molly.com
Tuesday 14 June 2005
The Geekiest Thing You’ve Ever Done
WHAT’S THE GEEKIEST THING YOU’VE EVER DONE?
While I probably have a long list of them, the other day has to be one of the more memorable. Drew McLellan and I met up at the Tate Modern in London, then went over to meet with Rachel Andrew and the small person, pick them up, and go off for some rest and relaxation.
Rachel and the small person were still busy, so Drew and I sat in his car in a seedy part of London with lots of student housing all around. What’s the first thing we do? Grab our computers and see if we can find an open WiFi network. Which we did.
So there we sat waiting, checking email, showing each other photos on Flickr, reading blogs, and even live blogging the experience.
Truly funny, truly geeky!
Your turn.
Filed under: humor, society
Posted by: Molly | 01:04 | Comments (101)
I was a Star Trek fan.
Oh where to start!
Seriously, there’s so many things.. going to opening night premieres for Star Wars 3 times in a row, having a house remodelled and focusing only and entirely on making sure that there is a cat-5 cable coming out of the wall for instant Internet access, being too lazy to grab a pen and instead grabbing the laptop/keyboard to jot notes down…
Or y’know, writing innuendo in CSS syntax. That’s pretty sick.
I’ve set up an email account and blog for my baby who is still 7 weeks away from being born.
I spent the whole of a UK bank holiday Monday in my undies coding my Ceefax Viewer widget for Mac OS 10.4
I excitedly showed my wife my signed copy of ‘Designing with Web Standards’ when I got home from @media last week.
I got told I was a geek.
programming itunes for firefox (flash for playing the mp3s, ajax for the gui, php/mysql to handle the files/search/…) and than never using/releasing it.
just to prove it can be done.
Getting all the housemates into a chat window to discuss what flavour pizzas we want for dinner. And then ordering them over the net.
Please note that this wasn’t because any of the housemates weren’t physically colocated at the time — just it was easier to get everyone to talk online than to assemble them in the living room over a menu ::rolleyes::
btw: best story on geekyness EVER (douglas adams, last chance to see):
(… observing birds on some island…)
I have a well-deserved reputation for being something of a gadget freak, and am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand. Ten seconds, I tell myself, is ten seconds. Time is valuable and ten seconds’ worth of it is well worth the investment of a day’s happy activity working out a way of saving it.
The bird we came across was called a megapode, and it has a very similar outlook on life.
It looks a little like a lean, sprightly chicken, though it has the advantage over chickens that it can fly, if a little heavily, and is therefore better able to escape from dragons, which can only fly in fairy stories, and in some of the nightmares with which I was plagued while trying to sleep on Komodo.
The important thing is that the megapode has worked out a wonderful labour-saving device for itself. The labour it wishes to save is the time-consuming activity of sitting on its nest all day incubating its eggs, when it could be out and about doing things.
I have to say at this point that we didn’t actually come across the bird itself, though we thought we glimpsed one scuttling through the undergrowth. We did, however, come across its labour-saving device, which is something that it’s hard to miss. It was a conical mound of thickly packed earth and rotting vegetation, about six feet high and six feet wide at its base. In fact it was considerably higher than it appeared because the mound would have been built on a hollow in the ground which would itself have been about three feet deep.
I’ve just spent a cheerful hour of my time writing a program on my computer that will tell me instantly what the volume of the mound was. It’s a very neat and sexy program with all sorts of pop-up menus and things, and the advantage of doing it the way I have is that on any future occasion on which I need to know the volume of a megapode nest, given its basic dimensions, my computer will give me the answer in less than a second, which is a wonderful saving of time. The downside, I suppose, is that I cannot conceive of any future occasion that I am likely to need to know the volume of a megapode nest, but no matter: the volume of this mound is a little over nine cubic yards.
I’m not sure about geekiest ever, but the first that came to mind: Opening all the official CSSZenGarden designs in separate Firefox tabs so I could go through counting the number of liquid/fixed/elastic layouts… that was fairly geeky.
Too many to mention, but I think the C64 logo generator is up there with the Star Trek LCARS navigation in CSS
I’ve done tons for unforgivably geeky stuff but most recently, After the @media conference I did the touristy thing and walked around london. I however checked my wifi detector about every 5 minutes, not that I had my laptop, just that I wanted to see where the hot-spots were.
I named our cat Javascript.
I also frequently IM Kate when she is in the same room as I am, though usually just to get a laugh out of her with questions like “yt?”
I went to a video game conference…and I’m female. That takes guts, but still tragically nerdy.
I once coded a program in Javascript that continuously computed my life expectancy. It showed the percentage of time I had been alive, relative to my estimated life expectancy. Oh, and this was accurate to the second. It also continuously calculated the number of days (and minutes) I had to live before I could collect Social Security benefits under US law.
