Messed Are The Geek

Geek blogging is dead, apparently. It's now all mainstream. I hope it doesn't die completely and I'm pretty sure it wont.

Mainstream-ness brings good and bad. For instance; it's good and wholesome that today we don't get gouged (too much) for computer equipment and software. About 15 years ago, when I was in sales, a single license of Microsoft Word (MS-DOS version 5, I think) sold for about £600. Corel Draw version 2, went for about the same. In 1990, an 8MB RAM daughterboard use to go for over a grand. Compare that with today, quite different. Supply and demand in all it's unashamed capitalist glory.

So, is it the end of geek blogging or just that everyone's now a geek? The former I suppose, if a key part of being a geek is being a social minority. And we'd be wrong to assume that just because the latest big thing has gone mainstream, that we geeks need to dejectedly trudge off en masse to find the next big thing. What's with all this 'big thing' nonsense. There are many, many small and commercially insignificant things that geeks revel in. Rarely, in fact, do geeks succeed in creating social phenomena like blogging. So, don't get so depressed if you don't find it, and don't try to project big-thing-ness onto replacement candidates like podcasting - as excellent as it is, it does have its limits, or moblogging; like since when was it socially enriching to share your bad photographs of assorted beer-mats, cats in various poses (frankly, if you've seen one cat pose, you've seen them all) and blurry groups of cool (but unrecognisable) people at conferences.

Disenchanted, disenfranchised geek bloggers should not go looking for the next big thing like a horde of bespectacled, over caffeinated venture capitalists sans the venture capital, for that is not the true way of the guild of geeks.

Instead, go wire up a giga-bit network point in your bathroom.

London Geek Dinner

This entry immediately precedes my attendance at the very imminently infamous London Geek Dinner taking place tomorrow night - in London - and organised by Hugh McLeod - I'll be wearing my Gaping Void T-Shirt - and Robert Scoble.

So, this post is my personal opportunity to astound the cool people I'll meet tomorrow night (there's reportedly over 200 going) with my razor sharp wit, 20/20 tech visionary skills, my exemplary wisdom, astounding creativity, staggering intellect and literary genius.

But for the fact that lately I only seem able to channel Mr Magoo when it comes to being a visionary, a dead bin-bag when it comes to creativity, a really shitty and cheap plastic calculator with a cracked LCD screen and weak battery on the wisdom front, I'm about as sharp as a scoop of melted ice cream where wit is concerned, my staggering intellect duly staggered and fell unceremoniously to the floor - out cold, and my literary genius feels more littery than literal.

But aside from all of that.

10 Years Ago

In October 1994 I bought my first PC. It was a Pentium 90 which at the time was a rocket ship compared with the 486DX-100's that were all the rage at the time. The earlier Pentium 60 and 66's were widely regarded as being quite crap. My PC cost me about £2,000 and had a now miserly spec of 8Mb of RAM, a 340MB hard disk, a 'bleeding edge for the time' Creative Labs AWE-32 sound card and a Diamond Stealth 64 graphics card with Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.1

I had used (and sold) PC's and networks to businesses for about 5-6 years prior but it was only about 10 years ago that PC's began to be half decent for gaming with titles like Doom showing up.

So much has changed in ten years that it's staggering nevermind impossible to imagine what the next ten years hold in store.

What is remarkable is that, during the first five or so years, my PC was regularly upgraded with every major processor, memory and storage and graphics card advance that came along. Today, my PC* is a 1.2GHz Athlon with 512Mb and 100GB+ of disk storage and a now sluggish GeForce 3 card. In other words, it would seriously struggle to run most of todays games at all. Having started at the bleeding egde, my mostly webby needs are now happily satisfied by a three year old spec PC. Strange.

* Actually, I don't physically use the PC these days, opting to remotely use it thanks to WiFI and Windows XP Remote Desktop on my company supplied Dell ultra-light notebook, meaning my desk has become a leather armchair next to our TV in the sitting room. Which is a social upgrade if nothing else.