Revealing my inner geek
>> Thursday, June 26, 2008
I love geeks. I don't know why, but I find them fascinating. Maybe they're a bit like the mystics and soothsayers of ages past - they understand the deep inner workings of things and seem to hold the knowledge that can unlock the powers of the universe.
And maybe there's a bit of affection for a category of people who in the past were considered weirdos and outcasts. The triumph of the underdog, on a grand scale. The kid you picked on in 4th grade is now creating things used by millions of people across the globe and getting wildly rich in doing so.
Bill Gates maybe didn't have too many friends as a youngster. These days, he's getting 4 million emails a day and there's approximately 2 billion people who would like to be his friend. (Another 2 billion are sworn enemies, of course, but that's a different story.)
My first introduction to computers was in a class in high school, which I recall only vaguely. I lacked a knack for the rudimentary programming functions I was trying to do. If I remember correctly, I was supposed to write some code to track points on some coordinates to make a rectangle or some such. I happily plugged in all the digits and doohickys, pressed "Enter" and up on the screen popped a tangle of criss-crossing lines.
I'm afraid to say that my programming skills have developed by a factor of zilch since that day. I will never be part of the pocket-protector set, and I will probably never understand how Internet technology works but I'm darn glad it does.
Since creating my little tangleweed code, the ways in which computer and Internet technology can go rapidly wrong has caught my interest as much as the geeks who orchestrate the whole web-shebang.
So I love reading things like this, from a Vanity Fair article about the birth of the Internet:
"There were countless snags. One of my friends figured out that you could order a negative quantity of books. And we would credit your credit card and then, I guess, wait for you to deliver the books to us. We fixed that one very quickly."
- Jeff Bezos, describing the launch of Amazon.com
A negative book order. Now that's the ultimate geek-cool.
I also love how IT is still very much a playground for the young. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, was born in 1983, for example.
People who were born in 1983 should not feasibly be running a company that was once offered - and turned down - a $900 million buyout offer from Yahoo.
People who were born in 1983 should not be sitting atop something with a market-cap potential into the billions. No, people of such an age should really be serving me coffee in a cafe somewhere.
Anyway, he's a geek so I love him.
Mr Zuckerberg, if you're ever in the neighborhood, maybe we can meet up for a chat about all things Internet. And, by the way, I like my coffee toasty hot with a splash of cream.
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