Doug Cornelius .com

An unprecedented collection of GeekDads descended on the first edition of Pax East. Somehow we had convinced the organizers that their attendees would be interested in hearing from us about raising the next generation of geeks.

This was the first east coast edition of Pax, a hugely popular gaming convention. The 60,000 tickets for the Boston event were sold out in a week.

Would be the attendees be interested in hearing from us. Frankly, I thought the only people in the audience would be the few who wandered in while trying to find the bathroom. That opinion was emphasized when I saw that the panel’s room was in the Wyvern Theatre in the far corner of the expo’s top floor.

Matt Blum, Dave Banks, Natania Barron, John Booth, Michael Harrison and I gathered for dinner and wandered up to the distant room of the panel. We bumped into the back of a long queue of people pointed in the opposite direction from our room. “Clearly, we are scheduled opposite some other popular session.” When we got the doors, we turned and saw that the long queue wrapped around the stairwell atrium and ended up in front us.

“HOLY CARP, they’re waiting to see us!!”

The room had about 250 seats, all filled, plus a few dozen people standing along the walls.

We were all stunned that so many people had come to see us. The room was full 15 minutes before the scheduled start time, so we figured we may as well start. Of course that meant we would have to somehow manage to be interesting for an additional 15 minutes. I was sure that most of the audience would empty out with seconds after we started talking.

Me, John, Matt, Natania, Dave and Michael

There were six contributors to GeekDad on the panel. That was the largest gathering of contributors to the blog in one place. (At least according to the six of us.)

We each began by giving our geek credentials and our parent credentials. The same as we do when someone new comes on the GeekDad podcast. Then we spent the rest of the time talking about the joys and challenges of raising the next generation of geeks.

About half the audience raised their hands when we asked how many were parents. The audience was great. They were very engaged and had lots of questions for us. Way more questions than we had time for.

Most of the audience stayed for the whole 75 minutes, they even applauded at the end. Fairly loud applause. “They liked us. They really, really liked us.”

Other Media Coverage:

• News Broadcast from Boston.com
• Pax East kicks off in Boston News Broadcast from New England Cable News
• Photos from Boston.com
• Video game culture, lifestyle take center stage in Boston
• Geek Out!: Wheaton wows gamers on CNN
• The Highway Calls by John Booth
• Images from the GeekDad Panel
• PAX East 2010: Six GeekDads, One Panel, Much Fun on GeekDad
• Matt Blum’s Pictures from Pax East 2010
• PAX East lookback, part 1. by John Booth (fellow GeekDad) in Cornfield Meet

Friday night, I will be in the Wyvern Theatre at Pax East speaking on Bringing up the Next Generation of Geeks. If you are attending Pax East, please stop by at 7:00 and pretend to be interested. (We’ll pretend to be interesting.)

How young is too young for The Hobbit? What should my kids’ first LEGO set be? How can I control my disgust if my child tells me he likes Jar Jar and the Ewoks? When should I buy my kids their first non-six-sided dice? These questions and many more will be discussed by writers for Wired.com’s GeekDad blog and other geek parents. Come share your stories and advice for how to make sure our kids grow up to be geeks like us! Don’t have kids? Show up and find out what may be in store for you if you ever do!

I’m part of a panel with some fellow writers for Wired’s GeekDad.

Panelists Include: Matt Blum [Assistant Editor], Dave Banks, Natania Barron, John Booth, Doug Cornelius [that's me], Michael Harrison, and Corrina Lawson [Who is not going to arrive in time for the panel].

Maybe Vice President Biden got it right?

See Cartoons by Cartoon by John Trever – Courtesy of Politicalcartoons.com – Email this Cartoon

The Charles River is running very strong with all of the recent rain. I cam across this video of Cordingly Dam.

I paddled in this area on the Charles River from the Hemlock Gorge section [Paddling in Hemlock Gorge] a few year ago when it was much calmer. I managed to get my kayak stuck on a rock and it swamped. With that torrent, I would just flipped.

Lis Wiehl has added another element to her career, from trial lawyer to Fox News commentator and now a novelist. The publisher sent me a copy of her book: Face of Betrayal.

