It’s hard being a geek

You think being a geek is easy ? It’s not. There are things that we compulsively do that can easily burn a normal person. If you have a compulsive need to do what I am about to list here,.. then as Yoda said,.. “The force is strong on this one …”.

1. The need to constantly check Slashdot and Digg when a command you issued on the commandline hasn’t finished yet.

Have you ever done a “svn co” or compiled a huge maven project, and while waiting for it to finish, you constantly switch to your second ubuntu workspace so you could check Slashdot and Digg already opened on a browser there ?
Bonus : You actually added a keyboard shortcut so you could easily switch workspaces? (Not that there isn’t a builtin shortcut, but Alt-1 and Alt-2 is way easier).

2. The need to slap that tech salesperson who told that other customer how Windows is much better than mac or linux.

3. The need to get on an “overheard” debate about any tech stuff ( C++ vs Java, Rails vs PHP, KDE vs Gnome, Eclipse vs Idea vs Netbeans, Ant vs Maven, Starwars vs Star Trek, etc.). You get my drift.

4. The need to have a practical working knowledge and understanding of techs whose names are 3 to 6 letter acronyms ( AJAX, XML-RPC, ROR , SOAP, J2EE, EJB ,.. FHM, MTC, GMA, ABS-CBN, :)) ).

5. The need to read

All interviews of Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Steve Wozniak ,… etc.
All news about black holes, expanding galaxies, extra-solar planets,… etc.
All XKCD and Dilbert comic strips.
All your friend’s Twit.
All articles bashing Vista.
The latest news on Hans Reiser’s trial.
The latest commit message on the open source project you’ve contributed on.
The blogs of the committers of those high profile open source projects.
The latest analysis on the nature of the force and their usage by several notable sith’s and jedi (Nap included).
….

6. The need to have a god-like familiarity of several technologies while being a “jack of all trades, master of none” on the rest.

7. The need to blog about your being a geek.

8. The need to constantly switch from working (coding) to doing “all of the above”, while simultaneously writing your next blog, Gimp-ing the logo of “the next great software that you’re gonna write” and educating your cubiclemate on what being RESTful means.

I rest here. Its 1:52 AM, I should be sleeping instead of blogging. If you think that sleeping time should be converted to “coding/blogging/making a website” time ,.. the force is strong in you!

Posted on 02.13.08 to Uncategorized by erle. Subscribe to follow comments on this post. One comment. Add your thoughts or trackback from your own site.