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This week, Christian Finnegan of VHI’s Best Week Ever (which also happens to be one of the best blogs ever), is coming to Philadelphia to perform at the Helium Comedy Club.

Christian will be in town on June 8th and 9th, and Helium was kind enough to dish out some free tickets for you lovely Geek readers. I’ve got a pair of tickets to see him on Wednesday (8th) and Thursday (9th).

How can you win? Just leave a comment about why last week was YOUR best week ever (saying Lebowski Fest might earn you some points), and I’ll select two of you at random for some free tickets. You’ll find out tomorrow.

Good luck! And check back next week, same day and time. I might be giving away some tickets to see Paul Mecurio (of The Daily Show fame).

Christian Finnegan @ Helium Comedy Club
June 8th – 9th, 2011
www.heliumcomedy.com/index.asp

X-Men: First Class is a great return to form for a franchise whose last entry was probably one of the worst superhero films in the last 5 years (I’m the Juggernaut Bitch! anyone?). While the film is more a reboot than a direct sequel, it once again takes a “timey-wimey” look at the X-Men character story-lines and gives you yet another “save the world while the mutants fight amongst themselves” scenario for your summer viewing pleasure.

Taking place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, we get a heavily stylistic and frantic look at the origin of the X-Men, the Xavier School For the Gifted and one of the greatest bromances gone wrong (Professor X and Magneto) in comic book history. The film moves at a breakneck pace and covers an immense amount of ground during its 2+ hour running time and could have easily been 2 films.

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It’s the start of the summer season and we’d like to kick it off with a $50 gift card giveaway from our friends over at SeamlessWeb.

Do whatever you want with it. Order a few pies from Geekadelphia favorite, Rustica Pizza. Get an absurd amount of wings from Manny Brown’s. Maybe order up some delicious sides from Phoebe’s Bar-B-Q. Whatever.

How can you enter? Easy. Leave a comment with what you’re looking forward to eating this weekend for your chance to win a $50 SeamlessWeb gift card. Simple as that.

UPDATE: Thanks for playing last weekend folks! We’ve chosen our winner.

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The Belkin Conserve Insight is a cool gadget that helps you monitor your electricity usage in your home. “Insight” is the key word here, because in my test spin of the product I’ve been able to glean some interesting anecdotes about the way my precious electronics contribute to the electricity bill each month.

The premise of the product is simple. Take the Insight, plug it in to one of your electronics or appliances. Right away, you get instant feedback on wattage, cost, and CO2 production. Then, go ahead and use it like you would normally. After 45 minutes it comes up with an average across all three measures, and the longer you let it sit the more accurate the reading is.

I’ve often wondered how much my electronics cost me. Here’s a chart that highlights different electronics and states that I used them in, and their corresponding cost per month.

Here are more specific breakdowns about the things I was trying to test…

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Start training those wrists of yours for some serious waggling, a national level Super Smash Bros. Brawl tournament (Clash of the Titans 5) is set to hit Philadelphia on June 25th AND 26th (yes, a two day competition) at Drexel University. We’re talking on a scale like Major League Gaming here, with players traveling to the event from all over North America. The event is expecting upwards of 200 competitors.

This isn’t some “let’s just sit around and have fun playing a game” tournament either. They are playing by the Unity Ruleset, the standard for all national events on Smashboards and Allisbrawl. I’d go into further detail, but I’m a for-fun gamer and don’t really grasp this sort of thing. You can get all of the info at Smashboards, here.

Entry is $15 for singles, $20 for doubles. Geekadelphia is helping to sponsor the event with some raffle prizes. Registered gamers will be entered to win one of three Wii Points cards (2000 points) from us. We suggest purchasing Chrono Trigger with some of those points.

Best of luck, brawlers. For more info on the competition, visit the official website.

Clash of the Titans 5 @ Drexel University
June 25th & 26th, 2011
cot5.vgbootcamp.com

Photo lovingly stolen without permission from Technically Philly

Heads up, geeks – did you know you have the power to save the world? That’s right, friends. You can use your software development and design skills to help to develop and design open source solutions for disaster recovery and climate change challenges.

Intrigued? Check out Random Hacks of Kindness, an event that brings together experts and volunteers to produce practical open source solutions to development problems.

RHoK began in 2009 through a partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, NASA and the World Bank. In 2010, volunteers organized events that took place in 26 cities with over 2000 registrants working on 120 projects.

The Philly event kicks off with a reception on Sunday, June 3 presented by Technically Philly and Drexel University. Register here. The hackathon commences on Saturday, June 4th at 9am sharp and continues through Sunday, June 5th. Register for that, here.

