Timmy's Board of Pumpkin Modification Oversight is pleased to announce its top picks in ThinkGeek's First Perhaps Annual but Let us Settle for 2009 Geeky Pumpkin Template Design Contest Extravaganza and do hereby decree:

FIRST and most awesomely prized:

NCC-1701, by maddoghoek, who wins a $100 gift certificate, Tauntaun Sleeping bag, Zombie Shooting Gallery, Eviltron, and Dismember Me Plush Zombie

SECOND and hopefully carved by a lightsaber:

Star Wars, by merit, who wins a $50 gift certificate, Eviltron, and Dismember Me Plush Zombie

THIRD and most clever use of a pumpkin top:

King Boo, by Thejehosephat, who wins a $25 gift certificate, Eviltron, and Dismember Me Plush Zombie

But we got more than 3 entries, and many of them were too good to pass up without showering them with blog affection. The best of the rest:

Most Helpful when Attacked By Goblins d20 by backslashdave	Most Awesome 'Cause Timmy Says So Timmy by whataslacker	Most Joss Whedon-Approved Blue Sun by Shimo
Most Evil Cthulhu by bobarobes	Most Clever Use of Negative Space (& Crow) MST3K 3-D by littlebitocd	Most Complicated/Zombied Lumber Jack vs. Zombies by meizme
Most Blatantly Childhood-Reverent Thundercats & Transformers by jhliu Cutest Couple (Awwwww) One Pumpkin to Rule Them All by PuckByter & Eye of Sauron by Tinnurien

You might have heard all this thrilling news during our Halloween Spooktacular show on JTV last Friday, October 30th, but if you didn't, you may watch us yammer and parade our costumes and pumpkins, IRL:

If you'd like to seem more pics of our pumpkin successes (we torched the failures, like usual), we've got a whole Flickr set for your perusal.

So, how was your Halloween? Pics or it didn't happen.

Today the ThinkGeek monkeys ventured into the wilds of Fairfax to harvest pumpkins suitable for slaughter. We managed to gather our samples and escape the herds of feral children before our ship jumped into warp.

We encountered many curiosities on our journey.

(More photos and video in our Pumpkin Patch Flickr set.)

The only thing left to do is hack into our pumpkin haul mercilessly and we've got a whole pile of great template ideas from our contest. We'll show some of our artistic handiwork on our Friday, October 30th Justin.tv broadcast.

Some of our favorites are below, and there's still time to enter to win a Tauntaun sleeping bag!

PUMPKIN TEMPLATES O DOOM

Don't Panic by FuziDave	Big Bang Theory by Madyson125
Super Mario 1-1 by ominousoat	Eye of Sauron by Tinnurien	C3PO by spirid0n
Domo kun by adamviolet	Timmeh-o-Lantern by whataslacker	Mooninites by Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Poe by raphaelsmuse5	Blue Sun by Shimo	Bender by The Bender Pumpkin
Timmy on Tauntaun (!) by Rindoshi	Enterprise by maddoghoek	Pumpkin cells by CaptDNA
Silly walk by Gigaflar3	Anne Stoke's Arachnoid by Noel-FantasyPumpkins.com	Stargate by GeekyOne
Mouse-powered pumpkin by LT55	Dalek by doctordonna

GO! ENTER YOUR TEMPLATE!

Hey guys. Tauntaun Sleeping Bag here.

You might've heard from Consumerist, Gizmodo, Topless Robot or @guykawasaki that I've arrived safely at the ThinkGeek mothership. Who knew a few unboxing photos could stir up so much jibber-jabber?

I just wanted to check in on my journey from Hoth to Realitytown to let you know that all is well at ThinkGeek and they're being very nice, despite being a bunch of over-caffeinated monkeys.

They even treated me to a lunch of fungus and mushrooms that were growing inside their fridge. But I think that was an accident.

For right now, I'm keeping busy with WoW and helping Customer Service answer the phone (I like to pitch in) but I can't wait for my fellow Tauntauns to show up. I'm getting lonely. I mean, I love the attention, being the first one here, but it's not the same.

And from what I can tell, I'm not the only one waiting for my friends to show up. If you want news and photos, you can sign up for email updates here.

