I had a very nice lady call me completely in tears one day because she had spilled an entire can of soda on her keyboard and it had quit working properly (aside from being just nasty – lol). One of the tricks I had learned was to have the customer put the keyboard in the dishwasher, after which, they should let it dry for a day or two. I explained to her this was perfectly safe to do and she was elated that it could possibly be so simple. Several days pass and she calls me back in tears because it didn’t work and NOW her computer won’t even turn on! After a few minutes of interrogation I determined that I needed to overnight her a new replacement computer.

What tripped me off? It was at the moment when she stated that she was able to get her keyboard AND box (CPU) in the dishwasher but the monitor didn’t fit so she had to remove the top shelp of her dishwasher and run a separate load just for it!

You’re invited to send in your IT stories, pictures, and other funny stuff and share it with those who will understand. Link

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Great comics and Star Wars teaming up to fight cancer? That’s certainly something we can all get behind. For more information on how you can help, be sure to check out the Stand Up To Cancer website.

Via The Mary Sue

Sure the geek-revolution is great for those of us who read Neatorama, but what about the jocks and pop-culture lovers? They’re tired of getting picked on by the more intelligent among us. This PSA reminds us that words hurt and sometimes geeks need to just bite their tongue.

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Oh sure, blame it on the plant! No word on where this photo was taken, as it was posted without a source. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

1. Etch-A-Sketch Skirt

The idea of this Etch-A-Sketch skirt by Etsy user SewOeno is pretty cool, but what really puts it over the top is the use of embroidery to create a picture that looks perfect for the subject in question.

2. Game Boy Dress

That same Etsy seller, SewOeno was also responsible for this exceptionally popular Game Boy dress.

3. Nintendo Controller Dress

For those who like old school Nintendo over Game Boys, you’re sure to love this awesome Nintendo controller dress by Liz Tan.

4. Mario Sweater Vest

This knitted sweater vest by Happy Seamstress is an accurate replica of a screenshot of the original Mario Bros game.

5. Mario Piranha Plant Scarf

With all the varying lengths of pipes that piranha plants grow in, this scarf by Technabob is a perfect materialization of the video game monsters.

6. Tetris Tube Top

Personally, my favorite old school game is Tetris, which is why I am totally in love with this sweet Tetris tube top by ZedishaLuxe. She also makes a nice one-shoulder dress in the same style and a Nintendo controller dress as well.

7. Tetris Dress

For those who like to mix their 1980’s video games with some classic vintage dress styles, then you might prefer this stylish Tetris dress created for A Dress A Day.

8. Missile Control Skirt

On a similar note, this poodle-style skirt by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories features cities, missile trails and aiming crosshairs.

9. Long Cat Scarf

If you like to wear your geekery in meme form rather than gamer form, then you’d look quite chic and stylish in this sweet long cat scarf by Etsy seller xHezaChanx.

10. 3D Glasses Dress

There are plenty of people who argue that the whole 3D movie thing is a trend, but if you love 3D in all of its forms, then this dress by nicolelinder is a great way to show your interests to the outside world.

11. Pong Dress

Get ready to party with this sweet dress by artists Max Moswitzer and Magarete Jahrmann of the Ludic Society that actually lets you play Pong wherever you go.

12. Air Conditioned Shirt

For all you geeks out there who are tired of slaving away in a hot office, this USB powered, air conditioned shirt by Kouzi Ichigaya, an ex-Sony technician, is a great way to cool down. Of course, if you don’t happen to be near a computer, you can always power the fan using a few AA batteries instead.

13. Httpanties

With messages like “403 Forbidden” and “411 length required,” these naughty panties on ThinkGeek are a perfect way to express your programming geektitude in any situation.

14. Computer Wire Dress

When you want to show your techy undertones on the outside though, it’s probably a lot more socially acceptable to do it with a great computer wire dress like this one by Tina Sparkles.

15. Star Wars Crawl Dress

You can’t have any geek-related articles without mentioning Star Wars and this dress featuring the introductory crawl from the movie series. In case you’re wondering, the headband matches the rest of the outfit, reading, “In a galaxy far, far away.” The dress was created by a woman named Chenoa who is a friend of the guy who runs Chris Eng Says ‘Bwuh?’

16. Star Wars Corset

For a more sensual side of Star Wars, check out these sexy corsets by Evening Arwen that will make you look like a feminine Darth Vader or a svelte storm trooper.

17. Star Trek Corset

For the Trekkies, there are still plenty of sexy lingerie, just check out this gorgeous red-shirt corset that was sold on Etsy, but I can’t track down the seller that originally released it.

Do you guys have any favorite geek gear? If so, share it in the comments.

Update: Reader Contributions

Reader Geneva wanted to share her wonderful Wonder Woman scarf with us, and I’m very glad she did.

