Maybe not so much nerdy as anal
I have a thing about grammar. In particular, the misuse of an apostrophe pisses me off like you wouldn't believe. If it's plural, dont put one in; if the item belongs to someone or you've missed letters out, then by all means go ahead. It's not that fucking hard.

So I attended a conference a while back in one of the older universities north of the border and went for a customary post-lunch dump. Scrawled up the side of the cubicle was your generic racist slur - I can't remember what it was exactly but I remember it was along the lines of "****'s go home".

I corrected the grammar, and included a short explanation as to the correct usage of an apostrophe. I left feeling quite pleased with myself, but this dissipated rapidly as I realised the depths of grammar nazism to which I'd sunk.
(Rushy, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 12:45, 9 replies)

Not on subject I know...
but I just found this.
tech.uk.msn.com/features/gallery.aspx?cp-documentid=7726954&imageindex=6
( Madam Marlboro wonders if you've found her yet, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 12:27, 2 replies)

OK I think my whole family is a bit Geeky...
After amusing myself reading a load of these posts I feel I should contribute and admit some things, not just about me but my entire family. On first impressions we all are quite normal – Married with 2 kids, we socialise, have lots of mates, go on holiday in the sun, do some diy on the house at the weekends, work and generally do normal things – but dig a little deeper and everything starts to unravel like one of grannies knitted jumpers…

Holidays – I get told frequently that this isn’t normal but don’t know if it counts. A few years ago me and the Mrs got into exploring pre Islamic historical sites North and West Africa… This generally involves driving around in the Sahara for a few weeks before ending up in some weird country that’s probably just recovering from a recent civil war and camping on the beach for a week – then driving back – not to everyones taste but as a family we enjoy it. We disappear 3 times a year like this and has lead to a very nerdy interest in Land Rovers,(we now have 4 but had to sell a couple recently) and general desert exploration.

And then there are the computers… Oh god the computers! – where do I start - we have loads of computers and related stuff. OK – we both work in IT so Geek meets Geek and the beige boxes grow in number but even so…

At the last count we have and use in the home:
6 laptops (4 Linux red hat – 2 windows XP pro)
4 servers (various flavors of windows and Linux),
5 desktops (mainly windows)
A dedicated Raid backup machine
Several networks, hubs and firewalls,
A couple of A4 BJ printers,
A big A3 colour laser
A large format big SCSI flat bed scanner.

I also keep a tablet PC in one of the land rovers on a Bagin Sat connection so I can work whist camping out in the desert by accessing one of the home networks via satalight. I have a shed with maybe 30 “old computers” that I have built, used and discarded over the years surrounded by piles of hubs and scanners and god knows what that’s been collected over the last 20 years.

We also connect directly to the internet via a 2m satellite dish in the garden (we are our own ISP – its cheaper in the long run to sort it all out your self and boy do you get the bandwidth!) that costs us almost as much as out mortgage…

My wife recently totaled the cost of everything we own for the insurance (and I mean everything down on a spreadsheet with serial numbers and photos) and found that the value of working IT gear in the house was more than 6 times every thing else we own (apart from all the land rovers) put together

As we both develop web stuff , networks and database’s for a living I’m not even going to mention where we are at with home made apps and programming for fun – needless to say we don’t watch tv much in the evening. Our oldest just built a Google Map hack so she can use an old gps hooked up to cheap PDA as part of a year 3 primary school project on “Maps and what they mean” OK she been using GPS and digital mapping out in the desert for most of her life and built her first web page when she was five but I still find it almost as scary as her teacher!

Oh and I also met my wife 10 years ago in a dodgy online chat room…
(dwair404, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 11:44, Reply)

Should use my B cups for good, or... evil?
I'm not as deeply nerdy as most people here, but I am very, very cross-genre. That means I'm a big damn geek for superheroes, steampunk, cyberpunk, New Weird, zombies, rock bands, all sorts of books and TV shows, RPGs, webcomics, slash fanfiction, zombies, bizarre youtube videos, grammar, reptiles, anime, computer games, did I mention the zombies?

