Category: geekery

If the people who play EverQuest have too much time on their hands, what does that say about the people who spend months researching them?

I build killer apps. No, really. Unfortunately, I don’t mean WinAmp, AIM or Windows. I build apps that kill webservers. It’s what I’m good at. If you have a machine, I can probably bring it to its knees with nifty in memory caching and data manipulation. I can cripple your web farm with intense bombardment from launching multiple threads and waiting indeterminate times for them. Now, I just need to find a commercial application for my obvious talent of hardware homicide.

I’m thinking about writing a book. I have a couple ideas, the obvious being a book on creating three-tiered applications with AOLserver. I know I’m not the perfect candidate, but I don’t see anyone else writing anything about AOLserver that’s done for the general public.

My other idea is a manual of style for large-scale web projects. I’ve heard all of the anecdotal ideas about where to put css tags and stuff, but nothing out there that a company or group could adopt like Robert’s Rules of Order for writing code. Proper tabbing, where to put graphics on the webserver, what order to put tag properties, etc. I’m pretty anal about all of that stuff at work, and well, I think it would be good to get some of it down on paper.

But now, it’s off to waste some time installing XP.

I just installed Office X on my Mac and ‘lo and behold, I now have my favorite font of all time, Tahoma! That means that our intranet looks peachy in IE 5.1 now. Yes! Ahhhh, geeks and our simple pleasures.

Beware geeks with free time.

Today was supposed to be a busy mess of QA, Launch and otherworldly stress. Instead, 30 minutes after the stress started, it was all called off because someone, somewhere, with letters after their name decided this was a bad idea and let’s not do it. So, all the stress and work I had geared up for never happened, and I now have nothing to do. It’s all well and good, but now I’ve read all my favorite blogs, added stuff to my Amazon Wish List, ordered a gift for someone, looked for some way to get Ximian GNOME installed in YellowDog 2.1, played with iMovie a little, talked about TiVo, went and bought a Dr. Pepper and now… squat-all.

Could I leave early and go to the Price Club for a gigantic box of diapers? Yeah, I probably could and no one would even notice. Could I curl up under my desk and take a nap? I probably could, although someone would probably notice my size twelves sticking out into the hallway.

I could do something productive like redesign my work homepage or read all those C books I’ve been meaning to. Will I? You can rest assured that I won’t be doing either of those things.

The Geekery is alive!! Check it out and let me know what you think.

Is it a bad thing if I’m a software engineer (that’s my title anyway) and I can’t stand C? I’m working through the Tome of the language (K&R), and jeez, it’s just ugly. In order to achieve Geek First Class, do you have to know C?

I am The Norm. The Norm is me. I consider it a point of pride that I keep my inbox empty at all times and deal with mail as it comes in. I don’t know why everyone can’t do that. I walk by my friends’ desks and they have an unconquerable mountain of mail. How do they live with themselves?

You can tell everything you want to know about him from the way walks: short clipped fast steps, his heels pounding the floor with a slap. He wears the corporate casual wardrobe like a uniform. His khaki Dockers pressed to a crease in the front, his oxford shirts in several solid muted colors, afraid to show any personality. It’s the same thing every day of the week. He is completely ordinary in every way, except one. He’s compensated for a complete lack of charisma and talent with longevity. He is where is he is because he’s stuck around, moving to management when the technology surpassed him and he couldn’t keep up. He knows the words, and tries to pepper his audience with them, hoping they won’t ask him to explain what any of them mean. He knows his days of walking his zip-zip heel slapping way through the halls are numbered and tries to look busy by inventing projects with important names. To justify his salary, he must keep busy. He must keep track of numbers, whether they mean anything or not. The spreadsheets and reports pile up, highlighted in a pastel rainbow according to a indiscernable color code. He is the bane of our existence. He stays while those who do real work drop like flies around us, caught in “budget cuts” and “restructuring”. We whisper and point and wonder, why not him? He does nothing. He makes more than three of our former colleagues combined. We sit, we wonder, we seethe.