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In my opinion,you can't know you are a geek until people notice it.
But you can say you're a geek when you don't speak of it too loudly.
As it is said,empty recipients make a lot of noise.......

think the thing with start counting from 0 is the most significant characteristic.

I'm a geek that grew up with Basic, so Option Base 1 it is for me

Oh, there's plenty of examples, but my favorite geeky thing is using an MD5 hash of my social security number as my personal desktop's password. Not a particularly smart thing to do, since if someone knew that's what it was they could brute force my SSN, but it's still funny to rattle off a 32 character block of characters when someone finds the computer off and wants to know my password.

I personally find the term geek to be less of a scientific guy and more of a Starwars / Trekkie type guy. Fanboy, gets caught up in meaningless debates of little things, being severely sociall inept, and so on. I consider nerds to be more of the guy who cobbles together a TV out of spare electronics parts he found, builds his own computer, writes his own OS, and so on. Thus, I really finy myself more of a nerd than a geek, but both therms apply to me very well (I love some Starwars!).

You know you're a geek when you bought a VGA cable to plug your computer in to your LCD TV and make a bucket of popcorn just to watch ASCII Star Wars [url]telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl[/url].

...when you end up reading chipset datasheets to try to figure out why your iPhone won't always charge...

http://howardforums.com/showpost.php?p= ... tcount=107

... when you have abdominal pain or diarrhea and you quickly start reading about listeria, e coli or botulism and start telling your own diagnosis.

... you redicule the Foregin (esp British) Math authors who write cumbersome proofs in a pompuous language , by smart and cool ways which reduces their proof into complete absurdity .
http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q ... s+&meta=

When you write something on a piece of paper (because you have to... e.g. at school) and you expect a red line to appear under the word to tell you if you misspelled it....
Jules

edit: P.S. BTW I'm back

-When you are confused by other peoples inability to count higher than 10d on their fingers. (May have been said before in a slightly different form... IDR).

-When explaining to your friend how your cruise control works you say "Its more like C++ than ASM." (ie you call the function and then set the values intead of the other way around (as with calling int(s) in ASM)) (I found this out the hard way after a month of programming in ASM and then I went on a road trip and my mind defaulted to ASM methodology))

As you can tell I fall cleanly under one person's suggestion about parenthesis usage in sentences.

-When you number your spelling/vocab tests in hex.

-When you have said (or atleast thought) "Why doesnt she like me? What parameter must I change for this to work?"... its kinda a shame girls arnt more like functions (well documented and will operate as long as the variables stay within a certain bounds) but no they just have to muddle things up with feelings *shudders*.

-When you make programming analogies on a regular basis.

@Suthers
IDK that I've ever waited on SP corrections but I have found myself wondering why the code I have written on a peice of paper doesnt have syntactical (not sure if thats a word) highlighting. (Which was quickly rectified by borrowing a few highlighters "Got something closer to lime green")

@the 0 comment
Yea, you know your a C family geek when 0 is the start of your counting

@Good Grades
Im a terrible student but Im one of the nerdiest/geekiest (I will address that issue next) guys around. Nerds as they are defined in my head are good with grades but so often geeks are not. My personal issue is my trouble with not seeing them as important enough to steal time away from reading RFC documentation (RFC 1149 ftw!).

@Geek v. Nerd (Telgin)
I've always though of nerds as being so academically minded they loose sight of being social. Geeks are really specialized in a subject so much so that they loose sight of being social (tradionally (although there has been a slight shift in recent)) (which is why we say computer geek way more often than computer nerd (ie the latter is erronious but unfortunatly perpetuated until Geek and nerd become synonomous)).

chezzestix wrote:-When you have said (or atleast thought) "Why doesnt she like me? What parameter must I change for this to work?"... its kinda a shame girls arnt more like functions (well documented and will operate as long as the variables stay within a certain bounds) but no they just have to muddle things up with feelings *shudders*.

I'm EXTREMELY ashamed to say that has happened to me, I't took me a few seconds to realise what I was thinking was messed up...
Also sometimes when something in every day life doesn't work, e.g. toaster isn't working, I sometimes automatically have a Ctrl+Alt+B reflex that comes up (My keyboard shortcut for my debugger...).
I'm a bad student in the sence that I don't study much, but I've been blessed with a very good memory....
I remember, I once got the top mark in my school for a chemistry unit after missing nearly all the classes on that unit and studying for the 15mins before the exam (e.g. just one quick read over...)
I also do next to no homework during the term, but I catch up on the end of term exams....
Jules

P.S. I just got my GCSE marks back yay (finally...)

I have not yet studied for a test. Ever. I glanced at my notes before a final, but then realized that adding device management would be more entertaining (it was).

You have a notebook with you at all times to write code that might pop into your head.

-JL

I've always figured that anything that you can't learn by reading the exam and then applying common sense isn't worth learning.

I'm a bad student in the sence that I don't study much, but I've been blessed with a very good memory...

You said it -> me too.

Unfortunately I suck at math, er, without using calculators and stuff. I count a bit slower and I don't like the time we had on exams (one school hour, 45 minutes for 6 tasks, one "task" in the last 9th grade was two/three linear equations with fractions and stuff, or a standard "word task" by using sine cosine tangens and all that stuff you know from 9th grade downwards), these days are now over as I'm going to the gymnasium (4 years). Its like "high school" in US but just more advanced and it's a "preparement" for university. (I dont know the gap in US that occurs between university and "high school".) In gymnasium I think we're allowed to use calculators at exams, but I don't think that will help me.

I always got from math exams marks (notes, grades) like 2, 3 or even 4 sometimes (5 is the worst, something like US's "E", but we dont have F).

Also, I get bad marks from math because I'm a type like this: "oh no, time's running out! crap. gotta double-check these equations, forget about next tasks, you heard the man: it's better to count slowly and correct than fast and wrong. .. lessee. ... oh crap, these results are bad. crap, now where is the error?... ... ... oh yeah I got it, my equations were correct after all. i've made a error in hurry, so they're OK. ... there. ... ... oh wait, these next results are just wrong! oh what to do?? crap. i don't have the time to fix them... ... lessee... ... ... *writes something*... let's doublecheck the new result... okay, it seems in order! (and after the exam, that result was wrong after all)".

I vastly prefer logic than math.

I would suggest you get a graphics calculator. It really helped me throughout high school.

We knew the types of questione before hand that would be asked, so my "studying" for exams meant writing a program on my graphics calculator that just take some inputs values, and outputs all the required calculations

Then on the end of year exams they did routine calculator resets Which was annoying since it cleared EVERYTHING on the calculator (which was our personal property, not that of the schools). Luckily I had the serial cable so I could backup all my programs I had written in classes.

It was difficult drawing graphics on my calculator, since the only way you could draw anything is by drawing lines between 2 points on a graph. But, you could customise the graph size in an option screen, so when I sent my games I've written to other people, I wouldn't know if the top left of their screen was (0,0), (-1,-1), (0,128), etc.

Here, in the normal 9th grade elementary school (which is finally over for me), we were strictly prohibited to use calculators on exams. If a teacher found one on your table, you got a quick 5, regardless of your exam results. (9 grade elementary school is from 6 to 15 year olds, then it comes the "middle school", usually 4 or 5 years, and then university if you want, after this week I'll be going on a gymnasium, which is middle school, but without a specific "point", its just like the elementary school but more advanced as I said. Plus you have a greater chance of getting approved in university when your middle school was gymnasium with maturita.)

And, in my city, there wasn't a suitable school for me (computers, IT, programming).

BTW as far as I know, nobody in my city owned a graphics calculator.