Melphistopheles wanted to make sure we included these great Star Wars bathing suits by Black Milk. While I love the R2D2, the C3PO one is great as well.

Keep the comments coming guys!

I know the Orlando Star Wars celebration is long past, but when I found this picture of two toddlers dressed up as droids for the convention, I couldn’t help but post it here to share it with all of my fellow Neatogeeks.

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1) Thomas Dolby: She Blinded Me With Science

How is it nerdy? This is the song that inspired me to write this list. It’s an ultimate geek love song in that a woman is able to seduce her love interest not through her looks but through chemistry and other scientific fields.

Choice lyrics: It’s poetry in motion/And now she’s making love to me/The spheres are in commotion/The elements in harmony/She blinded me with science/”She blinded me with science!”/And hit me with technology

Video:

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2) Marshall Gray: Critical Hit On My Heart

How is it nerdy? It might just be impossible to write a romantic song with more Dungeons and Dragons references.

Choice lyrics: I picked up spell resistance from the enchanted school/So I could bend up all these magic pretences/And though always use it as a general rule /This time I’m lowering all my defences

Video: There’s no official video for the song, but here’s a YouTube video with the song.

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3) Mc Chris: Nerd Girl

How is it nerdy? MC Chris is one of the biggest stars of the nerdcore hip hop scene and this serenade to a nerd shows just how geeky he can be, even when discussing matters of the heart.

Choice lyrics: She’s romantic, known to panic/With anxiety attacks/Literary, it’s so scary/Reading Brontes back to back/She’s playing Ragnarok on her mom’s Magnavox/She’s underneath my skin like a million nanobots

Video:

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4) Bad Religion: I Love My Computer

How is it nerdy? It’s not even about a girl, it really is about loving a computer and how the computer is far better than a real girlfriend.

Choice lyrics: I’ve never been quite so happy/all I need to do is click on you/and we’ll be joined/in the most soul-less way/and we’ll never/ever ruin each other’s day

Video:

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5) The Aquabats: Martian Girl

How is it nerdy? It takes all the silly scifi conventions about aliens and turns them into a love song about a green-skinned girl in a silver bikini. Of course, their love was not meant to be because after kissing the narrator and drawing blood with her razor sharp teeth, she flies away.

Choice lyrics: She’s not a bird/She’s not a plane/She’s got green blood/Pumping through her veins.

Video:

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6) Logan Whitehurst: Calculator Love

How is it nerdy? Aside from the bizarro chipmunk-sounding vocals, the lyrics revolve around solving math problems together using a brand new calculator.

Choice lyrics: If you really love me darling, count it up and see/And we can solve our problems with some trigonometry

Video: I couldn’t find any videos featuring the song, but if you want to check it out, here’s a link to the MP3.

7) Freezepop: Science Genius Girl

How is it nerdy? The song is about a girl who’s great at science and wants to clone a human being to be both her boyfriend and bandmate.

Choice lyrics: Measure out the chemicals/safety goggles on my eyes/turn the bunsen burner on/my creation comes alive

Video:

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8) Your Favorite Martian: Zombie Love Song

How is it nerdy? Geeks love zombies, so what’s more apt than a love song from the zombie’s point of view.

Choice lyrics: I knew you’d be surprised. You can bet that I/May not be alive, but I sure as hell ain’t dead inside./What’s with the shotty? I ain’t wishing you harm./You see, I’d try to hold your hand but I’m missing an arm.

Video:

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9) The Klein Four Group: Finite Simple Group

How is it nerdy? It’s all about math and is performed and written by students of  Northwestern University’s Mathematics Department.

Choice lyrics: I’m not the smoothest operator in my class/But we’re a mirror pair, me and you/So let’s apply forgetful functors to the past/And be a finite simple group, a finite simple group/Let’s be a finite simple group of order two

Video:

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10) Mouldy Peaches: Anyone Else But You

How is it nerdy? Aside from being the official theme for the movie Juno, the lyrics are decidedly dorky, particularly the line listing off the Contra Code.

Choice lyrics: Up up down down left right left right B A start/Just because we use cheats doesn’t mean we’re not smart/I don’t see what anyone can see/in anyone else but you

Video: There is no official video for the song, but here’s the audio with the lyrics.

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Have any more to add? Share your favorites in the comments.

Now, this is not to suggest that we nerds don’t enjoy a night at a gourmet restaurant or a nice home-cooked meal as much as the next person. But so much time, money, and effort goes toward nerdy fandoms and hobbies that we’ve become notorious for our reliance on cheap, quick, easily prepared, and convenient meals. Essentially, anything that takes us away from our computers, TVs, novels, comics, and games for the least amount of time — and leaves us with the most money in our pockets to fuel our obsessions is highly regarded.

