100 Reasons I’m a Nerd

100. I blog.

99. I get excited about writing a SQL join.

98. I would like to learn to program.

97. I check work email at midnight.

96. I’m on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Plus, etc.

95. I’m an X-Phile.

94. I once emailed my roommates saying, “If anybody needs me, I’ll be in the bathroom.”

93. I wrote my first webpage in 1996 – I was 15 and people were still learning about Yahoo!

92. My first webpage included pics of my cat, Nappy.

91. My first webpage was about my cat, Nappy. (What else was I going to make one about? Going to school?)

90. I was a frequent ICQ user in 1996 in order to keep in touch with my friend in Idaho.

89. I used Napster like crazy.

88. I spent my freshman year (99-00) of college chatting with all my dorm neighbors on AOL.

87. I’m the computer support for my parents, my grumma and sometimes help my younger brother.

86. My reward for when I manage to finish grad school will be to buy myself a Mac was a trip to London.

85. They pay me to be a nerd.

84. I type 90+ wpm.

83. Sometimes I push button combinations on vending machines in attempts to find the reset button or a prompt to enter a secret password.

82. I consider an application, SlickRun, to be a good friend.

81. I read the source code from web pages to see how they coded their nice layout.

80. I once replied to an email all in binary.

79. I called Rocky Mountain Power the other day about a problem with my bill and the lady told me she couldn’t see my financial information; I wanted to tell her that it was stored in their database somewhere and let me talk to somebody who has the rights to query that; I didn’t.

78. It’s obvious to me that the schedules from UtahSoccer.org are generated by a very simple query; slightly more sophisticated than the indoor soccer websites.

77. Every now and then, I used to  carry an extra cell phone and a pager with me for a week: on-call technical support.

76. When I was in Jr. High, I programmed my own version of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ into my Texas Instruments graphing calculator (I believe it was an old school TI-81).

75. I just called a TI-81 old school.

74. Because they allowed us to use graphing calculators for the AP Calculus test, I had a program on mine that had all of the common algebra and geometry equations on it.

73. I took my first typing class in first grade.

72. In that typing class, my friend and I figured out how to overlap ampersands, dashes and other characters to create soldiers marching across our page.

71. I schmoozed my elementary school teachers into giving me more ‘Oregon Trail’ and ‘Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?’ days.

70. In my word processing class, Sophomore year, I found my way into the school’s network and perused through the files stored on my teacher’s PC.

69. Kow and I were so bored in our Freshman typing class (due to our MIGHTY IMPRESSIVE typing speeds) that we got in trouble with Bob, the teacher, all the time.

68. Even though I was just the sports editor, by the end of my senior year, I basically did the layout for the entire school paper because I was a quick learner at Adobe InDesign.

67. In order to clear up email confusion about tone of voice, my friends and I invented the sarcastion mark for our email correspondence in college: ~!

66. I started this list of 100 typing it into my phone’s ‘Notes’ section while sitting on the toilet in the middle stall at work.

65. I am constantly thinking about ways that my cell phone could be more intuitive, the application that I use at work could be better programmed, and if there’s a problem with the toaster, just restart it.

64. I have a home network (and yes, I live by myself, but still have to make sure that my desktop, laptop and printer all talk nicely).

63. For one of my finals for a technical writing graduate class, we had to create short videos; mine included lots and lots of spliced video clips from amateur videos (created by other USU students), a little bit of text, and a really good soundtrack.

62. I have posted videos on YouTube.

61. I have software to rip videos from YouTube and convert it to a windows media format.

60. When Napster was shut down back in the day, I quickly jumped to Mozilla and still have an install file that can’t be removed from my old PC to prove it.

59. I have brought my old PC back to life after receiving Trojan horses, spyware and viruses.

58. I have a backup hard drive for that old PC just in case it dies; don’t want to lose all of my college papers. I copied all of my college papers onto a NAS so I can dump my old PC.

57. I’ve set up my iTunes to store all of my music on that hard drive to keep my old PC from dying due to lack of space. iTunes finds music on the NAS.

56. I used to create pages on our word processor when I was in fourth grade that included information, rules, etc. about the neighborhood clubs.

55. After watching the movie, Sneakers, I created documents on our Mac with secret codes in the words and pictures then printed copies and gave one to my friend to figure out (in sixth grade).

54. In sixth grade, this same friend and I created our own code for writing notes to each other; I still remember 20 of the 26 characters.

53. I played Dungeons and Dragons in elementary school.

52. I read one of the Dragon Lance books in 5^th grade and then told the boy sitting next to me in class that he couldn’t sit down yet because Raistlin was in his seat.

51. I played the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG.

50. I played Final Fantasy II and III on the SNES.

49. I wear glasses.

48. I think I’m cool because I have TWO monitors at work.

47. A friend of mine got me a job interview where they needed someone to run their ecommerce site; they asked me if I could handle that, I said sure and then went out and bought a book.

46. I googled people that I dated.

45. I google myself.

44. I get REALLY flattered when people actually comment on my blog.

43. I tell all 200+ of my closest Facebook friends when I update my blog.

42. When I get those emails with Excel spreadsheets that include pictures from old 80s TV shows where you have to guess the titles, I instead spend time unlocking the spreadsheet or looking for the hidden values so I get the answers right away.

