You must be an uber geek if ….

Om Malik | Sunday, March 11, 2007 | 7:00 PM PT | 13 comments

With most of San Francisco Geek Squad away, visiting Austin, Texas and twittering, I took the opportunity to clean the apartment; packed up winter clothes, and decided to give my tech infrastructure the Swiffer treatment.

There is more digital clutter in the apartment that even I had imagined. Two macs, a PC and a little Linux box; nearly a dozen phones and not to mention my ever growing number of storage drives, and streaming audio equipment … that’s what I am left with after packing up everything that came for review, ready to be picked up by the FedEx guy in the morning. Signs of uber-geekery?

13 comments so far

March 12th, 2007
2:32 AM PT
VCMike said:

Packing up the winter clothes?? What exactly is the difference between “winter” and “summer” clothes when you live in SF? You’re going soft out there on the west coast, Om!

March 12th, 2007
6:19 AM PT
Alan said:

You know you are a geek when the 4 corners of your bed in your one bedroom apartment are held up by various pieces of computer equipment.

March 12th, 2007
6:36 AM PT
Om Malik said:

Hey Mike,

In this part of the world it is as simple as swapping out turtlenecks and woolen pants with short sleeve shirts, and khakis, something you folks on the east coast can even think of right now.

March 12th, 2007
6:36 AM PT
Om Malik said:

Now in a quake prone stat. that would be seriously risky

March 12th, 2007
6:52 AM PT
E O Fall said:

You know you are an UG when instead of buying tivo,
- you got a used pc from your friend
- threw away the monitor
- partioned it and install linux on it
- added a digital video recorder to eat
- saved all your photos and digital files in it.
- Now you are cool UG when you use a pc2tv converter and record episodes of SEXandtheCity straight to your hard drive and stream digital pictures , that you have taken with your girlfriend in SF coffee shops, on that TV.

March 12th, 2007
6:53 AM PT
E O Fall said:

Sorry that “eat” was supposed to be “it”.

March 12th, 2007
6:56 AM PT
alan patrick said:

Voted for the terabyte storage, we blogged on the Terabyte Household a few weeks ago.

Of course, true geekdom is having a collection of modems and routers that go back 20 years…and Mac’s don’t count, they’re fashion accessories not computers ;)

March 12th, 2007
7:30 AM PT
MeTheGeek said:

Geek is a state of mind. You can be a geek with just a 386 and 128 MB of RAM.

March 12th, 2007
7:53 AM PT
Om Malik said:

MeTheGeek…. that’s just beautiful. Love it

March 12th, 2007
8:07 AM PT
thx said:

being a geek has nothing to do with these items. the apt term would seem to be gadget freak. being geek used to be about having used a soldering gun in your lifetime, having programmed a software program, building your own computer, excelling at science/math in school, installing/using linux, reading science/math books because you want to. Today’s ‘geek’ is nothing more than a gadget fashionista. Most couldn’t even spell soldering correctly let alone tell you what it meant.

March 12th, 2007
9:45 AM PT

Om I think your more of a business geek than an Uber Geek. When I think of Uber Geek I think of Linus Torvalds or Theo de Raadt.

That being said I think one of the major signs your a uber geek is whether you have contributed on (or started) an open source project.

March 12th, 2007
12:54 PM PT
Om Malik said:

Logan,

oh that hurt… i can’t even be delusional for a minute. with smart readers like you ;-) i get caught right away

hey but giving ideas and practical suggestions to open source “do-ers,” does that give me geek chips?

March 12th, 2007
1:14 PM PT
lizardb0y said:

Until about 18 months ago I lived in a 2 bedroom apartment. The second bedroom was a small room in which lived my 6 year old son.

Last count before I moved out I had something like 50 computers. I had shelving lining the longest wall in my living area and another small wall in my bedroom that contained only monitors. I personally have 3 cellphones and a PDA - and I’m waiting on delivery of a PDA/phone. My fiancee has two mobile phones - on different networks. Our home network consists of an ADSL router, two Linsys WRT54GLs (DD-WRT firmware of course), An Athlon 64 X2 workstation for me and Dell P4 workstation for her both running Ubuntu (mine’s running Fiesty). We have an iBook in the living room as a wireless laptop for when we want one. We have an old P3 Vaio laptop as a file server (with 200Gb Firewire attached external storage) and an Xbox Media Center in the living room streaming over WLAN from it.

And that’s just a start.

Editorial Masthead

Carolyn Pritchard
Managing Editor
Celeste LeCompte
Special Projects Editor
Om Malik
Senior Writer
Stacey Higginbotham
Staff Writer
Wagner James Au
Contributing Editor
Liz Gannes
Staff Writer
Chris Albrecht
Staff Writer
Katie Fehrenbacher
Staff Writer
Josie Garthwaite
Staff Writer
Close
E-mail It