The Iggblog

Recently Reesey mentioned to me what a trend it’s become to be nerdy or appear enthralled with nerdiness. The specific example was all the girls wearing the “I love nerds” shirts and stuff like that. Also people tote around how great they are at computers (HAX!!!!111eleven) and such. It’s so true. everyone wants to think they’re tech savvy. I blame the rise of video games to the point where they’re visually appealing enough to catch everyone’s attention. all the sudden being good at all things computer is a social boon.

I was kickin it with my bad self at Panera earlier. I had some time to kill before work, so I thought I could combine the delights of eating and free internet access into one holy union of bliss. Unfortunately the internet gods didn’t want me around, and gave me a hard time when trying to get access at the breadery. I told the guy at the counter I was having issues getting connectivity. He asked me if I’d tried restarting the computer (universal Windows fix). I said I had, and he was all “Ok I’ll come help in a second. it’s no trouble, I’m kind of an expert”. riiiiiiight. He waddles himself over to my table. I show him I can ping to localhost, but not to my DHCP assigned address (or the router for that matter). I show him an ‘ipconfig -all’ readout to show where I got the values. He let his tongue dangle stupidly from his maw for a while as he stared blankly at the weird black window with the funny white letters. Clearly he was searching the dozens of mighty synapses of his “expert” brainlet for some nugget of compu-jargon he heard in /general while playing counterstrike to try and equate all these mysterious numbers with. He walked away and came back with a number. “This is the helpdesk’s number. they should be able to help you.” I smiled and thanked him for his valuable time.

The second little encounter I had today was at Starbucks. There was a couple in front of me in line. One of them smiles and says “Sick shirt dude.” I thanked him for the compliment. I also noticed how he looked just like the sort of people that used to make fun of nerds like me in higheschool and whatnot. Cargo shorts, sandals, hemp necklace, bleached hair, “cheerleader” model generic girlfriend unit ™. Apparently very scene/trendy/etc. I found it funny since it was his sort that used to delight in teasing my sort. Not to generalize… it’s just what I’ve experienced. Odd how these things come around.

Ranting aside I had a good weekend. Back to the grindstone.

PS – Stuff that sucks: catching planes you wish you’d missed.