I?ve been wondering if being a geek is a genetic thing, you know, if there is actually a gene that makes you behave a geek. If, like me, you find that you just can?t stop yourself from doing geeky things then it?s almost certainly genetic, so stop fighting it and just succumb to the power of the geek side.
Like all genetic geeks I love to make geeky things happen and so I've been experimenting lately with geeky solutions involving my new
. It's got Bluetooth wireless (and 802.11b WiFi) which allows it to connect passively with my cell phone, meaning I don't have faff about to line it up for an old-tech infra-red connection, nor do I have to manually intervene to get it to connect up to the net, it just does it automatically. Whether it?s sitting in my pocket, case, dashboard or wherever I leave it lying around, providing of course that it?s in close enough proximity to my cellphone to be in Bluetooth range, about 15-20 feet.
I've been using PDA's ever since my first 16k Psion Organiser clunk-o-matic back in 1988. But the addition of wireless communications is a major step forward in practical and usability terms. You can do much more application-wise with wireless in the mix and I think we?re at a major inflection point in my humble, but exquisitely modest, expert opinion.
Like for instance, during my working week I use a remote e-mail management suite called
which automatically compresses and encrypts all my office based e-mails as they arrive and then dumps them on a secure server over at Symmetry Pro?s HQ. The Pocket PC?s Symmetry Pro client then periodically checks to see if there are any new emails waiting for me and, if so, it downloads them to my iPAQ?s e-mail app at a frequency of my choosing. If you don?t happen to have the often complex and costly tech infrastructure to properly support remote or handheld e-mail users in your business then this is a great workaround solution.
I set-up my iPAQ so that it has a secret Bluetooth love affair with my GPRS enabled cell phone every 30 minutes and it plays the infamous Outlook ?nee-naw? email notify sound or, if I?m in a meeting, discreetly vibrates to let me know whenever I've received any new e-mail. Very cool and infinitely useful for when I'm out of the office. To the extent, in fact, that you can no longer tell if I'm out of the office or not these days since I can always receive and reply to my e-mails all day long, whether I?m in or out.
But today I achieved geek factor 9. I connected the headphone jack of the iPAQ to a car stereo cassette adapter, a simple low-tech piece of kit that enables CD players, MP3 players or anything that has a headphone jack, to connect and play through your car stereo's cassette player. Then with my iPAQ connected to the Internet via the Bluetooth cell phone, I was able to stream live
, using a PocketPC app called
which enabled me listen to US based radio stations through my car stereo. Soooooo cool! [
].
Global time-zone confusion then ensued as the US radio presenter said ??and it?s 2 minutes after 9am? when in fact it was actually 2 minutes after 2pm in the UK. I guess I need to be careful that I don?t start driving on the wrong side of the road.
But anyway, it's when technology loops back in on itself like that, when genetic geeks pathologically seek out brand new applications using all the geeky tech know-how they can muster, that?s when our geek antennae start twitching like crazy and I think that this
must
be genetic. It can't be merely a love for all things geek like some other hobby or interest in stamp collecting or trainspotting. To me it seems like a more basic, fundamental need - a disorder even - in those of us with that critical geek gene.
Look back down the years and you?ll that some of the most revered historical figures were geeks. Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Doc Brown from Back To The Future were the geeks of their day, all engaged in extreme-geeking (also known as inventing stuff) to create new geeky ?things? often which the non-geeks initially greeted with a great deal of skepticism ? after all wasn?t the invention of the telephone greeted by the then US President, I forget which, who dismissed its invention by asking why people would ever want to talk to each other if they weren?t in the same room? He obviously never had the Geek gene.
But if all this geek-ness is genetic, it leaves me wondering what Stoneage geeks or Medieval geeks got up to before their latter-day geek descendents got their hands on electricity. There's no such thing as Geek Mythology and there's little evidence of geek behaviour prior to the appearance of the electron apart from the fact, of course, that we all know that cave paintings were an early form of weblog. But beyond that, all that I can seem to imagine about geek influenced technology in the Jurassic period seems to permanently revolve around The Flintstones period with its wall mounted baby dinosaurs used as hand blenders, but I'm sure there must be other examples of ancient geekness.