Anyway, the point is that my lack of proper nerdy dedication to one obsession means that offline I tend to keep company with people who aren't, strictly speaking, all that nerdy at all, and I am probably not the first to discover this curious phenomenon.

In sufficiently low quantities, nerdiness is actually *cancelled out* by the presence of breasts. I mean, were I to suddenly wake up with a penis I would be textbook nerd - obscure jokes nobody gets, poor social skills, huge porn collection, awkward stammering, bullied in school, even the glasses - but you bang a set of tits on there and suddenly everyone takes you for a functioning member of fashionable society. Who knew?
(Lieutenant Colonel Oblivious brought to you by intravenous sugar, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 11:27, 14 replies)

I am the world's biggest music geek
I'm slightly geeky in general. I did maths and science A levels. I spend far too long on the internet. I have asthma and frizzy hair. I don't get on with "normal" people. I spend my Thursday lunchtimes sniggering over QOTW. I am actually keeping a blog about my recent wisdom tooth extraction (seriously, take a look, you'll love it - it has grisly photos AND poo stories). None of these things alone are anything more than the normal activities of one blessed with more brains than social skills, but I bet I can beat you all for specialist geekiness standing on my head. Bow down to the world's greatest music geek.

When I was a child, I used to bunk off primary school to stay home and listen to music. I was obsessed with Stravinsky in particular. I had always thought that people's hair only stood on end in Scooby Doo until the first time I heard The Rite of Spring.

My parents started me off with piano and composition lessons when I was six. They weren't pushy parents or anything, but I begged them constantly. I was however convinced that I was crap at it because I couldn't play Bach or Ravel yet.

I have perfect pitch. In fact, if something is in the wrong key, I find this deeply annoying.

I took up the cello when I was 14, and did Grade 8 in a year.

I went to the Guildhall, even though I was quite bright and could have gone to university, but I didn't know this at the time - I thought that music was the only thing I would ever be any good at. Spent 4 years surrounded by people who would practise 8 hours a day and win loads of international competitions but were barely literate.

Grew to HATE the music profession and seriously want out.

Got a proper job when I graduated....at a classical music magazine!

I could explain the "Rite chord" and the "Tristan chord" to you if you wanted, and it's only relatively recently that I have realised that most people are really not interested.

I know the difference between French, German and Italian augmented 6th chords, and I know a fantastically politically incorrect method of remembering which is which.

Gratuitous key changes in pop songs make me go "Nnnnngnngnnnggggrrrrgggggghhghhhhh"

In possibly my geekiest moment yet, I recently modified the wikipedia pages for Lydian mode and the Octatonic scale. The Lydian mode page previously made no mention of the Simpsons theme tune, and the Octatonic scale page didn't mention Just.

But I think what really tops it all off, and what really qualifies me as the world's biggest music geek, is the fact that after all this, after spending hours in a practice room, having no life, missing out on my student years altogether, being able to analyse chord sequences, being able to tell you what key your car engine is in, I am still absolutely crazy about classical music. I still virtually take up residence at the Royal Albert Hall during Prom season, and still try to convert anybody who will listen to me for five minutes.

Nobody can beat me for music geekery.
(grandmasterfluffles Come to my Armageddon party on, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 11:21, 16 replies)

You are probably a nerd if you get this.
Little Johnny was a chemist,
But Johnny is no more,
For what Johnny though was H₂O,
Was H₂SO₄.
(oeb, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 11:08, 12 replies)

My wife and I recently had
a baby

We named her Akira

Yes after the Manga.

ZX Nerdy +2
( Peej, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 10:21, 4 replies)

Geekdom timeline
100,000 BC - Winfield Man
Discovered in a burial mound in the village of Winfield, UK. He was buried with a number of figurines and appeared to be wearing some kind of stylised hat. An ancient text was found on his person depicting a man being beaten to death with tree branches. The body has numerous broken bones.