Note that although this list contains one Japanese product, it is aimed toward the US audience. I know a lot of geeks who would argue all day that the ultimate nerd food is poutine. Link -via mental_floss

Red and Jonny call themselves Star Wars geeks. They started taking self-portraits wearing Storm Trooper helmets on their honeymoon, and continue to do so. See them in both everyday and outlandish situations in a years-long series of photographs.

Link to story | Flickr stream | Red and Jonny’s website. -via Digg

1. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
2. Steve Jobs (Apple)
3. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Erick Schmidt (Google)
4. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp)
5. Jeff Bezos (Amazon)
6. Bernard Arnault (LVMH)
7. Michael Bloomberg (mayor of New York City)
8. Larry Ellison (Oracle)
9. Evan Williams and Biz Stone (Twitter)
10. John Malone (Liberty Media)

All 100 are profiled at Vanity Fair. Link -via Holy Kaw!

Along with the ZX Spectrum, my parents had also presented us with a selection of computer games. Loading them was an undertaking in itself: each fed into a cassette player, its buttons held down with thumb-numbing force, while the tape whirred and spluttered and made a sound that may be roughly transposed as chkeeewschyrrrrrfffffllychkxduhuhftttt. My brother had three games: a vampire adventure named Transylvanian Tower, a treasure hunt called Espionage Island and a complicated programme that followed the process of evolution. For me, there was a solitary cassette, a numeracy aid named Count About. I cannot deny that I was at that age rather muddled by mathematics, but it only added to my sense of dismay that my computer time would involve assisting a badly graphicked monkey clamber up a tree to collect a specified number of coconuts.

You can contribute your own memories to the collection. Link -Thanks, Jason!

"When people think of computer science, the image that immediately pops into many of their minds is of the computer geek surrounded by such things as computer games, science-fiction memorabilia and junk food," said lead researcher Sapna Cheryan, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington. "That stereotype doesn’t appeal to many women who don’t like the portrait of masculinity that it evokes." [...]

In the first experiment, about 40 male and female students entered a small classroom that either contained objects stereotypically associated with computer science, such as Star Trek posters, video game boxes and Coke cans, or non-stereotypical items such as nature posters, art, a dictionary and coffee mugs. (The students were told to ignore these objects because the room was being shared with another class.)

Then, the students filled out questionnaires about their attitudes toward computer science.

In the geeky environment, women were significantly less interested than men in computer science, while there was no gender difference for the non-stereotypical classroom. Female students in the stereotypical environment said they felt less similar to computer-science majors than did those in the classroom that wasn’t geeked out.

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Cinematical put together a shockingly small list of great geeky girl movie characters.  They’re all fine examples, but surely there must be more out there along the lines of Thora Birch in Ghost World (left).

Geeky girls are few and far between in the 100+ years of cinema, but they are key to the revelation that technology and freethinking are not the sole playground of men. Geekology is omnisexual, and has been since…well that’s the mystery.

Check out their list, and tell us what they missed.  They did well as far as post 1990 goes, but what about the classics?  I’m calling dibs on Lt. Uhura, possibly the first geek girl who simultaneously had a free, sometimes kooky mind,  and access to a computer.  Who else is a geek grrl of filmdom?

Link (Image: MGM)

Recognizing the subtle differences between these similar titles can be confusing sometimes. Fortunately, this chart is here to help you understand which group you fit into.

Link Via Laughing Squid

Spotting silly vanity license plates is always a fun activity, especially double-innuendo or borderline-obscene ones. But some of the best still come from those who show their geek pride on their bumpers.

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From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geeksaresexy.

Sex, Drugs and Science

If this first group of studies show us anything, it’s that scientists are as drugged up and crazy as the junkies up the street from me.

Elephants on Acid:

If you were going to see the effects of LSD on an elephant, wouldn’t you start with smaller doses and progressively increase the dosage until there was a noticeable change in their behavior? I sure would. But the researchers on this one aren’t like you and me.

Instead the researchers working on this one started off by injecting the poor beast with 3000 times the dosage needed for an average human, despite the fact that elephants weigh around 50 times what the average human weighs. Within two hours, the animal died. The scientists defended their actions by saying they had used LSD plenty of times and were sure it was safe. They then concluded, “elephants are highly sensitive to LSD.”

Apparently another scientist found their results to be suspicious, so he gave elephants LSD in their water. In his study, the elephants acted a little funny, but were totally fine.

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Turkey Arousal:

We’ve all heard stories detailing how stupid turkeys are -like the one that says they’ll drown if you leave them in the rain. Well, some of those turkey stories may be bogus, but two Penn State researchers discovered that turkeys are so stupid they can be trained to be aroused by little more than sticks.

