Monday, February 11, 2008

Understanding a geek :P

Found a very interesting blog entry (by the author of a book called "The Nerd Handbook"):
http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2007/11/11/the_nerd_handbook.html

In summary, these are the traits:
Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer.
Your nerd has control issues.
Your nerd has built himself a cave.
Your nerd loves toys and puzzles.
Nerds are f**king funny.
Your nerd has an amazing appetite for information.
Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head.
Your nerd might come off as not liking people.
The best part is this paragraph:

Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. It’s clichéd, but a nerd is defined by his computer, and you need to understand why.

First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.

The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day. When the illusion is broken, you are going to discover that…


Actually, I would prefer the word geek to nerd :P ... Nerd sounds too... nerdy :P


Read the blog to find out more! :D

Enjoy!




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