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Friday Fun: Geek Cred

Get your geek cred on.

The top 10 geek sins that will get your geek card revoked

10. Admitting that you like iTunes
9. Not knowing the difference between binary and hexadecimal
8. Not knowing what MMORPG stands for
7. Loving your cable or telecom company
6. Not knowing the name of the book that Blade Runner was based on
5. Confusing Star Wars and Star Trek
4. Believing the “free” in open source refers to price
3. Defending Facebook for its privacy transgressions
2. Taking something into Geek Squad to get fixed
1. Buying a paper computer book at Barnes & Noble

Earn geek cred by doing these 15 things

1. Give the Vulcan live long and prosper sign
2. Know the answer to the ultimate question
3. Make a geeky fashion statement
4. Read at least one work by Clarke, Asimov, and Bradbury
5. Take a geeky vacation
6. Play a role-playing game at least once
7. Read and watch The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
8. Read at least one comic book
9. Know how to survive a zombie attack
10. Know if Han shot first
11. Take up a geeky hobby
12. Be ready to defend your choice of OS
13. Explain a geeky topic to a non-geek
14. Know your geek vocab words
15. Carry on a conversation using only geek movie quotes

Advanced Geek Cred:

1. Name the primary characters of all five Star Trek series.
2. Know the three words you must recite in order to retrieve The Book of the Dead.
3. Know how and when to implement the Konami Code.
4. Know at least one way to kill a Dalek.
5. Say “I love you” in binary.

Stephen

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Posted on: November 12, 2010, 8:05 am Category: Uncategorized

4 Responses

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  1. so funny, I cant stop laughing! I’ll never be able to refer to me as a geek, anyway I’ll survive!

  2. I am a bona-fide card carrying geek. I play D&D regularly, quote from Douglas Adams, am employed full time as a web developer, know three dead languages (human ones, not computer ones), the whole deal. I think nothing of wearing black socks with tan shorts, and keeping them pulled up. And I take issue with the #1 “lose you geek cred” criterion.

    There is absolutely nothing wrong in buying an actual paper book about computers, at Barnes & Noble or anywhere else. Buying computer books is fine.

    It’s all in your selection of computer book. If you pick up a copy of “Word 2010 for Dummies” — yeah, you just blew your geek cred. If, on the other hand, you buy a copy of “The C Programming Language” by Kernighan and Ritchie, and then read it and understand it, that will significantly enhance your geek cred. Likewise for Donald Knuth on “The Art of Computer Programming”.

    Basically, if the book covers genuinely complicated stuff, having it on your shelf — or more importantly in your head — can only increase your geek credibility. If it teaches you which button to click to accomplish a task, well, don’t invest in pocket protectors. They won’t help.

    Oh, and:
    1010010 1100101 1100001 1101100 100000 1100111 1100101 1100101 1101011 1110011 100000 1100100 1101111 1101110 100111 1110100 100000 1110100 1100001 1101011 1100101 100000 1110110 1100001 1100011 1100001 1110100 1101001 1101111 1101110 1110011 101110 100000 1011001 1101111 1110101 1110010 100000 1100111 1100101 1100101 1101011 101101 1100110 1110101 100000 1101001 1110011 100000 1110111 1100101 1100001 1101011 101110

  3. Will I think there is something wrong with your Bin Code

  4. You’re right. I forgot the padding (little-endian) to make each ASCII code a complete octet. My bad.

    Here’s a corrected version. Though given the topic of the conversation, I’d say I’ve undercut my own geek cred a wee bit. ^_^

    01010010 01100101 01100001 01101100 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011 01110011 00100000 01100100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01110100 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110110 01100001 01100011 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01110011 00101110 00100000 01011001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011 00101101 01100110 01110101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110111 01100101 01100001 01101011 00101110