3,000 BC - Pu Erh Pong
Ancient Chinese mathematician. He worked out how to play a variety of games on the abacus and was briefly at the centre of a Imperial craze that caused abacuses to sell out, leading to a worldwide bead shortage. He was executed and burned.

400 BC - Gygax of Halitosis
A collector of myths and legends, he went too far in making and selling figurines at markets around ancient Greece. His popular game "Myths and Legends" was the cause of his conviction for blasphemy and he was stoned to death.

300 BC - Eliaphas
Old Testament prophet who was made famous when he drew up a graph depicting the Glory of the Lord. His mother made him wear shorts until he was 153 and his nickname was "Shorty Greasy Spot Spot." Killed by a bolt of lightning while working on a graph of the Heavens.

100 AD - Ibn Hassan al Barack ib Beethoven
North African geographer who documented every town in the world on a giant scale map, categorising them all according to the numbers of letters in their names. He vanished after he went for a stroll in the direction of the Cliff of Certain Death (not on his map).

1000 AD - Bernard de Allo Allo
Chief Inventor to the Duc de Orleans, he designed a computation machine that was able to handle desk top publishing, accounts and advanced calculation. His employer had asked for a better kind of rolling pin instead, so Bernard was boiled in molten lead and his plans were lost.

1400 AD - Leonardo de Akropolis
Chinless one-legged dwarf, he is credited with designing the first computer program. After a lifetime of work, he presented his system "Lye Nux" to the Pope and was laughed out of the Vatican because the computer hadn't been invented yet. He came back with plans for a ski lift but his cousin from Vinci had already built one, so Akropolis was burned at the stake.

!750 AD - Sir Kevin Newton
Brother of the more famous Isaac, Kevin discovered that gravity works in reverse when you're off your tits on drugs and alcohol. He died a virgin aged 21 in a pub in Greenwich.

1911 AD - Wilfred Bogget
Ballistics expert and amateur model maker, Wilfred worked on a new kind of machine gun to use in Belgium. Unfortunately, he got so carried away that he ended building a spaceship for interstellar travel. Millions died as a result.

2000s AD - Rob Manuel
Sets up a site called b3ta on the Internet. This attracts dweebs, dorks, nerds and geeks from around the world to chatter rabidly about operating systems, role playing and unrealised pornographic fantasies. Worldwide productivity dips as a result.
(frankspencer, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 10:09, 7 replies)

Nuclear stuff.
I LOVE anything to do with radiation.

One day I want to visit Chernobyl, like this girl did: www.kiddofspeed.com/

And when I couldn't sleep I would sometimes go out at midnight and ride the 60 miles to Heysham, just to smoke a spliff and sit and watch the nuclear power plant.

I don't actually know why. I just find it fascinating.
(Half of Stephen Fry's right buttock pissed on your dog on, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 9:52, 4 replies)

Hmm...
Me and My friends Instead of using the Phrase

"Lol"

On instant messengers and stuff we used

"5"

Because its 101 in binary.

Simple things.
( [DTMX] Fishing hook, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 9:52, 2 replies)

Nerdy? Me?
We used to have this group in the 80's in which we used to act out our own Dungeons & Dragons. In the town I lived, there used to be a very large thick wood with grass patches open to the sun interspersed throughout. We used to split up into 2 groups and we would both have missions to accomplish, treasures to seek etc. The mission was created by a master who would set the rules, place the treasures etc and provide us with clues as to the location of this treasure to both teams. This was a fantastic time as we would carry backpacks with lunches and sit eating lunch after hours of adventuring. One time we decided to do this at night-time which made it even more atmospheric.

On other nerdiness. I have had a reasonable collection of computers in the past.