Update: Our good friends Indy Hall are hosting the reception. Nice.

This year’s April Philly Zombie Crawl was bigger and better than ever but that might’ve left some of you undead hungry for more. If your need for brains is still not satiated, here’s one more summertime event, just for you.

On June 18th, the Trocadero will host the 21+ event the Zombie Beach Party, a surf-themed bash. Come dressed in your best beach digs with a zombie-edge, or get there early as doors open at 8pm with make-up artists ready to zombify you!

DJ’s Kiltboy and Dave Ghoul will be spinning summer tunes to reanimate the crowd. Surf bands The Slotcars and The Sharkskins will begin their sets at 10 and 11pm respectively with a slight intermission for best costume winners to be announced!

Tickets are only $10 (zombie make-up artists charge $10 for their work but also keep 100% of that fee) and can be purchased ahead of the time at The Troc’s box office for no additional fees.

Zombie Beach Party @ the Troc
June 18th, 2011
www.phillyzombiecrawl.com/beach_party_details.html

This week’s geek is Randy Schmidt, independent developer of Forge38. You’ve probably encountered some of his past work with iSepta, shareURmeal, Lose it or Lose it and Nerd Merit Badges.

Hi Randy, tell me about yourself. I know you’re an independent developer, but what how did you get to where you are?

I graduated from Drexel in 2005 with a structural engineering degree and started working as a structural engineer. I had started to play with web development in college but it ramped up after I graduated. I built a couple of web apps for the engineering company based on some ideas I had while working as an engineer.

After a couple of years, I realized it wasn’t going where I wanted so I started thinking about going out on my own. I realized I was a bit socially awkward so I started operation “Learn to Socialize”. I started going to a bunch of meetups around Philly and took some days off of work to go to Cream Cheese sessions (IndyHall before it was IndyHall). It was all these meetups that led me to think about and eventually work on iSepta (I’ll get to that later).

In July 2007 I was getting more and more frustrated with my engineering job and quit. They immediately went into damage control mode and tried to keep me in _some_ capacity. They said I could work part time so I could gently move into working for myself. They dragged their feet for several weeks and came back with “You’ll have to work four days a week to keep benefits”. I was a little annoyed because it seemed like they were trying to get me to cool off then stay as full-time. I sent an email back that I didn’t care about benefits, “I was ready to quit without them three weeks ago”. So yeah, when I came back in on Monday they fired me .

It took me about a month before I was up to speed with enough client work so it was a little scary. I quickly found that although I had little experience building software professionally, I was fairly practical in how I built things so clients seemed to like me. I haven’t had a problem getting client work ever since.

One of the things I did early on was work A LOT of hours to build up a nest egg in my business. It wasn’t fun but it has really allowed me to take time off to work on other projects the last few years.

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I imagine the organizers of Lebowski Fest spend their time in smoky dark rooms, telling ancient secrets much like the Freemasons. The event is almost here, and the kind folks from the Lebowski Fest Commission sent over a giant box of Lebowski Fest swag from their hallowed vault of treasures. I’ll be dishing out swag at the event at the TLA, but I’m saving a box of items for one very lucky Geekadelphia reader.

The winner of this simple giveaway will score a Lebowski Fest “Here to Fix the Cable” and “Achievers” t-shirt, an awesome ABIDE magnet, a Big Lebowski pin set, stickers, and some serious, serious bragging rights.

Just leave a comment with your favorite Big Lebowski quote for a chance to win. The only catch? You have to be attending the screening this Friday at the TLA. I’ll give you your box o’ swag at the event, along with a high five or two. Maybe three. We’ll see.



For some time now youʼve loved delicious happy juice, or as everyone else refers to it, beer. However, youʼve never really learned how itʼs made. You know thereʼs something about malts and hops and what not, but odds are youʼd sound pretty dumb right now if I asked you to describe the process.

Wouldnʼt it be great if there was a group of local home brewers who could educate you, feed you, and get you responsibly drunk in one fell swoop? Guess what. There is! Even better they are all getting together this Saturday for Philly Beer Camp 2011 to share over 100 gallons of beer, a bunch of knowledge, and plenty of good times.

Weʼre celebrating good old fashioned DIY beer makinʼ, Philly style. For just 35 bucks you get all the food and beer you can handle PLUS you can learn lots of things youʼll forget. Awesome. Grab a ticket here.

Join us this Saturday, June 4, 2011 from 6-9 PM at the Jamaican Jerk Hut. It’ll be fun.

Beer Camp Philly 2011
Saturday, June 4th, 2011
6pm – 9pm
beercamp2011.eventbrite.com