When I was out and about today I stopped in at Reno Collective to check out the new digs and chat with Ed and Colin about the project. In the conversation Ed mentioned something about the “geek culture of Reno” that got me thinking……

It used to be, back in the mid eighties, that geeks were laughed at and made fun of for their eccentricities. They were the guys carrying a calculator, playing chess, scrabble and making jokes that no one else understood. Then the nineties came and the geek was the coder sitting in his mom’s basement chatting with his friend across the street over a telnet connection.

This evolved into the dot com era of these geeks creating some cool stuff- chat rooms, RSS feeds, blogs, pic sharing and more were the basis for today’s modern “web 2.0″. This is back in the days of Windows 3.1, modems measured in bauds and when Super Nintendos were AWESOME.

And today those geeks are still coding, not from their mom’s basement, but from coffee shops and wifi hotspots scattered about every medium or bigger town. And from here on out you will find them at co-working outfits like Reno Collective. Even with new digs they can still tell you without a hitch that a witch weighs the same as a duck and answer the question “What is the meaning to life, the universe and everything?”.

I have long considered myself a quasi geek. I can tell you what it does and how to do it, but not always how it works. But I am working hard to become a full fledged geek. You see, the geek is cool now. Geeks have moved past the silent weirdos hiding from the rest of society into the forefront of modern business. The geeks are the new entrepreneurs that create business from nothing more than an idea, and often without a traditional office or inventory.

Something big changed in the geek world when the rest of the world saw the, dare I say it, necessity for them. Nowadays we take the internet, smart phones, on demand TV and all the other tech for granted as part of our daily lives. Without the geeks of days past we wouldn’t know these conveniences.

The modern geek is a nomad. Always moving, creating, innovating and preaching his gospel to those that listen until something sticks. They share ideas freely, tweeting, posting and blogging until strangers start recognizing their names and eventually meet face to face with a semi awareness of eachother’s lives.

I say long live the modern geek, collaboration and hypersocializing. It is a much more interesting world with them around. And without them we couldn’t play Words with Friends…..

So what do you geek out on?

Image courtesy of myextralife.com

I spent a few hours tonight with some fellow bloggers over grub and gruel at a hip local place. Somewhere between the marketing chat and political ramblings the conversation turned to technology, old and new. It got me thinking about how technology has been part of my personal life.
My families first VCR (around 1985) had a four button remote tethered by wire to the unit. I came to know the joys of start, stop, on and fast forward without ever leaving the couch. And as a bonus it was easy to find the damn thing by following the umbilical cord….
Around the same time I got my first desktop computer- the venerable Tandy Color Computer II. This gem came with an amazing 512kb of memory, no internal hard drive and ran on an OS written with BASIC. I spent many a night playing Pooyan from one of the cartridges (think spawn of a 5.25″ floppy and an 8-Track) that we picked up from Radio Shack. You could even save your letters and such right to the external tape backup!!
The Walkman, Memorex CD player and old school Nintendo kept me entertained into the next decade….
It all started to change with my first “real” PC. A forgettable brand 486 running DOS- but I had moved up to 4.5″ floppies! An invaluable lesson in DOS commands still comes in handy when Windows takes a dump and I have to COPY my content.
A Packard Bell, half a dozen HP desktops and a big bulky laptop later I learned to build my own PCs. Nowadays I’m hoarding about 1TB of data on my desktop. That’s about 200,000 of those Pooyan cartridges…..
From external tape drives to 8Gb thumbdrives….
Manual entry DOS helped me slipstream windows
Stacks of Jewel cases replaced by 4000 tracks on my Zen Vision
Adjusted the tracking on VHS took twice as long as streaming HD to the flatscreen
And the two pound cellphone pales in comparison to the iPhone 3GS syncing with the laptop

But one thing has been consistent. You only get out what you put in- it still takes creativity, ingenuity and effort on the part of a human to make it all work. SO next time you are cruisin the hybrid, rockin to the newest Jack Johnson song via Pandora and tweeting your location to the rest of the world- take a second to appreciate the HUMANS that put it all together.

Not so sure why I am concerned about my personal google ranking. Turns out there are more Clint Jollys in the world than I knew about…..

Maybe I will take a hint from the creator of iamindisposed and start a fanpage to find all the Clint Jollys out here.

Anyway- been working on a new background for my twitter page…. and new avatar

Maybe it will pay off someday????