Amstrad CPC464 + green screen monitor + TV modulator
Commodore Amiga (introduced me to the tracker/demoscene)
IBM Ambra 386 SX 25 with 512k RAM + 40MB HD (got this to play Doom, didn't work too well)
Home built 496DX4 100 with Rightoues 3D graphics card and a rather large HD

and several machines upto the

Apple Powerbook G4

and now

the Macbook Pro 17" + 30" Cinema HD display

it's orgasmic :-)

So, I guess I'm still kinda nerdy.

I'm also a big fan of Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Tolkien, Salvatore etc
(scotsbloke, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 9:32, Reply)

I still have the same PC I had in 1994
It's had 6 new motherboards
7 new processors
3 new cases
6 new graphics cards
many new hard drives
2 new sound cards
4 new monitors
2 new keyboards
4 new mice

I think it may have a couple of the original screws left in it, but I may be wrong.
( Weetobix, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 9:29, 6 replies)

Oh God.
I'm quite a fan of post-punk proto-crusty band New Model Army.

As a lad they suited perfickly my angry-young-man's desperate need for self-righteousness.

One day, a bunch of friends and I went to the pub. The driver of the car we were in had little respect for the law, safety, or, indeed, physics, so it was no surprise that, as the other passenger and I got to the bar as the driver parked, the other passenger noted "He drives like a maniac!"

I stood, in silent contemplation, before uttering "Drives like a maniac. Drives like a maniac. "I'll get a big car and I'll drive like a maniac, if you'll only notice me" - Notice Me - Sullivan, Morrow, 1983 - track 7 -Vengeance/The Independent Story"
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 9:17, Reply)

My Star Wars name...

Is Leymi Broco
( Pooflake braces for an onslaught..., Tue 11 Mar 2008, 9:05, 17 replies)

as serious as cancer
Snap - Rhythm Is A Dancer

I can still remember the catalogue number for this 16 years after ordering hundreds of copies a week for many many weeks when I worked in a record shop in 1992.

I do believe everyone in a certain northern pit town owns multiple copies of this bloody record.

74321102571 (12")
( no longer a user, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 8:49, 2 replies)

and now, a musical interlude......
for all the nerdy and/or geeky people.......and everyone else....enjoy the following links for your laughing pleasure.....


www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQMbXvn2RNI


www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK0bZl4ILM


www.youtube.com/watch?v=84-g3kuJ2cE


www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uuCNAwXGaQ


www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou-yprCsHS0&feature=related


if you didn't find something funny in those, then I can't help you.....
( flirting with badgers What? It sounded good at the time., Tue 11 Mar 2008, 5:20, Reply)

Deep thought
I understand "42" and I know what the question is.....

Honest

Edit - thanks for the congrats y'all :-)

.
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 5:17, Reply)

I prefer geek to nerd
And using this title, I shall say that I am an art-based geek. I share many of the basic characteristics of the common geek/nerd. I was on the sound and lighting team at school - a roadie in a girls' school uniform. I got bored during my German Oral exam and convinced the teacher that what I wanted to do when I grew up was to set up a commune of tree-dwelling hippies in the German forests, and I quoted Douglas Adams in my Philosophy A level paper. Although I watched but never obsessed over Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5 and The Matrix (the first one...the others do not exist, my fingers are in my ears and I can't hear you) I know the whole of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy off by heart - not the books, but the original BBC radio plays as they are ON THE TAPES. I have the CDs now and I miss the gaps where I used to have to wait and then turn the tape over :( My Ipod is called Moya. When under hypnosis infront of an audience I was asked who my favourite movie star was and replied "I don't like movie stars, I like David Attenbrough!". I suck at sports and ride a trike because I never managed the art of cycling.

