe appears to come from jinx.com (their designs are better, IMO)
I don't recall ever seeing a coffee machine - no self-respecting geeks would go without some kind of caffeine-delivery system. For added spice, it should be some clapped out old thing which has had network connectivity hacked onto it by Moss :-) Said coffee machine should be standing on an old PDP-11 or VAX mainbox.
#31: I like the idea of Moss having some kind of uber-modded PC on his desk - he also needs a copy of 'The Camel Book' to go with the Perl camel he has on the wall behind him (and will offset the shame of the C# book plainly visible in some eps :-) ). Also, real geeks use IBM Model-M keyboards!
A couple of old 'dumb' terminals would look cool too - either DEC VT220s or old VIPs. Definitely need more Star Trek/Buffy/Firefly ephemera too, as well as an opte.org style map of the internet to go with their 802.11 protocol map.
Last, but by no means least, they need a couple of Tux or BSD daemon plushies lying around :-)
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Nothing says geek like a USB Lava lamp!
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Pweh - we had USB lightup Christmas trees last year!
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A 57Mb multi-disk platter.
A stack of mag tape reels.
A box of fan-fold paper tape.
A mag core memory unit.
Showing my age or what?
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A still sealed copy of Empire Strikes Back for BBC Model B on tape!
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A ZX Microdrive.
A magnavox
An ASCII drawing of the Mona-Lisa.
Any reference to a 'beige-box'.
Any IBM Redbook.
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"An ASCII drawing of the Mona-Lisa."
Surely you mean a 132-column ASCII 'Snoopy' calendar for 1969? ;-)
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Just after the 9/11 attacks an American colleague of mine came to work wearing a t-shirt with the following text on the front:
rm -rf /bin/laden
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Simon_Ward - hows about the enterprise c:1976??
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