Long ago I made a choice. It was 1991 and I was in the 7th grade at J.R. Masterman middle school in center city Philadelphia. My parents had just purchased a state of the art home computer from Microcenter in Saint Davids PA. They put that computer in my room. It was a 486SX, 25MHZ powerhouse with a respectable 100 megabyte hard drive and a blazing 2400 bps modem. Within a year I got in trouble for linking up to some pre-internet ‘site’ in California while I downloaded an animated thing of a woman lying on a bearskin rug, touching herself provocatively. It was a 6 or 7 frame, low resolution image file and it took about 6 hours of long distance connectivity to transfer.
Before me were 2 paths. All of my friends were already losers, but some of them were also geeks. Some were even programmers. Most read sci-fi. Some collected trains. Occasionally the best of us kissed a girl. Through the 5th grade I was a blossoming nerd, but when I entered the age of self-consciousness, the whole appeal of the lifestyle started to wear away.
I could have continued on the nerd path. If I had, I would likely own a swanky ass condo and earn at minimum, 3x what I do now. Instead I grew out my hair. I really, really wanted to kiss a girl. It worked and by age 16 I was cool.
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>>> Here’s a really good side story that shows you what I was up against:
It was the sock hop in 7th grade. It was my first dance and I was scared as shit. Once I got to the gym: shoes off, socks out and saw that all the boys were on the north side of the gym, with all the girls clustered on the south, I started to feel better. I stood alone with the rest of the boys; even the cool ones.
But way over on the west end were 2 of Masterman’s biggest nerds. I don’t know what triggered it, but one of them, feeling the ostracization of total isolation just lost it. He attacked the other nerd in an uncontrolled flailing rage. The other nerd tried to stay above it all and pretended to keep reading through the beating. A punch knocked his glasses off and the illusion that he was actually reading was shattered.
The rest of us lost it. Those nerds exorcised the tension that the rest of us were feeling. There weren’t may fights at Masterman and these were 2 of the most unlikely combatants. It was the pressure. We were all under it, but they were at the bottom. It was just too much.
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But anyway, over the next 6 years I fell farther and farther from my nerd roots. By senior year in high school I cut my hair short, started hanging out in the M.G. room and even made honor roll again, but the damage had already been done. Habits forged and tastes acquired put me on my path.
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Through it all, I remain a demi-geek. While I never took that new computer and became a programmer, I did become a competent novice. I learned the basics of web design. I can write html and css and work with existing php. Mostly I can manipulate shit that already exists. This site is nothing more than a series of modified templates and reworked hacks and plugins. I browse the code in dreamweaver and eventually make it do what I want it to. I can’t write it from scratch.
I still watch Star Trek (original, TNG, DS9) and read science fiction. I studied the original Mr. Bungle in college. My eyes don’t glaze over for a whole 10 minutes when someone expounds on the virtues of the VI text editor. I can talk some of the talk, but I can’t walk the walk. I sort of follow along and pick things up on the way.
But all this is way more about myself than I meant to get into. What this post is really about is the launch of:
What is it? It’s the Philadelphia areas newest and only site devoted to and written for an audience of geeks. I’ve been asked to write for this site and if I can find any time between my job(s) and if I can tug at my roots enough to create worthy content for it, I just might. Either way, check it out. It’s new, it’s here so read it. If you’ve read this far, I know you want to.
That’s all for now.