So thanks for all the well-wishing, and I'll keep you posted on what's happening here at ThinkGeek HQ!

Yours, stinkily, 

First Manufactured Tauntaun

P.S. Apparently you can compete for me by entering ThinkGeek's Halloween Pumpkin Template Contest, and you've got until 10/29/09 to submit an entry. (Check out some of my favorites below--including one of me!)

Han on Tauntaun by pchanrocks

MST3K silhouette by danhojan

Twenty-sided by backslashdave

And a few more photos, post-unboxing...

It's that time of year again. The days are getting shorter and it's so chilly at night Timmy has to cuddle up with the server for warmth. But at least we have the 31st to look forward to.

Needless to say, we do Halloween up right: ridiculously detailed costumes, lots of candy-nomming, and this year we're going to try our hand at slaughtering pumpkins. But what to carve?

Which is why we're presenting our First Perhaps Annual but Let us Settle for 2009 Geeky Pumpkin Template Design Contest Extravaganza. Here's the deal:

1. You design* a geeky pumpkin template (PDF, Flickr upload, JPEG on your blog, scan embedded in Google doc, whatever) designed to be printed out onto 8.5x11" piece of paper. We only want your template, not something you bought from a site. Or stole from a child. That's rude.
2. Describe your template and link to it in the comments attached to this blog post by October 29, 2009 at 12 midnight EDT. You can submit more than one template, but don't go crazy.
   
3. Meanwhile, we'll carve our pumpkins and Timmy will judge your templates. (Warning: He will not be accepting bribes this time.)
4. Contest winners will be announced during our October 30th Halloween Live Stream Monster Bash and Costume Contest (time TBD). Hurrah!

* Non-artists, please don't fret: we won't be awarding prizes based on your command of vector illustration tools. Do be clever, though!

** There's always fine print. Here is ours.

Prizes will include fame as well as:

• 1st place: $100 gift certificate + Tauntaun Sleeping bag (FOR REAL, IT EXISTS), Zombie Shooting Gallery, Eviltron, Dismember Me Plush Zombie
• 2nd place: $50 gift certificate + Eviltron, Dismember Me Plush Zombie
• 3rd place: $25 gift certificate + Eviltron, Dismember Me Plush Zombie

Some really clever templates so far:

Don't Panic by FuziDave	Big Bang Theory by Madyson125
Super Mario 1-1 by ominousoat	Eye of Sauron by Tinnurien	C3PO by spirid0n
Domo kun by adamviolet	Timmeh-o-Lantern by whataslacker	Mooninites by Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Poe by raphaelsmuse5	Blue Sun by Shimo	Bender by The Bender Pumpkin
Timmy on Tauntaun (!) by Rindoshi	Enterprise by maddoghoek	Pumpkin cells by CaptDNA
Silly walk by Gigaflar3	Anne Stoke's Arachnoid by Noel-FantasyPumpkins.com	Stargate by GeekyOne
Mouse-powered pumpkin by LT55	Dalek by doctordonna	Binary Boo by xandi2549
Twenty-sided by backslashdave	Zombie vs Lumberjack by meizme	Cover of Brisinger by Noel-FantasyPumpkins.com
Barcode Happy Halloween backslashdave	Wifi backslashdave	Han on Tauntaun by pchanrocks
Autobot by jhliu	I am 10 Ninjas by jhliu	One Pumpkin to Rule Them All by PuckByter
MST3K silhouette by danhojan

To get those creative, pumpkiny juices flowing, check out these masterpieces:

A NOTE ON THE COMMENT ENTRY SYSTEMTRON 3400XS: We're moderating the submissions, so you won't see your entry posted immediately. Please take a deep breath and get a cookie because it will appear once we decide you are not an evil robot with laser eyes. Also, you'll need to create a username so we'll know where to send the prizes.

This August marked the 10 Year Awesomeversary of the monkey horde known as ThinkGeek.

In case you missed out on the celebrations, including our super exclusive zombie Timmy collectible limited quantity t-shirt (see happy torsos at bottom of post), you can relive some of the 10-year magic through our party pics. We'd send you a slice of our beautifully geeky Charm City cake but ... we gobbled that thing up pretty quick.

FYI, it didn't taste like Duff. Not that we'd know or anything.

