Quick show of hands: Who has watched Star Trek: The Next Generation? We thought so. That means you probably remember Wil Wheaton, or at least his character Wesley Crusher. What you may not know is that Mr. Wheaton has single-handedly remade his image through his very popular blog at WilWheaton.net, showing his ever-growing readership that there is much more to him than Ensign Crusher.

A big part of his audience has come from the geekier areas of the Internet, as Mr. Wheatonis own affinity for technology and the Internet, not to mention his self-effacing ability to poke fun at his own Star Trek legacy, has landed him frequent appearances on TechTVis The Screen Savers, and a berth on the just-completed Trek Cruise Geek Cruise. In addition, his embracing of the open source community has also brought him fans from unusual places.

Something else you may not know is that Wil Wheaton is now a bona fide Mac user, often posting favorable comments about his iBook. He is a recent Switcher, having bought his iBook last year. Throughout his Geek Cruise, he posted updates to his blog from the iBook, including yesterdayis entry:

I am home.

Happy, rested, and staring at over 900 e-mails. 50 of them are actually not spam! The boat continues to rock, the dogs are thrilled to see us, and I had a wonderful time. Iill update about the last few days of the cruise tomorrow or the next day.

Couple of interesting things:

1. Randal Schwartz is a svengali when it comes to perl. I wrote my first five perl scripts today, while making my way through the Learning Perl book on the plane. And they worked. So there.
2. I am madly in love with my iBook after this trip, and I think Iim going to be getting myself an iPod and PowerBook before Summer is over.
3. My class went really well. I was terrified that I was going to suck, but I didnit. That was cool.
4. The past 10 days have confirmed that my wife is the coolest person on the planet. I hope that everyone who reads this page finds someone to spend their life with who is as cool as Anne is. I canit wait to do the massive road trip to Tulsa with her in 2 weeks.

Iim going to have a beer, eat some good food (the cruise food redefined "sucks"), and go to bed.

In an earlier entry, he commented on iPhoto, as well: "The shipis internet chokes when I try to upload lots of big [JPEGs] to the gallery, so I used iPhotois cool "export image" feature to scale down some pictures from today."

You can read up on Wil Wheaton, his cruise, and his iBook at WilWheaton.net. Wil Wheaton has also self-published (through Monolith Press) a book called Dancing Barefoot. The book is billed by Monolith Press as: "In this wonderful Freshman effort, actor and author Wil Wheaton shares five short-but-true stories about life in the so-called Space Age."