Their experiment consisted of creating a model female turkey that could be progressively deconstructed. The scientists would then gauge the turkey’s interest in the “female” and then remove some parts of her body and try again. They were expecting the birds would lose interest after is was stripped down enough. Surprisingly, the turkeys were aroused even when the model became little more than a stick with a head. I guess this not only shows how stupid turkeys are, but how perverse they are too.

Source | Photo Via Vicki’s Nature [Flickr]

Semen As an Anti-depressant?

I always thought scientists were supposed to be unbiased. I mean, if you’re hoping for certain results, might that affect your research? Obviously these researchers bypassed that concept, by attempting to prove that semen works as an antidepressant. They decided to study this theory by interviewing college women who were sexually active. Their conclusions proved that women who had sex without condoms were less depressed than women who used them.

Of course, their research was extremely preliminary and they didn’t even bother to take into account additional factors, like the fact that women not using condoms are more likely to be in serious

relationships. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that this might play into someone’s relative level of happiness. But like I said, this study was about as unbiased as all those tobacco company ones that couldn’t connect smoking with cancer.

Source | Photo Via Zen [Flickr]

Paging Dr. Obvious

The rest of these studies are amazing -in that someone actually bothered to research things so obvious:

Head Banging is Bad For You:

Who would have ever thought that aggressively and repeatedly throwing your head up and down would be bad for you? Gee, I never would have imagined that spinal damage and brain trauma could have resulted from head banging. Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. After years of dating a metal head, I can assure you that head banging can certainly make you retarded…or at least, it doesn’t help your intelligence at all.

The only good thing researchers found was that head banging is unlikely to leave you unconscious. What is really funny is the researcher’s suggestions for the metal genre. They suggest metal bands play more

mellow tunes and less “beat oriented” music. They also urged label to place anti-head banging warnings on their cds. Oh, and listeners were advised to start listening to “adult-oriented rock” instead of heavy metal. Yeah, that’s gonna happen real soon.

Source | Photo Via Cayusa [Flickr]

Male science nerds likely to be virgins:

Hmmm, who is most likely to be a virgin, a party-girl, a jock, or a nerd? Think about it. No surprise here; male science nerds between 16 and 25 are the most likely to not have had sex.

At least the study provided some legitimate reasons for this statistic, rather than the typical “nerds are pimply and boring” theories of popular media. The study reasoned that these nerds were the population segment least likely to be in situations where they would meet potential lovers. Apparently, doing homework and going to the library doesn’t help you meet chicks. Hey, at least they’re being productive. Interestingly, female art students were the most sexually active.

Source | Photo Via Miss604 [Flickr]

Bullies Like Seeing Pain:

If bullies were compassionate they would sit around crying whenever they picked on people. The fact that they don’t do so might just indicate that they are mean. Why did anyone need to set up a study to confirm that bullies enjoy seeing other people in pain?

An interesting thing about this study is that it was the first time anyone used fMRI to evaluate how respondents reacted to different emotions. Instead of being empathetic like the brain of a normal person, bullies mind’s activate their reward centers when they see videos of other people being picked on.

Source | Photo Via ZZClef [Flickr]

Television Viewers Are Unhappy:

It’s common knowledge that television and other forms of entertainment are a way for people to escape their problems. If you run home to watch tv instead rather than hanging out with friends, you might be unhappy. Did we really need a scientist to tell us that people who socialize are generally more happy than people who sit at home watching tv all day? What’s more crazy is that they needed over 30 years of data to back up their claims. The only unique thing the study discovered was that many viewers are actually addicted. (Marx was right about television, is this evidence that the scientists are commies?):

“Addictive activities produce momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret,” said Steven Martin, co-author of the study. “People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged. For this kind of person, TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It’s habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.”

Funny, I’ve was using the audio/visual equivalent of heroin the whole time I was researching this. I swear I could quit any time.

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Now that I’ve written this, I think I’ve got a couple of ideas I could get funded. For example, are people happier when they’re warm at home or cold in the middle of nowhere? Or maybe I could find out if donkeys really die when they take a bunch of cocaine and other drugs at a bachelor party. Do you guys have any ideas for awesome studies?

These little dolls are adorable and clever. I want a set! There are plenty more images and close ups on artist Matt Brown’s site.

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This one to the left is the Inka, the alien coffee press, by designer Guido Venturini (if that isn’t an alien’s name, I don’t know what is) for Italian design studio Alessi.

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If you can’t make it home to Thanksgiving dinner, here’s an adorable set up to make you feel nice and cozt anyway. Can you tell what it is? Here’s a hint, it’s a cake in a cup form. Yup, it’s a cup cake Thanksgiving dinner.

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