41. I have a shared folder on our network at work for sharing all of the humorous videos that are emailed to me.

40. I once edited a music video with my own message scrolling across the top (or was it the bottom?) for a guy that I was dating.

39. When I couldn’t sleep in college, sometimes, I would create short videos of pictures my friends and I took on our many trips to Southern Utah and Moab.

38. My laptop has wireless profiles for myriad connections: my home, my parents’, my brothers’, the coffeeshop down the street, the neighbor around the corner, etc.

37. I held a training session with my mom to teach her the correct order to reconnect the cable/router/vonage phone.

36. I won a photo editing contest and the prize was pretty sweet: SnagIt software, and TechSmith labeled SWAG (t-shirt, paper clip holder, pens, USB drive, cell phone sticky pad, etc)!

35. I used to digitally swap people’s heads in pictures when I was bored.

34. When I was obsessed with something (or someone) it usually ended up in a monitor background for my PC (Patrick Kluivert, the X-Files, Bengal cats, Southern Utah).

33. My old PC has been modified so that it plays the X-Files theme music when it first turns on, shows the X-Files logo when the mouse is ‘thinking,’ and some of the desktop icons are X-Files themed.

32. I used to shop on eBay… all the time.

31. When I was taking Ambien, I used to shop and not remember it; until a personalized cat collar for my brother’s cat showed up at the door.

30. I used to make music videos with my dad’s camera, dubbing music such as The Beatles’ ‘Three Cool Cats’ over home video of the family’s cats in the bathroom (because they couldn’t get out of that room).

29. Maren and I used to make videos with the neighbor girl about overcoming life’s challenges (they were having a hard time learning to do back handsprings, I couldn’t dance—I’m pretty sure they overcame theirs and I STILL can’t dance).

28. I wore headgear.

27. I was a snake high-scorer due to an incredibly boring Astronomy class at the community college in which the teacher kept on getting longitude and latitude confused; I don’t think she appreciated when I nicely corrected her AND kept up my game on my old school Nokia candybar phone at the same time.

26. I dream about DLP projectors.

25. My roommates and I once created a theatre in our front room—by stacking couches on top of pallets from a construction site, a love seat on our kitchen bar, blankets and pillows on the floor, the stereo for surround sound and the DLP projector broadcasting movies and General Conference across our entire wall.

24. I played a lot of Bond back in the day of N64.

23. I played enough Halo to make a few of the other guys playing embarrassed that a girl killed them.

22. I used to know all of the special moves of the Street Fighter II characters (SNES version, not arcade).

21. I was a Q-Bert queen back in my preschool days.

20. I have sketches of a design for a personal website from back in my high school days.

19. I had a personal website (before somebody hacked my Yahoo! account and Yahoo! wouldn’t give it back to me) that included my blog, family pictures, links to poems/articles I had written, and a page of family video clips.

18. When one of my fuses went out in my car late one night, I opened up under the steering column, stripped a wire, cut a piece out, twisted the wire back together, taped over it, then used the piece I had cut out to replace my fuse; it worked superbly.

17. My cousin, Ster, asked me if I knew how to design a webpage and my Dad laughed.

16. My neighbor was explaining her car troubles to me the other night, hoping I’d know what to do since the mechanic she took it to couldn’t figure it out.

15. I learned binary in Jr. High.

14. I slept through much of my AP Calculus class, but still got an A in the class and a 5 on the test.

13. I just now got off the phone with the realtor that I bought my condo from; he was calling for help on how to get his wireless router password.

12. When I was pulled over by undercover-gang-patrol cops my senior year, I had a car full of friends plus a sleeping bag, food and cans of lemonade in the truck, several squirt guns / supersoakers in the back seat, a few walkie-talkies, two cell phones and a list of people’s names (and some cell phone numbers) with “License to Kill” written at the top; this was in 1999, when cell phones were still somewhat of a novelty.

11. I have a little multipurpose tool at home for fixing my glasses if needed.

10. When one of the rubber grommets holding my muffler to the frame of my car split, the guy I was dating helped me find a replacement in his garage which we flipped and twisted into place for about a year.

9. In elementary school, my friend and I used to take old electronics (radios, phones, little TVs) and take them apart in her garage to figure out how they worked.

8. When my brothers need a sitter for their kids, they can check my Google calendar, which I’ve shared with them, to see if I’m free before calling to ask.

7. When I walked out to my car at the back of the parking lot last night, I named the countries where the cars I walked past were designed (I was going to say manufactured, but we all know that most Toyotas and Hondas are manufactured here, right?): Japan, Japan, America, Japan, Germany, Japan, Japan, America, Korea, Yugoslavia… what? There’s a Yugo in my parking lot?

6. I purchased a signed picture of Mark-Paul Gosselaar (Zack on Saved by the Bell) on eBay.

5. I still have some of my Legos, stored at my parents’.

4. I have a box of G. I. Joes.

3. The other day, my brother suggested that I connect my PC up to my 40” LCD TV and use that as my monitor instead of the 19” LCD on the desk; I told him I’d already considered it. We have a small form desktop connected to our 40″ LCD. It’s our TV PC.

2. We have the coolest, tiny keyboard with a mouse pad attached to run our TV PC.

1. I came up with 100 reasons that I am a nerd.