Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Geek Anthro

I'm in the vast Expo Hall in the Oregon Convention Center, with coffee, melon, bagel & cream cheese, coffee (other options available). O'Reilly treats us well.

Geeks think nothing of spreading way out among tables, deliberately choosing a very remote one, flipping open a laptop, and getting lost in some world (Uru?). That's me for ya. But other times we glom together for social networking (as some call it) i.e. there's no penalty for flipping between these behaviors.

Some geeks just gaze into space. You don't really need a laptop to get lost in a world.

Once I'm on-line, I have access to friends who might be in this very room. For example I see Robin Dunn of wxPython sitting three table hops away, gazing into his Powerbook.

In theory, I could Twitter about that and, if Robin subscribed to the right feed, he could notice I'm mentioning him in real time, and check the relevant blog link. That'd likely be interruptive of his train of thought though. Mostly we're "asynch" in geek world, more like in Twisted.

Razz turns into a pumpkin at 10 AM (the parking meter expires), plus I have a lot on my plate today. I'm hoping to meet up with DemocracyLab folks in the exhibitors' area at some later time, maybe blog about it some.

OK, so I just walked over to Robin, waving my Ubuntu Dell laptop, babbling about my blog and about needing more coffee, said I'd send him a link. Ah geekdom.