Geek week 4: Blessed be the geeks

After Miss Liana and Miss Windbag’s blogs yesterday about not being particularly geeky at all and being 80% geeky (respectively), I paused to reflect on the generous nature of the nerds that are around us. We all have an alpha nerd friend to help us out when we get in a fix. They are always super helpful and seem to love the challenge of solving tricky problems. No matter how nerdy you are, there is someone nerdier and they seem to want to share their knowledge and help you to learn. They are like a bunch of hippies and it reminds you that the human capacity for cooperation and sharing has played as large a role if not greater than the 'survival of the fittest' model that we are told is the fundamental evolutionary truth (and actually is in some art circles)! It is a hidden economy of gifting that never really gets recognised by economists and has had good things like the Linux open source systems that are spreading so much joy among microsoft haters. I hope the nerds know that they are appreciated by neo-luddites like me. For all that they do.

I said to Liana once that my alpha nerd partner and his nerdier friend were going to upgrade the computer that we share to add more storage capacity and that they had ambitions to make it into a super computer. Backups had to be done of my precious image files and it was a major disruption to my blogging/internet schedule. She said “God I HATE it when they do that!” It’s true, I wouldn’t mind how many gigglewhatsits my computer has. As long as I’m number one on a google search for ‘jewellery’ I couldn’t care less. And it is the geeks that hold the key to that.

Now I'm off to the beach for a coupla days to de-geek and watch whale watchers.