I'm such a geek

Given that I study computer science it really shouldn't come as a surprise that I'm a geek. However, since I'm usually surrounded by fellow geeks, I hardly notice. But then sometimes stuff will happen, situations will occur, where it is blatantly obvious that I'm a geek. Such situations could be the one time I went to the Friday bar when my code wasn't working. It was a project in groups and I was really annoyed that the code just didn't do the right thing. I was even more annoyed that it was probably one or more off by 1 (or more) errors and I felt like I checked the entire code for those already. Obviously I didn't. Well, after an hour or two in the Friday bar I simply couldn't stand it anymore. I left and went to my office to code. A few hours later I returned yet again happy and ready to drink. I found the bug in the code. Naturally, it wasn't code I'd written that failed. :) But apparently I had just enough alcohol in my blood to find the error nonetheless.

Another example also takes place in the Friday bar. A friend and I had been separated at some point during the evening. Wondering if I was okay, he sent me a text message with the text "Ping". When you receive messages like that, it's already a pretty good sign that you're a geek. When you respond with "Pong", it's an even bigger sign. When you tell the story to your friends and they look at you with a "Well, what else would you reply?" look, it's further supporting evidence.

Then there are my adventures with Google. First I tried writing "good" in some other context. It came out "googd". Has happened. Twice. Actually, just as I wrote "good" before, it came out "goog". I've also tried googling something that I found perfectly innocent only to get surprised when I got the result. Yesterday I was writing a report and I needed to use big O notation. I was writing in LaTeX as any self respecting geek would. While I could have just used O, I knew that you could get cooler looking big Os in LaTeX. I just couldn't remember how (in case you wonder, use \mathcal{O}). So naturally I turned to googling the words "big o latex". The first result was related to LaTeX but didn't help me. The next result was sexual and I wondered why for a split second. Then I realised "Oh, that big O! But how is that related to LaTeX? Oh, latex!"

I can also just look at my pet peeves. When people can't pronounce LaTeX, I insist on telling them that they are pronouncing it wrong and the last letter is not an x but the Greek letter Chi. Another thing I hate is mismatched parentheses. I physically feel a bit worse when I see a dangling left parenthesis (or any other thing that should come in pairs like for instance [] "" or {}). And people who think that the happy mouth on a smiley counts as closing a parenthesis. You're wrong! Smiley mouths in general should not come in pairs. And they cannot just be paired with other things that should come in pairs. Just close your parenthesis, will you! Please!

So yeah, I'm a geek. But I like it!