» How nerdy are you?

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…
(Tue 11th Mar 2008, 11:44, More)