Of all time?

Firefly
Twin Peaks
Babylon 5
Star Trek (TOS and DS9)
The Twilight Zone (original)

And hopefully the Hawaii Five-O remake.

Heroes
Firefly
Farscape
I Spy
Stargate

I have only written Fanfic or really participated in fandom for BSG, however.

Finally! I've been waiting to use this one.....


Friday Five for March 5, 2010. Name five of the coolest moments of your life.

1. getting Rachel
2. getting married
3. meeting my wife
4. getting my masters
5. getting my job

Hey--no fair asking without your own.

Let's see.

1. Cool in retrospect--My oldest was born after an extended, distressed delivery. It happened at change of shift with both shifts of nurses and doctors working it. They finally got the baby out and whisked him away for treatment immediately. When my wife asked if it was a boy or a girl, the doctors looked at one another. One of them then yelled back over her shoulder: "What was that anyway?"

2. Meeting our adopted son for the very first time in the orphanage on the back end of a bad case of jet lag.

3. Getting married twice in one day (civil ceremony in court followed by the BIG SHOW in my wife's village)

4. The first time I was ever called "Daddy."

5. Meeting my wife-to-be in an outlet mall.

Where did you get married???

Malaysia.

I'm not ignoring this- I am stuck on the last two! The first three are easy.....

Stuck as well, mostly from lack of time. I still plan on doing this one later.

What are five free things on the web that you like or use?

1. Ask Dr. Sears. My wife thinks this site has better infant health info than WebMD or the Mayo Clinic's site.

2. Thomasnet. If you want to find out who manufactures anything from cookware to spacecraft then this is the place, often with downloadable catalogs or even CAD drawings.

3. Google Books. I could waste so much time here...

4. Instructables. If I need to know how to tie a knot or fold a shirt I go here.

5. eMachineshop. You can draw almost anything, get quotes on how much it will cost to build, and order them from online manufacturers all in their free design program. The ability to get a manufacturing price at the click of a button is amazing.

Runners up:
I think that as they get more content the MIT Free Online Courseware and Bing Maps's Photosynth will be really cool.

1. Wikipedia. Often criticized, but still very useful.

2. IMDb. The "I Need To Know" forum has saved me from going insane on more than one occasion.

3.Simple Help. Computer issues.

4. How Stuff Works.

5. How to Clean Anything.

After considering the recent discovery that a surprisingly large cross-section of ATSers like WW2 aircraft combined with Pierre's movie recommendation I thought I'd make an unusual Friday Five.

List five non-fiction topics you think are cool and/or obscure movie recommendations.

The total of both should add up to five. I'm going to give 4 cool topics and 1 movie recommendation, for example. What do I mean by something you think is cool? If you would give in to the temptation to spend your ice-cream money on a book about it, or waste several hours following an accidentally discovered chain of websites on the topic then that probably qualifies.

Here's mine:
Stuff I think is cool.
1. Space stuff. Space travel, space colonization, space-based manufacturing, etc. I especially like the can-do optimism of the pre-Space Shuttle retro era before people became afraid of ambition and atomic power (the old Orion concept, the huge L-5 colonies, etc.) and I have a bunch of old aerospace magazines and technical articles in my library. I have great hopes for the new generation of private space companies. There are only 4 entities that have launched men into space; the U.S., Russia (and former Soviets), China, and a small business operating out in the high desert of California.
2. Aircraft. As already discussed in the Chance-Vought Corsair thread. Yes, Pierre I have also heard that the gull wings were to reduce the landing gear length and yet keep a huge propeller, but I suspect there is more to it than that. Landing gear is heavy, but I don't know that you'd save anything by using the wing as part of the landing gear. Plus the wing is possibly the most important component of the aircraft to optimize, and having a long landing gear on a carrier based airplane doesn't strike me as a bad thing because it allows a longer oleo.
3. Military Science. I have no interest whatsoever in getting into a war or in the minutia of things like uniform buttons, but I like the mental challenge of military science topics (much more is at stake if you get something wrong than, say, literary theory) and I guess to a degree I never outgrew the little boy's typical fascination with it. I like cold-war era topics and books like Thinking About the Unthinkable, but would be just as happy reading about WW2 history or Hannibal of Carthage. In fact, when the first teaser trailer for the movie "Hannibal" came out it just had the release date and the name; I was really excited until a friend explained to me that the movie was just about some crazy person-eating psychologist who didn't even own one elephant.
4. Autobiographies. Not of movie stars, but of interesting people trying to explain how they think about their field. It is a completely different experience to read what the history books tell you and then go read an autobiography where the author tries to explain his ideas and realize that there is so much that either wasn't obvious or was just plain wrong in conventional wisdom. Henry Ford, Edison, and Richard Feynman are good examples of fun reads.

And to make five, my obscure movie recommendation:
A Boy and His Dog.

You mean inverted gull wing...
There's an explanation here, I don't know if it's very pertinent or not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gull_wing# ... _gull_wing
I didn't realize the Junkers 87 did also use this...


It's apparently based on the short story written by Harlan Ellison...

My List: (not completed)

1. Fantasy RPG solo computer games (NOT On-Line MultiPlayer). I *loved* to play those. I started early, with Ultima Underworld (UW) (1991!) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Und ... gian_Abyss
With time, lots of games appeared, not always good ones.
My preference goes to the Elder Scrolls series, started in 1994 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls and http://www.elderscrolls.com/
It's really not just a "hack & slash" game...
The Thief series (1 to 3) was also pretty good, especially the two first. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_(series%29

And, of course, Looking Glass Studio, who did the two UW and the two first Thief, also created System Shock... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock

2. My modest shell collection. Cypraea Broderipii...
Are there conchologists here?


3. Obscure Movie Recommendation:
Der Müde Tod, from Fritz Lang (1921), "Destiny" in English. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0012494/
b&w silent film, with a powerful and beautiful musical partition.

Speaking of gull (or W or Dihedral) wings there's a more recent example : the Virgin Galactic Whiteknight (carrying the Spaceship One shuttle).

My list :

1) Astronomy and Space stuff. I have a lot of books and magazines in my library. I'd like to travel to distant worlds but I'm born at least a century too early (reason #1 why I'm watching and reading Sci-Fi).

2) Aircrafts. One of my addictions since I was a kid. I have lot of books about it (One of them is a rare book edited by the Germans during WWII with pictures of both German and Allied aircrafts - the latter labeled "enemy aircrafts") .

3) A French/Belgian comics collection (I have over 3000 all first printing).

4) Computers and IT. I began early, building my first computers from scratch (designing and etching the circuit-boards myself !) when most people didn't even know what a computer was. I've never bought a ready made computer (except a laptop). I'm also building the PCs I use at work. I've also programmed the software I'm using at work (actually I love programming).

5) I don't know any obscure movie. But I recently watched the 1950 version of "The day the earth stood still". The music is played on a theremin (I had never heard the name of the instrument before but if you ever heard "Good Vibrations" you should know how it sounds)".