Ah, I remember the days when you’d nearly always find me singing the catch tunes from computer game Outrun “na na ne na na ne na na na”. Excellent! Actually, I remember once practically begging my Dad to buy me a copy of Turbo Outrun at a computer fair. And the spectrum version of Outrun actually came with the arcade audio on the B-side so that you could pretend that your machine was capable of playing the music or something. If I still had that, I could slip it on to the odd compilation tape…

Anyway, fair play to the author of this bootleg for bringing “new life” to a classic:

Outrun vs Spiller

I am somewhat “famed” for my sarcastic harshness. But not even I could be quite this harsh about things, even if they are crap:

www.seanbaby.com/nes/egm20.htm

Truly, this had me crying with laughter. Check out all 20…

On my way home from work, I was thinking about this blog. It occurred to me that I hadn’t written anything very profound, or anything that stretched my boundaries of danger or creativity. Then I got to wondering when was the last time I had a truly original thought? I don’t know, but it struck me that some kind of on-screen statistics for life with this kind of information available would be most useful.

Aha!  The Dave* awakens.  I thought I should clarify where I fit into this wonderful landscape of coders.  I’m not as good as Dave.  And he’s stated that he’s not that good.  So that makes me bad, I think.  I always understood the basic concepts of programming languages, so skipped those and then found out that I couldn’t understand the intermediate concepts.  That would explain why my “coding” consists of doing things in VBA and occasionally pretending to know something about C++.

But I think it’s important, so I have a “coding action plan”.  This involves firstly learning VBA for Powerpoint, Word and Outlook.  Why?  Well, because I don’t know anybody else that uses VBA in those apps and I can barely think of any uses (VBA in Powerpoint… just wtf?)  So that’ll be an unusual (useless) skill.  Then I’ll learn VB.  Then I’ll learn something useful.

So to desktops.  I do like Dave’s desktop.  I don’t think it’s geeky, but I do worry about its low-resness – Dave are you using a higher res image than the one you linked to?  See, that’s the kind of thing I worry about :-)  As for me, I have a matching pair of “gaming girls” on my two machines.  They’re cartoony, quite cool.  I like them.  But I agree that a desktop can tell you a lot about a person, I’d love to see the desktops of the rich and famous…

* It is a rule that putting “the” in front of a noun makes something funny, in most cases.  Particularly if there is a suggested “the” that people don’t normally use.  e.g.  “I was listening to some The Beatles yesterday.”

OK, so we’ve been here a while, and as I’ve mentioned already, one thing we’re here for is to “classify antigeek”.  In a nutshell, as you may have picked up already, it’s as follows:

There’s Geeks.  There’s Normal People.  But then there’s people inbetween.  They know about geeky stuff, but they appear (or try to appear) normal.  Sometimes, they may even be quite cool.  In fact, they may be cool because of their antigeek-ness.  But not necessarily.

I’m not going to say where I fall on the scale.  I’m not sure that I could say in fact, you’ll just have to judge.  Hmmm, I’m asking other to judge me…….ah, we’ll gloss over that.

Anyway, I’ll close by mentioning the thing I started this blog entry for.  Desktops.  Whats on your computer desktop, and what do you think that says about you?

Me ?  Well, for several months I’ve had a montage of BBC TV idents.  I’ve still got that at work.  Pretty geeky.

But today, I’ve just changed it, so a picture of a shape made from magnetic fluid.  Now, again this sounds geeky, but it’s actually rather nice, and pretty cool.

Have a look.

So I think I may get away with claiming antigeek on that one.

Right, anyway.  Erm, it’s a bit late to say it, but enjoy our blog.  Plenty more descriptions and classifications of antigeek to come.  Oh yes!

Ah yes, coding.  It’s interested that you bring up codeing, since in my eyes its one of the things that lets me down in the geek/antigeek stakes.

Viewers may remember that pauly and I may at some point come round to trying to define what antigeek is, and coding is a good point at which to make a start at that, although I should point out that since a lot of friends are coders, that nothing I say here is meant offensively ;)

Coding.  Traditionally geeky.  The loaner, sat for hours on end in front of a keyboard.  Not talking to anyone, just a bottle of coke for company, and a few books/web-sites for referrence for bits he can’t quite remember.

