In school I had a love / hate relationship with chemistry. The mad scientist in me loved the idea of mixing up all manner of explosive and corrosive substances. That same mad scientist hated all the little things that got in his way .. such as common sense, safety protocol and protective gear.

Fortunately for me and to the relief of my lab partners, fate always intervened by placing an over cautious and hyper vigilant instructor nearby when this wannabe chem geek was about to try for another fiendish creation.

Looking back now I have to admit that I was probably not the best person to have in close proximity of things like sodium, open flames and sinks of water. I have to thank all those instructors that I hated. Today I wish I could show them that I still have all of the digits I was born with and shake their hands.

Note: I am not the idiot from the video. I would have used more sodium, been indoors and without proper ventilation.

When I think of Zombies, I often think about that old Dorito's marketing slogan - 'Crunch all you want. We'll make more!'. Which is exactly why the skull biting and cranium sucking undead have always been at the top of the list when Hollywood, pulp horror writers and fans are looking for a never ending supply of bad guys to run undaunted into a hail of bullets or walls of flailing baseball bats, swords, axes and chainsaws.

The latest offering of restless undead set to splatter all over movie screens October 9th is Zombieland. From the trailer (see below), it looks like it's going to be a very entertaining grim comedy starring Woody Harrelson. The mix of laughs and gore was a real success with zombie movie geeks with Shawn Of The Dead. One of my favorite good time films.

So why are the ravenous re-animated dead so much fun?

It never seems to matter how many of the tenacious highly motivated rotting things you kill, there numbers never get depleted. There always seems to be a supply of humans that do stupid things to secure their spot among the undead horde as a freshly risen zombies.

It looks like Twentieth Century Fox is just not willing to let it's 'Alien' franchise die. Maybe the money shelled out by sci-fi and horror movie geeks over the years since the first Alien movie was released in 1979 is too good for the movie studio pinch off just yet.

The first movie, directed by Ridley Scott, rocked our worlds. The second movie with James Cameron at the helm was like a wild fire. The following four movies in the franchise, two of which were Predator crossovers, received luke warm approval from the sci-fi geek crowd with their marginally acceptable levels of 'suckyness'.

This time Fox appears to be trying to minimize the risk by tapping Scott to sit in the big chair and spin a yarn for the movie going masses that will be set sometime before the flight of the Nostromo.

I have not heard anything about the script or the plot of this prequel. As far as I know, Ridley Scott and writer Jon Spaihts are plumming the depths of their creativity to come up with something that I hope will be just as cool and immersive as the first film.

'... Another profession dominated and ruled by men'. That is what a lady friend of mine commented recently about the IT field.

Though, I have to agree with my ultra feminist friend that the male gender is in the majority when it comes to computer and internet related jobs - I also have to point out that without the brilliance and priceless contribution of many women the industry that it would would have been completely different.

One such woman was Grace Hopper. She was a one women powerhouse of geek. She was the first to postulate that because computers should be easier to program for their users, a higher level programming language could be created and then compiled into low level machine code.

In the early 1950's she began working on the first compiler while working on the UNIVAC I.

All compilers today can trace their roots back to the work Grace Hopper did over 50 years ago. Every time I have built applications from source or tweaked my kernel - I am invoking a little bit of that magic Grace Hopper made possible.

'Bugs' is a term used to referred to errors in ones program code. Another contribution to computer science from Grace. While working on a Mark II at Harvard University a moth was discovered in a relay preventing it from working properly. The bug was removed. Later she tapped that bug into a log book with the comment 'First actual case of a bug being found'. It is open to debate as to whether the term debugging orginated here - but after this moth and the log entry, the terming debugging was set firmly within the geek lexicon.