Also: Our Random Happiness Machine XR42 has finally crunched the numbers and spat out (on tractor feed fanfold paper) the winnars of the ThinkGeek 10 Year Awesomeversary Sweepstakes of Win!

And, they are, in order of luckitude:

1ST PRIZE: Christopher Maidt of Edmond, Oklahoma, who wins:

• $1200 ThinkGeek shopping spree
• Tauntaun sleeping bag prototype
• A spot on homepage for a day
• A batch of homemade cookies made by staff (flavors TBD)
• Small box of random doodads

2ND PRIZE: Troy Topp of Calgary, Alberta, who will hopefully enjoy:

• $500 ThinkGeek shopping spree
• His likeness on a future ThinkGeek shirt
• Random TG office decorations, including 10" vinyl sleestack (pictured) w/ bonus Mardi Gras beads
• 22 old Atari 2600 cartridges

3RD PRIZE: Robert Cannon of Winter Springs, Florida, who cannot wait to receive:

• $250 ThinkGeek shopping spree
• His likeness incorporated into a future YouTube video
• Pre-ripped wearable action hero cotton vest tee
• Signed photo of Cisco, office dog extraordinaire

We hope the prizes--some of which are, let us be honest, ridiculously delicious--show our gratitude for letting us keep our lil' ol' website on the interwebs for so long. It's been a great 10 years and we hope for a trillion million more. Thanks, d00ds!

When we asked you guys to nominate your favorite sysadmins to our pageant, we didn't expect the tsunami of entries that followed. Among the 1,000-plus nominees: a sysadmin who repaired a broken Slurpee machine that got in the way of refreshment after a hard day, one who braved raw sewage in waders and a respirator, one who brought in bacon-chocolate-chip cookies and made mojitos, one who launched himself onto a server rack to shield it against a leak in the ceiling, and one who defended her email server by redirecting junk mail from one spammer to another (not an approach we necessarily condone...at least, not in public where our lawyers can see).

In breaks from refactoring large swaths of the ThinkGeek website source code to get it ready for this week's big re-launch, when we probably should have been sleeping, we codemonkeys read every one of your submissions and narrowed it down to a handful for the whole office to vote on. Then we wrote a little ballot-counting script using many a sysadmin's best friend, Perl. Its surprisingly verbose output (we didn't even use -v!) is as follows:

In recognition of his stamina, humility, and dedication, ThinkGeek's 2009 SysAdmin Pageant SysKing: His Most Excellent Majesty Keith Schincke of Dickinson, Texas (nominated by his wife, Sandra Schincke).

SysKing Keith's qualities of character were best exemplified when Hurricane Ike struck Houston last year. He and his family endured a week without power or hot water so that he could brave the receding floodwaters by car and then, when the roads became unpassable, by bicycle, to secure and power up the servers at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

In honor of her forbearance, diplomatic ability, and mettle, ThinkGeek's 2009 SysAdmin Pageant SysQueen: Her Most Gracious Majesty Ginger Spencer of Inglewood, California (nominated by coworker Jay Gerber)

SysQueen Ginger's qualities of character were shown on many occasions, from bridging relations between far-flung and sometimes adversarial regional offices, to waiting hours in the dark without any promise from the power company for the moment power would be restored so she could bring systems up as soon as possible, to arranging her IT manager's first interruption-free vacation in 20 years by coordinating staff to change escalation procedures.

Congratulations to our SysKing and SysQueen! Live long and prosper, Your Majesties!

ThinkGeek will be 10 glorious years old on August 13, 2009, and we figured what better way to celebrate than to surprise you with a new website. But we're too excited to not spill the beans. So, um, here's your preview:

Everybody has them. Web sites that you loved a long time ago (10 - 15 years ago, long in Internet years) when the web was still in its infancy. We have them, too, and we thought we'd share with you some of our favorite lost sites.


Michael's pick:

• AdCritic - In the heady days of the Internet bubble, AdCritic was a staple for bored surfers. AdCritic put thousands of TV commercials online. The site brought us classics like the EDS cat herders, wolves attacking a marching band, and the guy dropping his cell phone into the urinal. AdCritic shut down in 2001 and was later reborn as a paid subscription service. Now it seems to have morphed again.

