I have noted my dissatisfaction before with the awfulness of Enterprise; enough so that I always called it “quasi-Star Trek” due to the many violations of Star Trek canon. Producer Brannon Braga apologized for the horrible ending of Enterprise noting that it did not even live up to his own expectations for what he wanted in the final episode stating:

My analogy with Star Trek is I divorced my wife, I love her dearly, she’s with a great guy, and I’m so happy for her. At the same time, in the back of mind, someone else is with my wife. That’s how I feel. I can’t help but feel emotionally attached to Star Trek. But predominantly my feeling is it’s in great hands with J.J. Abrams and I can’t wait to see the movie.

While the apology on the ending was nice (although really should have apologized for the whole thing), I think the thing that bothers me the most is that since he knew it was going to be the final episode, you would think that he would have scrapped the ending once he saw it and do it over for a proper Star Trek send-off.

Then again, he never cared for the canon anyway, so really never should have expected anything more.

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The technology today continue to advance towards some really amazing abilities with robotics and bio-mechanical (mind-controlling) abilities such as this video with people being able to mentally control a prosthetic arm. Unfortunately am unable to embed it, so you will have to click on the link above to actually watch the video which I found on Technology Review.

Of course, this may seem somewhat similar to the Borg (with a picture of Jean-Luc Picard as Locutus), but is different in that there is no collective control over the device with sole control belonging to the wearer themselves. One of the interesting things in the future will be whether humans first become integrated with mechanical parts before the advent of the Singularity of artificial intelligence.

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Lenovo, a Chinese computer brand that bought out IBM, seems to be a big fan of social media campaigns that has been backed up by the recent success of its Lenovo S10 that I mentioned previously.

This time around, Lenovo is embracing the sci-fi fan base of the Trekkies for the newest Star Trek movie that will be coming out in May 2009. I ran across the ads on Facebook about a week or so ago, but for whatever reason when I clicked on the link, the resulting page was blank. I tried again today on an ad that look as the following:

Ironically, I was not interested in purchasing a new laptop as much desktop provides all that I need at this point, but was more interested to see how the “Star Trek” Lenovo laptops looked. Suffice to say, it is a Thinkpad/Ideapad and that means ugly, RECTANGULAR, and no sense of StYlE.

Personally, I would have recommended using the money to build a better laptop with a sci-fi look rather than a viral campaign, but regardless, let me tell you what they did.

As you may have noticed with the Facebook Ad, it talks about the Lenovo Ideapad, but when you hit the page, the first computer they show is a Lenovo Thinkpad. It is minor, but thought I would mention that regardless. In any case, there are some sweet sweepstakes you can sign up for called the Intel Lenovo Seek New Frontiers Sweepstakes where you can win an Ideapad or a really sleek Star Trek messenger bag. There are even greater prizes later on in 2009 with going on the zero gravity flight or showing up for the premier of the Star Trek movie.

If you are not a fan of signing up to sweepstakes, feel free to play the really easy four questionaire (that gives you the answer anyway if you answer incorrectly) to get a nice Star Trek background desktop image.

Once you are done having fun there, head on over to the Intel viral Starfleet Shipyard site to trailers, desktop backgrounds, the USS Kelvin, character snapshots, and much more.

Man, how I wish I could have worked on a Star Trek buzz campaign.

Freebie–here’s a picture of a Beta Quadrant alien called a Monchezkian (I’ll let the canon concept of a Beta Quadrant alien in Star Fleet aside for now):

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The bootlegged version of Star Trek XI (Star Trek Under Construction) is making rounds on the Internet and Youtube with a rather exciting teaser of a clip below:

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So, here I was on vacation again in Shanghai, China at a local supermarket looking at a book when I see the exact image seen on the left.

Now, the book was talking about extra-terrestrials and how they maybe came in ships like these to abduct things–and as an example of a “外星人” ship, they decided to use Star Trek’s Enterprise D ship–probably from some kind of Chinese search which elicited this terrestrial human ship. I don’t know why this was used, but I found it quite ironic to see.

Oh, and the book interested me in the first place because it was all about dinosaurs with pictures.

Yeah, don’t ask me why aliens and dinosaurs had a relation here, but there you go on a random China thing.

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Io9 playfully asks its users What Should a Star Trek Move Require?

• A Technical Disaster Aboard The Enterprise
• A Sultry Alien Woman Who Wants To Learn About This Thing Humans Call Love
• Klingons
• Doctor McCoy Dispenses Some Non-Medical Advice

My choice? Following the actual Star Trek canon! For example: where it does not take less than a week to get to Chronos or where humans do not meet the Ferengi before the Enterprise-D.

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Since I’m on the topic of Star Trek, thought to include this awesome detailed map of the Star Trek Alpha Quadrant Universe. The blue areas is the United Federation of Planets, green is the Romulan Empire, Dark Red is the Klingon Empire, red-orange is the Cardassian Union. Click on the picture to see a close-up of it.

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Got forwarded a link that had the following hilarious image:

“Will Work For Dilithium Crystals” — well done. Although, personally I would have used some kind of background such as this one:

To make it more desperate/funny, but that’s just me.

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You just know Paul Krugman had a lot of fun writing this paper on interstellar trade (PDF).

Of course, a lot of the interstellar economic trade theory has to rely on a future without replicators as that just throws economics out the window.

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This flashlight by wicked lasers just screams to me that they really should begin building a phaser. You know how many Trekkies would buy that?

Okay, so maybe not as much profit off Trekkies as a military contract, but still would be sweet.

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