The only thing is, these come with a subtle twist. Par example: many obsessives keep their books in strict alphabetical order. Anal, but really rather practical. If, that is, you can remember the author. I have a visual memory. So how do I keep my books? By colour. At this point, most librarians cringe, but keeping your books strictly in alphabetical order without sub-catergorising is just as arbitrary as what colour the book happens to be. Why should Asimov and Aristophanes sit next to each other on a shelf merely because of the accidents of birth? The organisation by colour is also a more complex process than you might think. You can go by a spectrum of colours, the way that say yellow progresses to orange, through to the red which in turn go into purples, blues, blues to greens and greens back to yellows. But then there are shades from pale to dark. Black books need their own shelf, but do they progress to greys, and then from greys where do you go? Into white, or into grey blue, blue grey and then true blues? What about grey greens? What the hell do you do with two very pale blue books, one of which is a greeny blue and one of which a purpley blue so that if they sit together they clash horribly? One you've progressed from yellow to orange and then to red, where the hell do you put anything pink?!?

The mind boggles. In the end, you are left with a slightly frazzled but satisfied mind, very pretty and overall harmonious looking bookshelves and a subtle system that everybody gets but nobody truly understands. Oh, and a reject shelf for books that just have too many damn colours on their dust jackets!
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 0:45, 1 reply)

I always refer to the number 62
as the Vienna number.
(Chuckman, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 0:41, 2 replies)

Computers
My life around computers has been, well, interesting. I've had a succession of weird, odd and downright ridiculous computers.

Let's start back, wayyyy back with the ol' BBC Micro. For those of you too young to remember - Good! It was a big ol' pile of steaming, cow produced, grade A poo. But... It did have 32k RAM, that's right, 32k - for all you memory hogs, that was an astounding amount of memory then - but it did run "Elite", one of the finest games ever produced...

Moving on to my next computer - a ZX81. Oh yes, a ZX81 - plastic and expensive, but my God, it was cool. If you had big hair, big glasses and no friends that is.... But.... I did have a thermal printer **rubs-hands-with-glee** which was brilliant - apart from it's tendency to burst into flames - ah well, we must suffer for our art. My Mum threw it out - it was in pristine condition and was worth some money. I cried. A lot.

My next was a ZX Spectrum 48k. The rubber key jobbie - with a 3.5Mhz processor (that's NOT a typo, it really did have a 3.5Mhz processor). But, it did run and play Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. One of my catchphrases is still "We must perform a quirkafleeg" to this day...

I branched out into weirdness at this point and got an Amstrad **shakes head** with a 3" disk PCW6128 which was, well, rubbish. THe games were poor and, well, it had no redeeming features so when I got...

The PCW8512 - What the hell was I thinking there? It had 2 3" drives - double the pointlessness, double the crapness, double the uselessness. But... The 2nd drive could get up to 720k from a disk **without** turning it over...

**Shudder**

I don't think it got any better at Uni when I cannibalised some work computers (allegedly) to build up a machine capable of playing Doom2 - so I built the cutting edge, seat of your pants, DX4/100 beast. With 32Mb RAM - on riser cards. And 20Mb of disk space. And a 14" SVGA monitor.

My next new purchase was a Pentium 120 - hoo hoo hoo. It was pretty damned good, I can tell you - I spec'd it up myself from a store now closed in Sheffield, but it lasted me 4 years and some of Uni and I sold it on too :) This had 64Mb RAM (later 128) and 120Mb disk space.

It gets a bit boring after that as I got a Celeron 400 as a budget machine, but I spiced it up by adding a Righteous Orchid graphics accelerator card - an expensive secondary video card that waited for software to call it to enable, a few clicks and clunks later, the accelerator kicked in. Grand Theft Auto (1) needed, inexplicably, an accelerator card - I think the Orchid was one of the first.

The Celeron 400 did me well, I upgraded from 2000 to XP and even dual booted for a while, but when I dropped in a P3 450 processor - well, things took off. Well, sortof....

At about the same time as the P450 processor upgrade, I decided to build my own computer - So I bought a board, processor, memory and disk. Wired them all up, carefully, having followed the directions (really) - then turned it on. ***BANG*** and smoke and a genie appeared.

Well, no, but I was down £250 as I'd blown everything connected to that board.... Ah well, lesson leaned and all that...