I generally would not bother writing a review for book this bad, but I agreed to write a review in exchange for a copy of the book. Given the the that it is a pulpy crime novel and that Lis had a contributor, I had low expectations. Even those lowered expectations were not met.

The book is a “Triple Threat Novel” with three narrators: FBI Agent, reporter and prosecutor. Three friends who share food and drinks in Portland, Oregon. I couldn’t tell the difference in the narration between the three. It just confused the story and viewpoints.

The primary story is a Senate page home for vacation takes her dog out for a walk and never returns. The triple threat team each take their respective role in investigating and reporting the crime. Each of the triple threat has their own battles to fight. One has a stalker, one is in an abusive relationship and one is a single parent.

The characters are flat, the story is predictable and the ending is rushed. If you are looking for a crime novel, try William Landay’s Mission Flats or Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Unless you’re a Lis Wiehl fan, don’t bother wasting an afternoon with Face of Betrayal.

For the dozens of you who watch NBC’s Parks and Recreation on Thursday nights, here is a great take on the opening credits.

Computer-generated map of Pluto from Hubble images, synthesized true color

When picking up The Daughter, I was horrified to see a montage of the solar system on the wall of an adjacent classroom with nine planets.

NINE PLANETS?!?! That’s so 2005.

It’s not that I have anything against Pluto. The problem is that it was mislabeled as a planet when it was discovered because of some bad observations of Neptune. I read Planets X and Pluto a few weeks ago so I had still had a bunch of history and science in my head.

By coincidence, March 13 is the day that the discovery of Pluto was announced. So I put together a post on GeekDad: Happy Pluto Discovery Day.

If still think there are nine planets, you definitely need to read Happy Pluto Discovery Day.

Some of my recent GeekDad posts:

1. Assembling LEGO Creator Super Speedster
2. Assembling the LEGO Atlantis Neptune Carrier
3. 20 Geeky Images from Space
4. Assembling the LEGO Atlantis Turbo Typhoon Sub
5. Own Your World With Location-Based Mobile Games
6. Catalog Your Books Online

GeekDad

I am continuing on my quest to read 52 books this year and with 15 books finished, I seem to be on pace.

The latest book was Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde.

Since the book had a compliance angle to it, I posted my review on Compliance Building: Weekend Book Review: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde.

[Get this widget from LibraryThing]

Will the world of book publishing be subject to the same revolution as the music industry because of digital content? With the Kindle (or iPad or Nook) do to books what the iPod did to record albums?

It’s not my question to answer. But Jason Epstein from the The New York Review of Books has an excellent view on this in his article: Publishing: The Revolutionary Future

Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.

The schedule for Pax East has been released. What is PAX East?

PAX East is a three-day game festival for tabletop, videogame, and PC gamers. We call it a festival because in addition to dedicated tournaments and freeplay areas we’ve got nerdcore concerts, panel discussions, and an exhibitor hall filled with booths displaying the latest from top game publishers and developers.

It’s happening March 26th to 28th at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston.

I will be on a panel with several of the GeekDad writers on Friday night at 7:00. The panel, titled “Bringing Up the Next Generation of Geeks,” will include Dave Banks, Natania Barron, Matt Blum, John Booth, Doug Cornelius (that’s me), Michael Harrison, and Corrina Lawson. We described the session as:

How young is too young for The Hobbit? What should my kids’ first LEGO set be? How can I control my disgust if my child tells me he likes Jar Jar and the Ewoks? When should I buy my kids their first non-six-sided dice? These questions and many more will be discussed by writers for Wired.com’s GeekDad blog and other geek parents. Come share your stories and advice for how to make sure our kids grow up to be geeks like us! Don’t have kids? Show up and find out what may be in store for you if you ever do!

If you are coming to Pax East, please stop by the Wyvern Theatre on Friday night and say hello.

There is also a story in the latest edition of the Boston Business Journal: Geeks and gamers to descend on Hub. Rodney Brown notes that Pax East will be the third largest recurring event in the first quarter, after the Yankee Dental conference and the International Seafood Show.