A few highlights:
I used to live with a good friend. We routinely talked more on AIM than in person, despite being about 10 feet away from each other.
I have a custom license plate – and the domain to match (“geekchyk”).
Most of my serious injuries as an adult have been a direct result of LARPing (live action role playing).
But by far, the geekiest thing I have ever done: tailgating at Star Wars III. We had the collapsable chairs and table, the full spread of food, the whole nine yards.
I was visiting Louisiana since my inlaws and parents had wanted me to bring my son down for his first trip. Being just shy of 25, it was easier to meet my parents in Lafayette and ride up to North Louisiana with them, instead of renting a car. Since I wasn’t driving, I decided to catch up on my blogging and sorting pictures. My parents didn’t believe that I was actually on the net while we were driving through the middle of nowhere, La. until my sister wanted to know how I had a new entry with pictures up when we got to my parents’ house.
Nothing geekier than getting love notes in XML syntax…. and understanding them…. AND thinking they’re sweet… and then sending one in return. aaaahh… geeky love, nothing better!
It wasn’t something that I did, but something I saw. During the recent presidential campaigns, I saw a protest sign that read “</bush>.” Bush supporter or not, you’ve got to love that.
Mark,
RE: your bird mound volume calculator.
Is that the volume of the space taken up by the contents over the bird’s eggs, or is it meant to be just the solids over the bird’s eggs?
I ask, because… the solids will compress over time – starting out fairly fluffed with air – hence the volume will therefore decrease over time. Meaning that your calculator would then only be for a snapshot in time…
Just thought you might want to add a few more variables into the mix… in your spare time, that is.
Ok – enough of the ‘funny’…
But, seriously… you might want to gather that code up and offer it to some college/university ornithological program – they may actually find it valuable.
I went to the opening show of Star Wars: Return of Jedi – 12:30 PM (just after Noon, if you haven’t got enough eyeopener in you, yet)…
It was raining – well just a little misting.
Stood in the line for about 1 hour, before the doors opened and was only about 75-100 people back.
BTW – this was before people started doing this “for charity” or “to get on the news”.
OH… did I forget to mention… My Mom was with me – she was a huge fan. Guess that’s the “geeky” part – although I despise that label…
I had burned 5 CDs of music to play during my wedding ceremony, in the background during the meal, and for the dancing portion. When I got to the site, I found that the old CD changer in their PA system didn’t read CD-Rs.
So I went to Radio Shack about an hour before the wedding and bought a 1/8″ to RCA adapter, a 2f/1m RCA adapter to mix the stereo to mono, an RCA coupler, and a splitter to send the mono signal to both speaker systems. I ran the playlist from iTunes.
Hosted a LAN party…
every year for about 8 years…
staffed by hackers and phreaks.
We started out on Token Ring network and a phone line stretched across the yard to the neighbor’s phone box… they had no idea why their phone bill had so many strange and long distance numbers on it.
Keep in mind, this was long before the Internet was available. On the other end of the line was rotary phone attached to an acoustic coupler 300 bps modem.
Yes, that’s right, we were playing BBS door games and trying to hack the local phone co.
John:
I hope you got, that this story is not mine, but douglas adams’, the famous author of “the hitchhiker’s guide to galaxy” and it’s from the book “last chance to see” co-authored by zoologist Mark Carwardine in which they hilariously describe sad stuff: species on the edge of extinction.
Adams described himself repeatedly as apple-fan, gadget-fanatic and general geek.
Using ICQ to talk to my gf even though she was sitting right next to me. At home. In our living room. With nobody else there.
The full title of my degree is:
BSc.Hons. Remote Sensing & Geographic Information Systems
….my life was a lot more geeky from then on!
When I tell non-Geeks that my PC dual-boots into either Linux Fedora Core 2 or Windows XP Pro SP2…they are saying the word ‘geek’ wihtout opening their mouths!
I posted a link on a blog a few weeks ago to a site about old computers just because I found the same model of computer than I first ever used…
I’ll be ‘geek-of-the-week’ again and post it here!
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=809
Marvel at it’s sexy looks, hot performance, and deep, (very deep!) memory….don’t you just want one?
(I bet you all do!! # Laughs #)
A Few months back…I was talking to a friend and said: “I’ve just added Techworld.com as an RSS feed in Firefox,”
My friend’s face went blank, “What the hell is an RSS feed you sad geek?”
(And I was thinking how ‘Techworld.com’ was the geeky part!)
I tried to sell Firefox to a telemarketer and blogged about it.
A similar story: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2004/04/23/mission-insignificant/ …and that’s from April 2004, ya latecomer.
Also, I out-geeked Ferrett on obscure points of Elliott S. Maggin “Superman” novelization trivia.
