Daniel Nisbet Just another WordPress weblog

Geeks

A person intensely interested in a particular field or hobby, generally at the expense of broader social interaction. Often used with an attributive noun.

I’ve been thinking recently about how ‘geeks’ are becoming more and more mainstream. It’s odd seeing pictures of friends from school going out to Ibiza and dressing up as ‘geeks’. Often now it’s becoming a look or a badge of honour, something hard to attain. I can hardly believe that geek chic has become an accpetable look.

On twitter people profess to be geeks or nerds and low and behold they end up asking about how to recover a lost document or don’t know how to plug in a mouse. It’s not enough to know what lolcats is or to use a hashtag. It’s not enough just to wear big glasses and slag off Comic Sans. That’s just web culture and as good and fun as that is, geek culture is a whole other level up.

Or am I completely wrong? Am I just annoyed that my precious little world is being seen for how great it is and should welcome all the newcomers? Even if they didn’t spend years at school getting looked at funny because you knew what hexadecimal was or what all those other buttons on the calculator actually did? (The picture above is the one of the calculators I had doing my A-Levels, a casio fx-9750g).

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Bought one of these with money for my birthday last month.
Might be one of the best things I’ve ever bought. Seriously.

Senseo Latte Select HD 7850/69

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Ed & Meleri’s Wedding

On Friday we travelled down to Oxford to attend the reception of Ed & Meleri’s wedding.
We had a lovely time and it was nice to see some friends that we don’t often get the opportunity to see. Ed & Mel met whilst at University and I met them about a year after first going out with Kate? Something like that. It’s funny the difference in them between then and now, back then they were wondering whether or not to move in with each other and whilst to us it was clear that they were in love with each other and a couple that were very very good together it seemed to me like they hadn’t quite discovered it for themselves yet (I have no idea how long they had been seeing each other at that point). We used to all meet up for parties at Kate’s sisters flat in London and seven of us would be staying in her 1 bed ground floor flat, having had some good food, lots of drink and silly games.
After a bit of a palaver in trying to find out what name our room was booked under we check-in to the lovely hotel (which had a spa! If only I’d checked beforehand!) We had some food in our room and went down to the reception for 8.

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life, the universe and everything

I just wrote a big old post about life the universe and everything. It didn’t make me feel better and I’ve decided it’s not something I want to write up for everyone to see. Hmm.

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Data Centre Tools

There was a post today on Evil Mad Scientists listing their favourite tools for the job. So I thought, hey that’s a good idea I can steal! So I’m going to present to you my favourite tools for the data centre.

1.

Just so so useful. I walk into the data centre sometimes not knowing what I might need and it’s a pretty long walk back to the office where the tools are. So I bring this guy along just in case and nine times out of ten – it does the job.

2.

Maglite 2AA cell. It doesn’t have to be the LED one, I just like it. The modes aren’t particularly useful to me but you never know one day you may need to have it on SOS mode (which If you’ve read Cory Doctorow’s When’s Sysadmins Ruled the Earth you might be able to envisage). Our data centre has a lack of lighting at the top end so it’s good for that as well as being essential for seeing with when you are crawling around the floor. I also carry a Maglite Solitaire on my keys in case i’ve forgotten to bring a proper torch with me.

3. Crimps
You’ve got to have good crimps. I used to have on that did cutting, stripping and crimping in one tool but the stripping bit started to wear out so I’ve now decided that separate tools are better. I keep getting the bit of skin between my thumb and first finger caught in our current one so I’m not going to be reccomending that particular model.

4. Wire stripper
Because using your teeth gets tiresome and wearing. We use one that you poke the end of the cable through and twist it round.

5. Cutters
Believe it or not these can get pretty expensive. But with good reason, several times i’ve cut out a power cable that’s out of use but stuck in a rack through over zealous cable management and it’s been still connected to power. Flash and a bang later and you’re glad that the snips have done their job and insulated you from it all.

6. Tile Lifters

Go for the double, single suckers aren’t enough often. We had a couple that had slight hinges on the suckers but they wore out pretty quickly. For lifting vented tiles I usually use the pliers on my penknife.

7. Cable tester
Stops the user complaining about their dodgy network connection when you can show them that there’s nothing wrong with the cable you spent time crawling under the floor to install for them.

I could go on about how my iPhone has helped me in situations, which it has – often to get to the universities phone directory, make sure a DRAC card I’ve just set up is pingable. But until the university sorts it’s wireless out so I don’t have to re-authenticate every time I use it it’s actually much easier to troop back to the office to use my PC.

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