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"every self-respecting geek has one" I realize Jeff's just being...poetic, but really it's just an excuse to buy toys. Spend your money on what makes you happy
by jkat 13y ago
"every self-respecting geek has one"
I realize Jeff's just being...poetic, but really it's just an excuse to buy toys. Spend your money on what makes you happy. If more gadgets, or that 6th purse, or 20th pair of shoes does that, great. If you want to define [part of] yourself by your possessions, do that. But don't judge others by the lack of theirs.
- chadwickthebold 13y agoBut then people wouldn't click on his amazon referral links maybe?
- pekk 13y agoYeah. If you need to unlock doors, then you need keys. But you don't need a flashlight all the time unless you are a security guard or something. We might as well be talking about purses.
- cubix 13y agoThat's what I thought, until I started carrying one. Now I use it all the time for mundane tasks such as finding something that dropped under my car seat, plugging in an ethernet cable under my desk, rummaging around in the back of a closet, and so on. It really makes life easier, especially as I find my night vision isn't as good as it used to be. LED lights and Li-ion batteries last for ages, so it's hardly an inconvenience.
- dangrossman 13y agoI find the one built into my cell phone adequate for all of that. It's brighter than the $3 filament bulb flashlights they sell at Wal-Mart, which people considered adequate for decades. I have a real flashlight (uses the same Li-Ion pack as my Bosch cordless screwdriver, 8+ hours continuous use) for something like walking at night; I don't need to carry that all the time as the phone light is plenty for all spontaneous type situations you've mentioned.
- cubix 13y agoWell, it's nice to able to light up a room when you need to. But to each his own.
- btilly 13y agoI am not so sure. I draw a joke distinction between a geek and a nerd like this. A geek is someone who loves technology and toys. A nerd is someone who gets utterly obsessed by a particular topic. I usually bring this up when explaining to a fellow programmer that I'm a nerd but not a geek. Which fact I then demonstrate by pulling out my flip phone. If they proceed to doubt that I am a nerd, I'll then offer to explain something esoteric. A good example is the differences between the Riemann integral, the Lebesgue integral, and the Generalized Riemann integral. And why if the last had been discovered earlier, we might not have needed to develop Lebesgue integration at all!
- arrrg 13y agoSeems like irrelevant categorizing that doesn’t make much sense and isn’t very useful. Who cares what you are in terms of dumb categories like that?
- tekacs 13y ago> Who cares what you are in terms of dumb categories like that? Certain kinds of nerds do (though usually not geeks). Seems like pretty handy categorising - it's come in handy already! :P
- derefr 13y agoBecause you can be one without the other, and people frequently assume that because you're one, it means that you're the other--and predict your actions based on that (for example, by buying you stupid geek toys when you are merely a nerd.)
- arrrg 13y agoSo, why not eschew those categories altogether and reject them outright? It seems to me they are too, well, mushy to be really useful.
- derefr 13y agoI don't understand what you're saying. The reason it is useful to make this distinction, is to explain to people that don't see the distinction (and thus assume that, for example, someone who likes math watches Firefly; or that someone who collects MTG cards will be able to fix their computer), that in fact there is a practical difference between the two categories, and that they should keep them in mind so as to not offend people that aren't both by assuming they have traits of a group they don't.