Sunday, September 25, 2005
Got Geek?

Yes, as a matter of fact we do. We’ve got plenty of geek, thank you. I just counted; there are seven personal computers in our house. SEVEN. To be fair and honest about our geekdom, three of these are home built frankenputers and are on their way out, or at least doomed to a life of garage neglect. Two of them are really decent machines. I just wish the people for whom I refurbished them would remove them from my garage.

That leaves four: two apiece for Ani and myself. Ani has a laptop for her work that is on the verge of becoming valuable in an antique sense. It was made in the era when, while playing twenty questions, it would be difficult to say whether or not a cellular telephone was bigger than a breadbox and when broadband was a misogynistic description of groups like the Bangles or the Go-Go’s. I actually think that this machine predates the Spice Girls. It is capable of doing nothing except allowing Ani to leave the AS400 at her job early enough to get Ruby from daycare and then zip home to run a few tasks from the relative comfort of our bedroom. Of course, said comfort is directly relative to the decibel level of our screaming 1.5 year old. Although the loud child is the love of her human life, the dinosaur laptop wasn’t the love of her digital life, so she recently bought herself an apple ibook laptop. Bring on the love of her iLife.

Seeing Ani’s cute little appletop, I became jealous. My big ol’ beast-Lappy 486 is great for playing games on its 17 inch display, but it isn’t really portable enough to take to school, especially now that my main method of transport is my bicycle (unless I have Ruby with me). I had to have an appletop too. I’m not a true “switcher”, because I still do a lot of work on the more powerful pc, but with that little white beauty, I have truly taken a step into the cult of apple. Sara commented about how great it was to have two laptops, and she’s right. That one step into the Land of Apple was followed by a leap into the world of iPod. Ani has had one for a while now, and it seemed cool, but I was never intrigued enough to get one for myself. When they introduced the nano however, I could no longer resist.  I was the first person on campus to walk out with the 4gig model, and I love it. Its flash memory is Solid State baby, and it’s small. I have 90 albums with me wherever I go. Nuff said.

Here is a picture of just the tech stuff that’s on my desk everyday. Take special note of the tiny hand knitted black iPod cozy. I love my wife.

Ruby is a true child of mine. Technology is her friend. Whenever one of us is on a computer, Ruby gets really excited and yells, “MONKEY MONKEY MONKEY!!!” I don’t know exactly how it started, but my daughter has distilled all of the information on the Internet and decided that its sole raison d’etre is to show still or moving images of monkeys. She will sit for an indefinite period of time as we scour google image searches and repositories of primate imagery. As each picture appears, Ruby seems surprised and lovingly proclaims, “Aaaaah  Monkey…” 

I present this algebraic theorem:

Lots of computers+lots of videgames+lots of gadgets+ipod+riding bike to school and work+having monkey pictures bookmarked on three machines for daughter=GEEK. 

I’m ok with that.  Anybody want to buy a slightly used Nintendo 64? Umm… on second thought, I had a lot of fun with that system. I think I’ll keep it. Anybody want to come over and have a Warcraft III LAN Geekout? Ruby’s down as long as we take a break to look at some monkey pictures.