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I was visiting an office colleague today while our highly competent IT team was trying to ascertain just what was wrong with my computer. For the first time, said office colleague’s office mate was there and since work had come to a stand still thanks to my dead computer, I sat down to talk for a while. One comment led to another and I stopped for a second to consider the math of one of the statements. (I believe it was about the carbon capacity of the ocean and I thought about what was the fastest way to measure the liters of water in the ocean).

I remarked that I had to stop to think about this. The office mate said something to the effect of “Wow what a nerd you are” to which I happily told her the story of my college’s unofficial motto: “Where fun comes to die”. Upon which I was asked in disbelief, “Why are you admitting this?”

Why indeed. Consider: I read sci-fi, I play video games, I listen to opera and techno, I can out pun all but one person that I know, I devour knowledge, but most of all, I understand technology in a way few people do. Most people think an internal combustion engine or a computer or why the sky is blue are magic; I know enough to explain the mechanism to someone else. I’m decently good at math and I grok a fair amount of physics, economics and a few other fields to not be so that I am not confused when people far ahead of me try to teach me a thing or two. And I am not afraid to ask questions.

I pride myself for knowing more than most people. And I enjoy verbal swordplay and banter. And I enjoy intellectual discourse. And challenging mental problems. And reading. The pursuit of more knowledge is the single greatest joy of being alive.

So you know what? I am a nerd/dork/geek and proud of it.

If you are too, take the word back. It’s about our quest for information. Not their label for something they don’t understand. Not their label for those of us who revel in the quest for more.

Edit 1: And one more thing – I list the stuff above not because it makes me a genius, but because it tells you a little bit about my quest for knowledge. More information about a lot of things is infinitely preferable to more information about a few things. These are just some of the “nerdy”/”dorky”/”geeky” fields I look for information about – and from there, learn to tell others about. If that makes me a nerd/dork/geek, I am proud to be one.

My Father is an avid newspaper reader, and occasionally cuts out a few articles (usually letters to the editor or opinion pieces) from said newspapers for me to read. Though I’ve long encouraged him to scan these articles and send them to me, he usually brings them with him whenever he sees me. Which usually means that I end up reading the articles a long time after they are relevant, if I ever get around to reading them in their entirety. This one, however, caught my eye, and three  years after it was written (and two years after it was given to me), it is one of the few articles that I have that are still relevant. Quoting the most interesting part:

“[Y]ou start a new job and the first thing you do is buy a new car and, a month later, a new house? What if the job does not go right? What if your boss hates you or you hate him/her? What if there are other things that drive you crazy at the job (you fill in the blanks)? Given your $400,000 mortgage and $20,000 car financing, will you have the guts to tell your boss to go where the sun does not shine and just leave? Or will you just put up with it, remain in a state of miserable hibernation at work and look for joy and satisfaction outside of work, usually piling up on your material possessions and partying hard to forget?”

You can read the whole thing over at FT.com (which misses the point completely as indicated by its titling): The American Dream and the importance of thinking poor.

There were lots of things that happened, and I could write tomes on each, but let’s do a quick roundup in the interests of speed and coherence:

1. I was forced to change my Xbox Live Gamertag, because my name was either: (a) offensive; or, (b) a security risk. So if you don’t see me on Xbox Live anymore, and see some dude named “MixedStrategy” that you’ve suddenly befriended, that would be me. Personally, I wanted to be “GrimTrigger“, but that was apparently taken. Gah.
2. I’ve been learning how to program in Lotus Notes of late for work. Far from being an irritating VBA-type script that I feared, it’s actually pretty powerful and probably a lot more extensible a tool for RAD-ing a quick solution of some sort or another. Particularly when your company has most of its data stuck in Lotus Notes to begin with – then it’s especially useful. The only really annoying thing I’ve discovered so far is that someone at IBM made the mistake of letting a marketing type get near the Notes 8 interface, so I’ve spent a lot of time learning new terminology for things. My project is interesting because essentially, Notes supports a lot of database-like operations, but one major shortcoming is the lack of an equivalent to the SQL “UPDATE” statement. And given the retention policies at work, to update, say, the date of a task manager’s meeting, you have to reload all 5,000+ projects into the database. Not good, if I may say so myself. So I’m writing a little script to handle that. It’s pretty interesting work, but it’s taking longer than I had hoped.
3. I came across this link today, explaining how to get around one of the more annoying problems with feed reading. Unfortunately, it does not work quite as I had hoped, so I’m still stuck visiting LiveJournal.com and other sites once every couple of months.
4. Facebook launched “Chat” on my network. On the plus side, it’s pretty well integrated and doesn’t quite get in your way like I had feared – even Gmail’s Google Talk client sometimes does. On the minus side, it doesn’t allow you to connect using a non-web or different interface. I’m surprised, since I thought the back-end was all Jabber. I suppose it won’t be too long before someone writes a Facebook application to talk to the client… maybe it already exists!
5. Raymond Chen is one of Microsoft’s longtime developers, and someone whose blog I read daily. So I wanted to point out three really good books that he likes, and just wanted to add that even if you’re not a developer of any sort, or have anything to do with engineering, The Design of Everyday Things (née The Psychology of Everyday Things) is amazing. Just the number of annoying things that I’ve faced in the world makes me appreciate how stupid unintuitive things can get design awards. Until you have to use it, things seem elegant. Then not so much. (Bonus example: the Windows standard key to insert a hyperlink is Ctrl+K. The developers of WordPress 2.5 decided to arbitrarily remap that to Alt+Shift+A, so now my muscle memory is wrong, and it’s an extra key stroke. Annoying. Will be changed soon.)
6. My kitten cat turned 1 year old on Friday last week. That marks the milestone where he stops being a kitten and becomes a cat. Wow. They really do grow up quick!
7. I went to a Library of Congress concert that I’ll write more about. But in case Europa Galante is performing in a house near you, I strongly urge you go see it. I’m not usually a fan of Vivaldi, but this may change my mind yet. And bonus points for anyone who plays Gluck and Telemann in the same concert!
8. I’ve found someone else who is working on a Lego Mindstorms NXT biped walker similar to mine. I will have to take a good look at it, but it seems to solve the issue I’ve been having with the stability of the walker – mine has a Star Wars-like tendency to flip over on one side.
9. The weather is bright and sunny and 24 degrees! That’s today. Yesterday it was cold and overcast and -1 degrees. I love how these new wild swings in weather are now considered normal. Hey, maybe I can write a book about climate changed called “The New Normal” with an appropriately long subtitle… maybe something like “Evidence You Can See of Climate Change”.
10. And finally, if you’re in the UK and feeling nice, could you please buy me the latest Goldfrapp single, Happiness, and mail it to me?

Good night!

Since I’ve moved to DC, one thing I’ve sorely missed is intellectually outstanding and interesting conversation over a couple of bottles of wine. That has now been achieved.

I have the best and most interesting friends.

Happiness = great conversation. (And Lego.)