So, the next part may be extremely old news to some, if not most, but it's new to me so hell with it. You know how sometimes you find something cool out and you're all buzzed about it and you tell someone and they say, "Oh THAT? We've known about that for ages..." and then you get that feeling that confirms that you're just outside the clique, on the fringes of madness, riding a scooter powered by squirrel spit on the teetering edge of the abyss and the munch pebbles are getting bigger... (If you don't know what munch pebbles are, you've either never skated or at least didn't own a skateboard during it's golden age between say, 1980 and 1990,)
Anyway, a little while ago I discovered the 'personalise this page' thing on Google. (If you're thinking, "big whoop", skip this bit. There is a discussion on Geeks vs Nerds further down and some funny quotes and stuff at the end.) First of all I was none too impressed. OK, so it gave you a little clock and I could RSS feed a couple of blogs I like, which was kind of cool but nothing amazing. Then today for some reason I remembered when I saw a demo of Vista, the sidebar to which you could attach gadgets and then I hazily remembered some comparison to Google. So I started tinkering with the add stuff part - how cool is it? There's EVERYTHING on there! I have an IT tab to help with work with feeds from Slashdot and GRC, as well as IP and DNS tools, a fun page with games and comics, and a main homepage with blogs, quotes and the news and weather. I'm all geeked out about it. (I am a self confessed geek and have bought products by thinkgeek.com to prove it - actually I'd love to get a feed from there...) So anything bad I said about Google, (not on here,) I take back - mainly because as well as the gadgets thing being really cool, there is one that rates how evil Google is on that day based on a user poll. I figure any company that doesn't take itself too seriously and allows that kind of thing can't be all bad. Besides, people have a go at Google because they are getting too big and are trying to take over the whole net. Well, being pragmatic, that's what companies in a capitalist society do isn't it? They grow and earn more money and offer more products and services and basically try to take over. It's only the monopolies commission that stops one company trying to buy everyone else and in reality most stuff is owned by about 5 or 6 massive corporations anyway and I doubt most people know the names of any of them.
Whilst I was impressed by Vista when I saw it, it basically does what other versions of Windoze did, which seems to be rip good ideas off other people, (mostly Apple and also Google for this one,) and implement it. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Window$ boy myself - all but 3 of the computers I look after at work are Micro$oft machines, (the others being 2 Macs for the graphics crew and one Free BSD based server with a proprietary OS that acts as firewall and net monitor type of thing,) but the ideas in Vista blatantly aren't new. The Aero flipping screens thing is similar to OSX's interface and the sidebar gadgets are like Google's, as mentioned. I still want to upgrade though, as the benefits will still be worth it and it looks damn sexy.
On another note, I had a drunken pub discussion with someone once on the differences between Nerds and Geeks. Some people will think that it's a different term for the same thing, but this guy described himself as a Nerd and I think of myself as a Geek, so we got talking about why. I asked him if he had any toys on top of his monitor. He said no, which definitely puts him in the Nerd camp, but is a symptom rather than a cause.
After about an hour of discussion, we decided that Nerds have a need to make things neat - whether it's cabling or code or whatever. They like things to be in order. It makes sense to them and they feel more comfortable when things are in their proper place and correctly labelled or referenced or commented or whatever.
Geeks, by contrast, just like things to work. It doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to get the job done. Sometimes this is by necessity, like a lack of time to pretty things up, sometimes it's by design because, hey, that's just who we are. We admire Heath Robinson and are more likely to be impressed by a bodge job that works despite looking unbelievably dangerous and/or unlikely to work, over a job that looks very pretty and orderly.
You don't have to do a particular job to be a geek or a nerd, you can find both schools of thought in programming, network administration - even (gasp,) non IT jobs, (see under [L]users,) it's a lifestyle thing.
Right, finish on some random cack:
Word of the day that doesn’t exist but probably should: Grebulon (noun): A name for those small, unexpected crunchy things you often find inside other things – usually foodstuffs, but not exclusively.
Usage: “I was eating a Kinder Surprise yesterday and there was a grebulon inside, as well as the toy. I may sue the company for psychological damage and whiplash.”
Random me quote: “Don’t let the bastards get you down, shut you up, or fob you off.”
Random me quote 2: “Life is what happens. Everything else is just stuff.”
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