Geeky Stuff

Places I visit daily

Bike Geek

Places visited weekly

Mostly normal web comics

Resources and experiments

Strange stuff

But there are stranger people than I out there on the web.

How to recognize a geek in conversation:

These days, everyone is on the Net and has a homepage. Geeks are hot and people who can't tell the difference between the web and the Net have Dilbert cartoons tacked up. At the same time, geeks are developing social skills. How do you recognize a real geek, a true geek, a geek of the first order? Well, I can't tell you secret handshake, but certain conversational hints should illuminate the difference between posuers and coders.

Meeting one of these criteria does not make someone a geek (except the wearable computing thing). It's the total number of signs you observe and the intensity of those qualities.

  1. Does not ask you your favorite Beatle, but your favorite Doctor, Star Trek series, or Star Wars original or remastered version.
  2. Puns. Incessantly. Caution: could also be a tabloid headline writer.
  3. Talks about arranging Internet access during vacation. This can be either pre-planned (look at my new CDPD modem!) or seat-of-the-pants horror story.
  4. Trivia. Knows a little about everything or everthing about an obscure subject.
  5. Obvious, even conspicuous toys, such as pager, cell phone, personal digital assistant, palm-top computer, hand-held computer, and, the penultimate, wearable computing. Always multiple toys.
  6. Considers the technical book buyer for Gene's Books a celebrity on par with Leonardo DiCaprio.
  7. Two or more e-mail addresses.
  8. Considers normalcy/reality boring. This is a leftover from those long years of torment in junior high school, when fantasy was much better than classes. Typical geek coping mechanism.
  9. Tape around the glasses. Who am I to diss conventional wisdom?

Everybody's a Critic

From: [my ex-boyfriend]
Date: Sun, 22 Dec 1996 22:12:30 -0500
To: sue@dustbunny.seas.upenn.edu
Subject: shameless self-agrandizement
Status: RO
         
I know we used to say there's no such thing as bad publicity, but that web
page of yours is almost enough to make me doubt it. Hello, Sue. It's Joe "I
just got hip to this Internet thing" Saunders stopping in to say hello. I was
fooling around with the Yahoo thing the other day when I thought of doing a
search for my friend Perry -- whom you may recall -- since he's a teacher now
at the University of Puget Sound. I looked and bingo, he was there. Then I
remembered you were doing something scholarly, did a search et voila! There
you are. Liked the joke about two Jorg Bauers. Liked you better with long
hair, but I've never seen the X-Files, so I can't be a fair judge.