waiting for the bullet to hit has given me plenty of time to think, but little motivation to discuss. sitting on a 5-hour train ride, on the other hand, has given me opportunity and enough caffeine to wire up an entire LAN party.
i am an observant soul, and i observe many things that other people ignore. this isn't to say that a lot of detail doesn't pass me by, but i know that the unusual workings of my brain makes interesting connections sometimes. what i've been seeing in recent history has struck me as being so obvious that i'm amazed i never saw it before. when i was young and a noob my computer was pretty simple. it did what it did, which was about as much as i could make it do, and that was that. gradually as i became somewhat skilled my machine started to get whiz-bang. i had little programs to that made things pretty and perform every service under the sun - 3 different IM's, 4 different browsers, 3 CD Burning tools, a music player that put pretty patterns on the screen - you name it.
then, one day, i had to reinstall my OS because my hard drive died and i lost it all, so i rebuilt it. and again, and again as i switched and changed machines until eventually i just couldn't be bothered spending 12 hours reinstalling everything again every time it happened. since then my UI has become more and more austere, and since i got into linux, far less complicated in many respects. in fact, i was looking the other day at switching distro's to version advertised as being less complex still than the one i'm using at the moment.
this got me to thinking about some of the ubergeeks i've met over the years and how many of them eschew even a GUI a lot of the time and instead live primarily a text-based flatland. i remember sitting around uni wondering why they lived with such asceticism when it was so easy to rig up a pretty interface, which is when my inner eye turned outwards again and looked at some of what louise has been doing with her laptop - prettying up the desktop, adding tools, fiddling with RSS feeds... and i can't bring myself to care overly about any of it while i hack config files in a terminal window. it's almost like a bell-curve: as you get better and better your personal machine gets more and more complicated, until there comes a point where the complexity is in what you do, not how it looks and UI customisation drops away. louise is now where i was back at uni as she tracks the ever-improving average curve and i'm now assuming the role of the ubergeek with a ponytail, beard... and... a cheap sports car... with a penchant for alternative OS's...
oh fuck. i've grown up to become the arrogant, overconfident pricks i always hated. oh well, fuck it. at least i'm not massively overweight and i've had sex with actual women. i remember having a conversation with Spoon some years ago about how we were like the New Breed of geek - all the technical ability and aptitude but without anywhere near the social deficiencies that the previous generation was cursed with. we're stronger, faster, better, with an understanding of basic fucking hygiene and the ability to provide multiple-orgasms. we'll be superseded soon enough, but for the time being we're inheriting the world and we'll take no prisoners when the time comes to line up the Old Guard against the wall. we're kinder to our juniors than our predecessors and better able to evolve to cope with the changing environment and it's only a matter of time before those smelly sons of bitches get decommissioned.
all hail the nouveaugeek!
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