» How nerdy are you?

I'm as nerdy as SUM(AllPreviousPosts)+1;
I was doomed to be a nerd from a very early age; since we didn't have Teletubbies in the seventies, toddler-me was often kept occupied by being sat in front of a telly switched to Open University broadcasts on BBC2. I blame this for my tendency to nod off when confronted by beards or kipper ties.

At age six, I got a telescope for Christmas. I had endless fun looking at fuzzy blobby images of Jupiter and Saturn and it never once occurred to me to point the thing at the windows of the nurse's accomodation behind my house. No, really, it never did. Twenty-nine years later, I have two computer-controlled telescopes and I still don't use them to spy on naked nurses, as that not the sort of heavenly body I'm looking for. That's how nerdy I am.

At age eight, I was exposed to computers for the very first time in the form of a Commodore PET 2001 with compact keyboard. It was supposed to be used to run the family business. Instead it got used to keep me quiet after school as I played games off some tape that came with a specially imported American magazine.

By age ten, I had my very own computer in the form of a Sinclair ZX-81 and was by now writing my own games in BASIC. This would be followed by a Commodore VIC-20, a C64 and an Amiga 500 all before I left school.

When I did leave school, I was too nerdy to go to college, so instead I got a job in the computer games industry as a games tester. I had achieved the ultimate goal of getting paid to play games all day. At night (when not sleeping under my desk), I'd go home and write C programs on my brand-new 386SX-20 PC, which resulted in me doing a certain amount of programming for my employers too.

After the company got bought out and everyone got made redundant, I went back to college as the older guy everyone "liked" because he had his own car, didn't drink and could win the Students Union pub quiz single-handedly, the prize for said winning invariably being free beer, which of course I didn't drink. The only time I've ever had girls fight over me is over whose pub quiz team I'd be playing on.

"Sod off, you slag! He's playing with ME!"

After college, I wound up running the billing systems for a Gas company in Holland, all by remote-control (well, Telnet) from an office in Manchester. At the time, the tax system in the Netherlands was such that anyone with any actual computing skills went to the country next door to get work, so the people actually in Holland had no computing skills whatsoever (they were mostly arts history grads for some reason) and whenever there was a problem, I would get a phone call and log in to sort things out, usually by the use of "rm -rf *".

I was also responsible for Y2K compliance testing and found that whilst our stuff worked okay, the accounting software our customer used didn't work worth a damn, but no-one seemed to think this was important.

I made damn sure I got a new job by November 1999...

In 1999, I went to work for a company that wrote Operating Systems for palmtop computers and things. The first project was the Seiko-Epson Locatio, a bizarre Japanese PDA that had an integrated camera, GPS tracking and a teeny-tiny mobile phone module all in one cool but clumsy device. To compare, it's the same functionality as the Nokia N95, only eight years earlier.

Strangely, I also worked on the Nokia N95.

To complete the nerdiness, my spare bedroom has about £1000-worth of old role-playing games in it. Ah, memories.
(Tue 11th Mar 2008, 14:18, More)