Am I a bit geeky? You bet. I have a number of things here that no one mentioned.
I too am a Star Trek fan, at least through Next Generation, But I hated the bad science. “Our engines are failing. We’re losing orbit.” Really? We have satellites that stay up for years without engines. Or moving forward through time? That’s easy. Ask Einstein. Just travel near the speed of light.
I’ve also been a Dr. Who fan since Tom Baker (late 70’s).
I also like math and logic games and puzzles. I like Sudoku and variants. XSudoku is where the diagonals also have to be unique. I also have the option of playing Roxdoku, a 3×3 cube where each face is unique, and Mathdoku where “cages” are drawn and you have to satisfy an operation and reach a result in each cage as well as keeping the numbers in each row and column unique.
I like other math/science jokes and comics. Have you heard the one about determining a building height with a barometer? There are all kinds of answers not related to the expected answer of measuring the difference in air pressure. I like other logic puzzles, such as rebus puzzles. I like reading Murphy’s laws and their many corollaries. And I really look forward to reading xkcd, a really geeky web comic. It’s so geeky that the “joke” continues hidden in the title text, found by hovering the mouse over the image
I am a Jeopardy! fan. For those who don’t know what Jeopardy! is, it is an answer and question quiz show. They give you the clue and you have to reply in the form of a question. I was really rooting earlier this season for Amy Schneider, an openly transgendered contestant who won the second most games and fourth most money in the shows history (excluding tournaments). I’m definitely not at that level.
I’m an IT professional who grew up with Unix and later Linux, and I still use the Command Line Interface and shell programming. The second computer I used in high school was a desktop size version of an early HP programmable calculator. I did some of my early programming on punch cards (and even learned basic “editing” using the duplicate and holding a card in either the read or punch station to insert or delete a character). I grew up with email when it was truly a game of telephone, computers literally calling each other up over the phone network and transferring files up and down the line over a 300 baud modem. Your email address was a series of computers to call from the backbone of the internet to your computer.
One day in college the people in the machine room were having some fun. The machine room was visible from a big window in the hall. They turned on all the test lights on the front of the IBM 360, then selectively unscrewed bulbs until the panel read TILT (a reference to a pinball machine that has been shaken so much that it deactivates for the current ball). Students who submitted jobs to the computer were wondering why they ran when the machine said TILT.
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