March 05, 2003
RU12?
Posted by Matt in
Geek Humor
In 97, I was working at a company called Omni-Multimedia. On my first day, my boss asked me "Are you a nerd or a geek"? At the time I never understood the difference. In high school, a nerd was a geek and vice versa. Having to give a response, I reluctantly said "Geek". Apparently I made the right choice and today, I openly admit it. Geek, in my opinion, has evolved from being the equal of nerd in high school to a respectable term today. Certain web sites like ThinkGeek and MegaTokyo actually promote this once shunned title.
Just how did I become a geek? Well, if I had to pick a time in my life, it would be 7th grade when I took a class on programming in BASIC. It was my first programming class ever but I LOVED it! Granted, at the time, it was a cheesy little program that showed a city street and cars driving by. However, I was naive, and was just starting to like "girls" (ewwww cooties). I had a building with flashing neon (just a few pixels really) that said "Matt's Girls". I never really knew the implications at the time but now I understand that it was either a Shack outside LaGrange or somewhere you could get Legs and Eggs. In either case, I never really thought about it til now.
I began college as a pharmacy major but it was not GEEKY enough. I needed something more. Junior year I switched to Computer Science(CS) when my geekiness really shined (granted it had to because I was, in essence, a freshman in CS with every gen-ed filled). I took core-classes for CS through my Junior, Senior, Senior, and Senior years in college but it was worth it! Me and a group of CS friends (I was never really any well at English grammar (sorry Libby, you English major you)) began to see just how small our code could be and still function properly. I could write 8 lines as one with in place swapping and a splash of recursion here and there. We had the philosophy of "if it was tough to write, it should be tough to read!".
Continuing down hill, in my first Senior year I found something new (old to others but new to me at least) and that was Multi-User Dungeons or MUD's for short. To my surprise, they were written in C so I lobbied to help code one of them. Finally, I got my chance and you can still see some of my old-school code on a simple google search for Zyrenthian. It is the CircleMud stuff that contains my code, but you can see my other geekiness in the links provided. Pretty sad that you can do a search on ONE WORD in google and only find pages pertaining to you, but hey, it goes with the territory of "GEEK" I guess.
So, if that is not enough to qualify me as a geek, I am also a gamer. From Warcraft (the original) to Everquest (was almost the death of me) to Warcraft 3, I have played em all. Everquest, however, took over my life. It was my food, my drink, my world! Level 57 out of 60 in only 3 months of game play time. The scary part is those 91 days, 12 hrs, and 15 minutes of game play in the world of Everquest was done in a 6 month period. You heard it right, in 6 months, I managed to spend 2196 hrs and 15 minutes playing at my computer. Still not geeky enough? I also write code for fun. I got a bunch of lil' utility apps (one that could be used as a virus if used improperly) that do all sorts of things such as remove read-only flags on all files in directories and sub directories, rename files, generate files... the list goes on and on. Give me a file and it's specified format and I will have a parser for you within a week but most likely a day if I am not busy converting software to Japanese or fixing bugs. I try to play Dungeons and Dragons every weekend but lately, I am too busy to do even that.
So what distinguishes me from a nerd? Well, I guess it is the fact that I don't wear plaid and stripes in the same ensemble, I can interact with people, I don't have to put a 5 star ring binder over my crotch when a pretty girl walks by, and I shower. Ok the last one was a bit low... nerds shower, you just don't know it cause the showers are few and far between. If you dare, you can take their hair and reposition it any way you want. The grease will keep it in place. In the world of Object Oriented Programming (OOP), I would say that class Nerd (this is the only time class and Nerd should be used in the same sentence) inherits from class Geek. In simple terms, that means a nerd "IS A" geek but a geek is not a nerd. The geek will have certain private members such as "People Skills", "Personal Hygiene" etc that will not be inherited by Nerd. Ok, so I am a geek for explaining this through OOP but once again, it goes with the territory.
Well, for my first blog, I hope I have made a few closet geeks stand up, type it out, 3\/3n
\/\/h1+3 80yz 90+ 2 $h0u+, BABY GOT GEEK.
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Comments
LOL...
"Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
-Ralph Wiggum
Matt --
You geek, you. And really, for a geek, pretty decent writing. Really. So saith the English major. :-)
It's about time you broke into Jess's demense here -- you are on the domain, after all.
Libby
public boolean getWashed() {
return getBent();
}
I'll try not to be a "bloghog". ;-)
Hmmm... I should copyright that.
STAN!
Hi!
It's GREAT to hear from you, and thanks for reading. You always crack me up.
Jess