Then I was allocated work machines that I'll just name:
Toshiba Portege - great laptop and light. Great if you liked it to fry your hands, desk and knees - but there was a pretty good chance you might be ok, as there was no way the battery would last that long
Compaq N610 - great laptop and light - shame I left the company and have to hand it back.

And now?

Well, I've a works dual core Vista laptop that's a special kind of shite

And a MacBook which is mine. All mine

So nerdy? Me? I'll let you judge....

Thanks for reading - if you got this far :-)
(james_tiger_woods is going to start his killing spree on the, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 0:06, 6 replies)

You know your nerdy
When you know every single firefly episode word for word....

Cough. Click 'I Like This' if your as hoplessly nerdy as me :)


EDIT: Oh, and my birthday is the 25th May - Nerd Pride Day... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerd_pride_day

:P
(Pointless as a chavs bathroom, Tue 11 Mar 2008, 0:06, 2 replies)

Of dot matrix printers and...
How nerdy am I? As a pimply teenager, I once printed out Ascii porn on my Epson, dot-matrix printer. Enough said.
(neil4ad, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 23:56, 1 reply)

How Nerdy?
Quoted from the most trustworthy source of Wikipedia, A nerd is:

"Nerd is a term often bearing a derogatory connotation or stereotype, that refers to a person who passionately pursues intellectual activities, esoteric knowledge, or other obscure interests that are age inappropriate rather than engaging in more social or popular activities. Therefore, a nerd is often excluded from physical activity and considered a loner by peers."

I feel as though i am the social outcast nerd more than anyone here as I have never programmed anything, never got into star trek or played warhammer.
(PassTheKhat, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 23:28, Reply)

I earn my living as a nurse.
I have been trained in communication skills, have very few hang-ups regarding body image, have to deal with people on a day-in, day-out basis and there is very little to do with computers.
why am I posting here you might well ask?

I'll tell you why.

I'm an Intensive Care nurse, lab techs and microbiologists aside, we are the spods of the health care game, and I'll tell you why.

1) Gadgets.

In Intensive care we use a wide variety of highly entertaining gadgets.
Ventilators with a multitude of settings which range from letting you be very hands on with your patient's care to one which will let you sit reading and picking your nose through the night shift, various pumps, all extremely programmable, the LiDCO, a gadget for monitoring ore cardiac functions than you though existed, Vital signs monitors(not the exact one we use, the ones we have are flashier than this) and the the blood gas machine to name but a few things.

2) Technical Stuff
I'd like to think that it goes without saying that working in ITU calls for a pretty technical knowledge base, in the course of my working day myself and/or my colleagues may be expected to interpret blood results(a process which largely involves looking at numbers) or calculate fluid inputs and outputs for the day in order to reach set parameters when doing haemofiltration(again, this largely involves numbers), for example.

3) Everyone has their own private obsessions which they know possibly too much about than is healthy for one individual.
I can waffle for hours about the merits and numerous near-identical dressings, another is very very keen on auditing EVERYTHING(again, numbers)and another gets very excited about the colour of a patient's sputum and what this may indicate.

And finally 4) In intensive care, the majority of patients are sedated, ventilated and occasionally paranoid. This is so us poor freaks to speak to as few people as possible, quite often the doctors have more to do with patient's families than us, so Intensive Care is one of the few areas of a hospital where the doctors are not the most inarticulate members of staff.

Oh and we work a big windowless unit, we've got better goth's suntans than the average WoW player.

Length? about 48 hours to live, if you're doing well.
( Amorous Badger NAKED BEA ARTHUR PHOTOS 4U, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 23:00, Reply)

One thought though
We consider, as does society as a whole, being able to quote Hitch-Hikers Guide or Star Wars verbatim as geeky and sad. Yet knowing who scored the winning goals in every FA cup final is fine.