Regan's picks:

• Funny But No... - This was a section of Hallmark's site which was plugged as a selection of "rejected" cards. It ran from November of 1996 to April of 1999, but came back to live via Shoebox Greeting's blog in April of 2007. Yay Undead Funny But No!
• Movie Critic - Man, I loved this site. It predicted with uncanny accuracy movies you'd like based on what other people who liked movies you liked liked. I think there were a couple more "likes" in the official algorithm.

Jacob's pick:

• PixelTime! - This was an icon drawing contest hosted by Word.com and the quirky computerized PixelMaster. A Java applet gave everyone the same pixel-at-a-time drawing tool and wacky palette to work with. The site and its art are mostly lost to time and Java bitrot, but see some samples here and here.

Carrie's picks:

Turns out that some of our new-in-box Sega Dreamcasts delivered to us magically via unicorn are a little love-worn. You might have seen the Gizmodo, Destructoid, and Consumerist posts about it.

'Cause, see, we don't really know where these Dreamcasts came from--could've been a liquidator, a Circuit City that had closed shop, or a 7-11. We just don't know, and it looks like returned merchandise is in the mix.

So now we've decided to QA/QC all the incoming Dreamcasts to ensure fresh and crispy game play.

Behold Hans working through a pile of consoles and slapping them with "QC PASSED" stickers when they meet muster, just like in the movies! He takes his job very seriously, hugging each console before snuggling it back into its box.

But not really. That would be creepy.

Stardate -313650.56941273477.

The ThinkGeek monkeys traveled to the far reaches of the galaxy to watch the newest Star Trek to grace the viewscreen. Despite our red shirts, we found the theater inhabitants friendly and most of our team returned to the ship unscathed.

Our field report follows. Please be aware you may find slight spoilers, both real and imagined.

Staff reports:

"A genuine Trek, despite having too much Star Wars influence (Delta Vega monsters, Scotty's sidekick, etc), unnecessary exposition, action sequences chained to ridiculous lengths, and not enough time spent on character (re-)development. I'd love to see this Star Trek slowed down for the small screen." --Jacob

"Not enough red shirts slaughtered.  But I liked how everybody died in the end." --Willie

"I honestly enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. The opening scene was very moving. The only thing I didn't like was the music. It was just kind of movie lame, rather than being anything grand and special. But all in all, not the Star Wars prequels disaster I thought it could be." --Chris

"Loved it! The nods to the character quirks were brilliant, and it had the perfect balance of action, tech and humor. The new love story was a little weird, but I'll let that one go." --Jen

"Nothing more (or less) than what I expected: a wild, non-stop action ride through space. The poorly written script bounces from one not-so-subtle reference to the cliches of its predecessors while Captain Kirk hangs off the edge of one thing or another. Still, lots of things go boom, bam, and zoom with undeniable eye-catching fun.  So, if that's what you're looking for (and, really, who isn't?), you can't do better than Star Trek." --Ken

"I thought Kirk got all the chicks! I wanna see the Chris Pine/Winona Ryder scene on the cutting room floor!" --Fraize

"As a non Star Trek fan, I loved it. I was especially fond of the mocking of Kirk and Simon Pegg as Scotty. I <3 Simon Pegg. As expected from J.J. Abrams and his people, there were a lot of quick references, so keep your eyes peeled. Its definitely FTW. I'll go see it again." --Andrea

"I'm more of a TNG fan than TOS, but I loved it. Also, assigned seating on opening day FTW." --Regan

"Slickly produced with plenty of TOS-esque cheeseball. My favorite characters were Dr. Cameron, Sylar, Lydia, and Lens Flare." --Carrie


Reviews via the Twitterings:

@upsidedowndog: Hull integrity at 95%.

@LycoLoco: JJ Abrams did for the Star Trek series what Ronald D Moore did for BSG. It was a series reboot/reinvention at its finest.

@HugoMunsterberg: New Star Trek movie is like if Kirk and Picard had a baby. And that baby turned out to be a high-grossing summer blockbuster.

@Daffydil: Hallo, my name is James T Kirk. You killed my father, prepare to die!

@MattAlgren: The kid in front of me said it was "Awesome. Better than Star Wars III." I think that's good.