But can coding be Antigeek?  Well, maybe.  After all, there are people who code, but who don’t LOVE coding.  They code because they have to.  They need some software, that does a certain thing, and it doesn’t exist  “….so sod it, I’ll write it myself”.  They do the job, possibly neatly, possibly a bit slap-dash, and then they go out into the sunshine.

So yes.  Possibly the first broad distinction of Antigeek.  Reluctant coders.  They know how to code, so they’re not normal.  They have conversations with their mouths, not via keyboard, so they’re not geek.  ANTIGEEK!

So, back to what I originally said.  That Coding is and area in which I let myself down.  I like coding.  OK, so I usually approach things with the “….might as well right x myself” Antigeek stance, but then I go and do that for far too many things.  Like spending ages writing something to re-title mp3 files, instead of just doing it by hand.  But then agian, that task was for a girl, so is that geek or antigeek?

Yeah, I always thought I’d like to be a propper coder.  When I was at Uni, I always “tolerated” my degree of Electronics, but thought that if I had to do it again, I’d do Computer Science.  But then, all the CS people I knew had a really rough time of it, even rougher than me.  Although I enjoy coding and see it as just about my only channel for “creative” output, most of the poeple I know that code for a living are massivly stressed and overworked.  Plus, although I code, I’m not very good at it.  I know little bits of lots of languages, and write massivly unelegant, though usually functional code.

So yeah, I guess on the subject of coding, I’d fall on the side of being geek.

Wow!  What a refreshing day at work!  I actually got to sit and code for 8 solid hours and it felt good.  No, really.  OK, so it was only VBA but it at least felt like I was doing something really worthwhile.  I hope for more days like that!  Plus I talked to somebody who was a Buffy fan and yet suffered from the same misjudgement (see entry yesterday) about why I liked it…

Anyway, I’m starting to think that maybe I should just have had done with it and become a programmer.  I suppose it’s good that I didn’t go down that route though – it’s a little easier to maintain the balance.  But certainly something for the future.  Actually, with all the speculation about who might buy the company that I work for (yes, looks like they’re selling) perhaps I’ll end up doing more techie stuff whether I like it or not.  There are completely opposing views on what a sale to an IT company would mean – some think that all the duplicated techies would be made redundant whereas others, like me, consider that actually they want to increase their techie strength and might not even be interested in the advisory side…  We shall see.

Hmmm, I just contemplated starting to review the Buffy episodes I’m watching.  Suddenly I feel very, very afraid…

Well, it’s one of those things that’s on the somewhat fine geek/antigeek divide.  I think you can only decide which side it’s on by looking at why people watch it.  If it’s “pretty girl in sci-fi” then you’re looking at geek, if it’s “to laugh at Xander’s jokes and generally do impressions of Giles” then that’s antigeek.  Obviously.  Hmmm, maybe it could be expressed better.

Anyhow, Buffy is good.  We are (ahem, I am) now the proud owners of Seasons 1-4 on DVD which makes for a somewhat marathon amount of viewing.  Being currently on Season 2 means that we’re doing Drusilla / Spike impressions at the moment (speak slowly in a slightly mock cockney accent) for, well, no reason.

I’m fascinated by things with massive story arcs.  They don’t have to be sci-fi, it’s just that the best examples seem to be.  Babylon 5, for example.  Just amazing that somebody could write something so long but yet keep the overall story in mind.  People talk about the storytelling of Lucas’ Star Wars trilogies, that’s nothing compared to the enormity of Babylon 5.  Mind you, I haven’t watched that many of them – I kind of forced myself not to.  It’s another of those things where I feel I have to watch them all, or not at all, it’s the same with Buffy really.  And 24.  If they bring Babylon 5 out on video, then we’ll be talking…

Yes, Dave, we can do a /whois. In fact, it’s a good plan!

So, /whois me?

Hmmm, seem to be lacking inspiration at the moment. Well, I live in London and I’m a “professional”. I like technology. No, I love technology. I also like The Divine Comedy. I sometimes wonder what life would be like if I owned an Apple Mac.

antigeek.net is my corner of the web. Hooray!

That’ll do for now.

Erm, hello? Is this thing on? Is that you over there? Crickey.

Sorry, just new to this whole bloggy thing. Just looking around. I’ll post propperly soon. Might even delete this one. I’m cold and frightened.

Whoo! Pauly – are we doing the whole /whois thing agian, since the last one got trashed? I kinda had one in my head, although it was a tad on the long side. Then again, does anyone care /whois me?

I wonder where Addiional Text ends up. Hmmm.