I fail to see the difference.
( Mrs Entity is in hiding., Mon 10 Mar 2008, 22:34, 7 replies)

Does
knowing a windows 98 code off by heart count?
( weekendsession, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 21:31, 1 reply)

More than some - less than others...
Our dining room has been converted into a library - Zelazny, Anthony, Herbert and Dr Who rule. The children are allowed to keep only their TARDIS playset in there, the TARDIS zipperobe sits in the den. (Keep in mind, we live in the US, so DrWho paraphenalia is rather hard to come by).

Against the wall of our living room, are the missus' and my desks. Each has it's own computer, with the printer and the Wireless Router on the filing cabinet between them. More often than not, I'll have to email her to remind her to check dinner or to go to bed as she'll have the headphones on while surfing the YouTubes.

The eldest boy has a computer in his room on which he surreptitiously surfs for pr0n. I usually browse his Internets history to see if he's found anything I haven't seen yet.

There's an old laptop connected to the telly so that I can watch streaming vid from Netflix on a proper screen.

85% of Weird Al's 'White and Nerdy' applies to me.

I listened to Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy when it was first broadcast on US Public Radio (following the Star Wars radio program!).

I haven't let anybody else cut my hair since I got out of the Navy in '87 (I was a barber) - I cut it myself. I wear a mullet, that makes it easy.
(thanatos, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 21:27, 3 replies)

Not only, but also...
Well, as is fairly standard, I alphabetise my CDs, and order by release date within artist, though I do also ensure that each CD is aligned correctly within its case - which may technically be unecessary, but I find it a crucial part of the CD-ordering ritual.
Slightly worryingly, this isn't something that I instigated, but many years ago I recall someone saying it as a joke, and thinking it was actually a rather good idea.

I also keep my Digipack CDs seperate from my jewel cases so as to keep each shelf uniform in composition, and those digipacks with their variable sizes just don't cut the mustard.

Oh, and I work for a company that makes printers (and more importantly lasers*) that put Best Before Dates on things.

_{*Burny, burny lasers, oh so much fun. Last week I was burning codes directly into cheese, and filled the entire building with acrid, lactic smoke.}
(spankfrencer, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 21:19, 2 replies)

Throwing my hat into the ring...
- I walked up the aisle to a spanish guitar version of the Throne Room Theme, and back down to the Cantina tune.

- I have two dogs called Chewie and Leia. To be fair, Chewie was so named because he looked so much like the said Wookie. Then when we got a little black female dog, it was too fitting not to use. But her full name is Laika Kudryavka.

- I find the joke about the Biologist, Physicist & Mathematician on a train looking at a sheep funny, and knew it before it appeared in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.

- I collect Tube maps from around the world and their variants. Nothing beats the London map for its beauty and effectiveness. I get a wide-on from just looking at New Johnson font in use, which brings me to...

- I'm a fontaholic and can easily recognise which company is writing to me by the font. I think the death penalty should be brought back for usage of Comic Sans and all first year infant children instructed in the usage of small caps.

- I always use who and whom correctly, even in speech.

- I always do things like showering and washing up in the same order, cos it's the most efficient way I've found to do it. My husband teases me by saying he fancies re-ordering the cupboards for a bit of variety, which makes me need a lie down.

- I get frustrated trying to do simple things in DOS, and then realise I'm using UNIX commands.

- My ultimate holiday would be to go and stick my arm in the cracks in the concrete sarcophagus at Chernobyl. I can explain what wrong there too. Also want the grand tour of CERN.

- I did the "Is your brain male or female?" quiz by Simon Baron-Cohen, and found that whilst I was averagely female (empathetic), I was more male (systemising) than most men and got a score unheard of for most women.

- Plus the usual stuff, H2G2 obsessed, watch every physics documentary going, miss my Amiga, C64 and Spectrum so much it hurts, got married on the MUD, atheist, colour-grapheme synaesthete, disparaging about Stephen Hawking, and so on...
(Cryptoprocta has abandoned the username of Voodoo Mary, Mon 10 Mar 2008, 21:12, 2 replies)