Wait. Does writing my own browser-based slideshow system count?
It’s 2am, I’m biking home after a Christmas party here in Minneapolis. I bike past a recently unvacant store front, proclaiming free wifi and to be open in 4 days.
My first thought – I wonder if the wifi is on yet.
Yes, yes it was.
Eric: “…Wait. Does writing my own browser-based slideshow system count?”
Yes – you big geek! # Laughs #
There are some very funny posts on this blog…insightful stuff!
Back in high school and college there were plenty of stories I could tell. But the one I alway remember was after another great session with one of my favorite professors. Standing around outside of the classroom we stood around joking about how cool it would be to talk in binary and even tell jokes that way. We even started talking in ones and zeros to emphasize the point.
And then we all laughed hysterically at our cleverness…
I think the geekiest thing that’s happened to me in the last day or two was knowing someone who got their book reviewed on slashdot
(congrats)
[...] by all. We did however, manage to meet up with Molly for an evening, and after making her hang around in dodgy parts of London where the Small Person was at a film sho [...]
When the original Star Wars trilogy was released on DVD, I went to a “midnight madness” sale at a local store. I wound up buying a set of the DVDs even though I’d already pre-ordered from Amazon.com.
Then, one Sunday afternoon a few months ago, I set out to test sj-free-wifi. This drew a few stares as I walked around downtown San Jose with an open notebook computer.
I have John’s “Standing in line to see “Return of the Jedi” story beat by 3 1/2 hours!
My friends and I cut the last class we had in school that day (P.E.) to SUPPOSEDLY get a head start on waiting in line at the local mall.
It wasn’t raining on our day but it was hot as crap. There were 5 of us so we took turns walking the mall in 1/2 shifts and playing some video game until we were finally able to get tickets to see the movie.
-Chris
adding a gps receiver to my handheld computer, watching as it communicated with 4 satellites and mapped my longitude, latitude and altitude while standing in my front yard just for fun. when trying to share the excitement of the moment with my family..my husband responded sarcastically, “great, so you know where you are!”
Does getting married to a person met online count as geeky? If it does, I did it!
goodwitch: # Laughs # That’s funny, i can imagine that one quite clearly! Plus you’ve just reminded me of another geeky experience of my own when I was at University….(oh, wait, I’ve just remembered this blog is about ‘the geekiest’…as in, the singular, and I’ve already posted farrrrrr too much already – Molly will ban me at this rate!)….I’ll hold – and save that tale for another time.
I have to say, I went to a discoteque and i was dissapointing with the music, so while i was dancing i pick up my earphone and put the ipod. Nobody notice that I was dancing Orbital music.
Tried to bridge a wireless laptop to an internet connection at my neighbors in my backyard so that we could have Net in the garage where I was having a LAN party.
I wrote a java program that combined random letters from my fiancee’s last name and mine to see what our new name could be. I incorporated rather extensive rules to maximize our chances of getting a usable name, was able to set the length manually or randomly, and could make them in bulk or one at a time. Upon discovering my game, my husband-to-be had trouble deciding if it was geeky and cute or just plain geeky
Spending five hours on a sunday with a friend, writing a javascript fix, that will allow IE to understand max-width in CSS? (we later discovered that Dean Edwards was doing the same thing, and sent him our code).
Or, spending the equivalent of $50 to get a T-shirt from thinkgeek (wishing they had an outlet inside EU)?
Being very thrilled about the fact that my girlfriend is learning a very specifik XML DTD, to reformulate old Icelandic sagas (1200AD to 1400AD) into XML, and actually bragging to my colleagues about it.
I coded a web service that allows me to upload my shopping lists in XML, and then access it via iMode on my phone: I always forget my list at home when I write it on a paper.
Then I made a website, so I can type my list from anywhere in the world, and I added support for other devices (PDAs, WAP phones); just in case I would change my phone operator and wouldn’t have an iMode Phone…
Whipping out my Treo in the middle of Best Buy during Xmas shopping madness and connecting to the web in order to consult my family’s PHP/MySQL enabled Xmas list database before buying my computer scientist Dad some geek gadget, then conferring with my brother about how the web page rendered on the handheld display. –What can I say? It runs in the genes!
Hi im from Chile, and i dont have friends who blog, so the experience of makeing the blog and spred it out, was geek, no body could understand (or they just dont what to open), the idea of every person having a webpage where you can open yourself and express in a different way, they dont know. Im making my best so that more of my friends join to blogging put right now, im the only geek with his personal webpage.
Peace world.
OK, this wasn’t me, but one of the geekiest things I’ve ever seen was one of our lecturers wearing tshirts with slogans across the chest in binary. What was worse was one of my house- and classmates working out what it said by just looking at it.
Does reading all these comments and creating a ‘to-do’ list count as geeky?