I've determined that I'm not a geek. You may think it's strange that I'm getting a PhD in artificial intelligence and still don't consider myself a geek, but let me explain.
I like technology, but I'm not enamored with it. I don't have a laptop, and I have no real desire to get one so I can blog from Starbucks. I have a PDA, but it's several years old and the batteries aren't even charged. My cell phone is a three-year-old Nokia that doesn't have a color display or digital camera, and can't download ringtones. I did build my own computer, but I hate fiddling with it. I know very little about Linux, and have no desire to install it on anything: not my PC, not my Xbox, not my PS2, not my microwave.
I liked Blade Runner and Snow Crash, but thought they were both overrated. I haven't read Fark in months (too long), and I haven't read Slashdot in over a year. Not since I started getting into blogs, anyway. Oh yeah, I do have a blog, but I don't think that qualifies me as a geek just by itself.
I do know that there are only 10 types of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don't. I don't play first-person shooters anymore (although I did write Quake Superheroes, and I'm using the Q2 engine for my PhD work), and I haven't liked a real-time strategy game since Age of Empires 2. And I hardly played that.
I don't download music. I don't use IRC. I don't have a network of any kind set up in my house. I've only been to a couple of LAN parties, and I got bored pretty quick. I did use an exclusive-or in the title of a recent post, however.
So what am I? I'm an engineer. Now, some engineers are geeks, and some geeks are engineers, but they aren't equivalent. The geeks I know revel in technology, but many of them have no real desire to understand it or create anything of their own. The engineers that create the technology the geeks adore are probably geeks themselves, but not all engineers fiddle with gadgets and gizmos.
I haven't quite pinned it down yet, but I think of myself as a philosopher-engineer. That's why I got into artificial intelligence; I want to understand the human mind, language, culture -- the building blocks of humanity. I considered going into psychology, but after taking several psych classes (undergraduate and graduate level) I realized that it's a very soft science, if it's science at all. I want to quantify intelligence, but psychologists just want to hypothesize endlessly.
I respect geeks, and I know a lot of them, but it's just not who I am. Sure, the toys are fun, but to me they're only a tool for studying the deeper issues of existence, and not an end unto themselves.
haha... i'm strongly anti-geek. you know, the kind who is still a little embarrassed to know any html. however, my own reason for thinking of purchasing a laptop was precisely so i could blog from starbucks.
funny. :)
I'm not ant-geek per se, but I am glad I'm not a geek. I suppose everyone should be glad for what they are, and glad not to be what they're not, so that's not saying much.
Perhaps your "real-life" friends are right, and you are consumed with your blog :)
You are protesting way too much. I suggest that you surrender to your inner geekness. The fact that you even know Blade Runner or Snow Crash says everything anyone needs to know.
Probably, you're just geekaphobic. And you know what they say about geekaphobes really being wannabes, right.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Maybe I'm just geek-curious.
Geekdom, hmm Geekiness, is not so much a matter of what you are interested in, but of how much passion that you bring to it, and to what extent other activities get crowded out... like bathing for example.
Anyway, My money is on this article as the one that got you your SDB link.
That's interesting, Lurker. I really don't know. I've emailed SDB several times and read his site for months... I'd like to think it was more than a single post that got his attention :)