Are You a Latent Computer Geek?

[Bumper]

Are You A Latent Computer Geek?

No cheating now, remember, you're not cheating us, you're just cheating your analyst out of 180 an hour...

1. It's your birthday and your parents give you are large parcel. You hope:
a. It's expensive
b. It's something that'll help you "score"
c. It's got an alcohol content
d. It's measured in "gigs"

2. Your favourite Star Trek - The Next Generation star is:
a. The Captain - always the Captain
b. The Captain too, cos he scores all the good chicks, just like on the old generation
c. The guy with the car air-cleaner for glasses
d. Data

3. You've got $20 left in your bank account, it's a Friday night and you're bored. You:
a. Go see some friends and sponge off them
b. Invest your money in a couple of bottles of cheap cherry ripple leg-opener
c. Leave it in the bank as the interest rate is almost 6 percent!
d. Go downtown and tease the ATM machine by withdrawing the money and cancelling it at the last minute

4. The highlight of your career was when you:
a. Pulled off a currency deal worth 31 Million
b. Bought 16 magazine when you were 14
c. Successfully Diagnosed yourself as having 3 degenerative brain disorders
d. Got your Commodore 64 to talk to the washing machine so you really could program the wash

5. Your cousin is the Black Sheep of the family because:
a. He doesn't have a cell-phone
b. He doesn't drink Jack Daniels from the bottle
c. He doesn't collect unemployement benefit
d. He doesn't have a computer that doesn't rely on the TV to work

6. You win a trip to any destination. You go to:
a. Wall Street, the home of money
b. Graceland, home of Elvis
c. Anywhere marrying siblings is legal
d. The Motorola factory

7. You never cried so much as when:
a. They told you Santa wasn't real
b. The Beatles split up
c. They told you you'd moved to a “dry” county
d. You heard Commodore 64s were discontinued

8. The partner of your dreams is:
a. A currency consultant with a Jet Ski and a Timeshare in Florida
b. An attractive blond with Big Bazookies that talks dirty
c. Dead
d. A Dual Pentium with personality simulation

9. You have 24 hours to live. You:
a. Sell everything and indulge yourself
b. Make peace with you enemies
c. See if Anti-Freeze is drinkable
d. Back your personality up onto 4 Gig DAT (and only use .2 megs)

10. The greatest threat to our way of life is:
a. Nuclear Weapons
b. Communists
c. Reduced-alcohol liquor
d. 8 bit graphics

11. You're drunk at a party. You talk about:
a. Your financial model of the world
b. The one that ripped your heart out of your body, stomped on it, shot it twice, set it on fire, then flushed it down the toilet like...
c. How to make a good fruit punch with Ethyl Alcohol
d. Which is the better disk controller, EIDE or SCSI

12. You have a kid. What do you call it?
a. "Wall-Street", "Money" or "Profit"
b. A Single Syllable name like "Dave" or "Sue"
c. A miracle.
d. R-Two

13. In the old family photographs, you're always the one:
a. With the winning smile
b. With the hair sticking up at the back
c. Clutching your genitalia
d. With the pocket protector

14. When you die, your burial wishes are to be:
a. Buried in a gold-plated coffin
b. Cremated at a quiet ceremony
c. Dead first
d. Buried with a full set of Windows XP floppies and Manuals

How did you do?

Mostly A's - You're not a geek, but we still hate you.

Mostly B's - You're normal, mostly, no intellectual threat and not really a geek either.

Mostly C's - You're really out there somewhere aren't you?

Mostly D's - BING! On the nail. Need we say more? Welcome to Geekhood!

[bbA2]

Hi Bumper,

good stuff!!

The commodore stuff got me 'memberin ...twas about 1983 or 1984ish and I had just gotten my first modem, I believe it was a 300/1200 baud modem. I was a member of a local 'hacker' group, this was before such teminology was taboo and it was more of a user group that shared software and ideas... anyway I got a hold of a dialer that allowed you to enter a dialing prefix and it would run calls to each number from xxx-0000 through xxx-9999 to determine what lines had modems connected to them and then create a log of sucessful connections for review at a later date. Well I threw in all of the local prefixes, all 5 of them and let 'er rip, it took about a week or so running at night. I did not really fully comprehend what I had just done until I got my phone bill. In those days there was no unlimited calling plans...or if there were I certianly didnt have one. Well I got a bill from my phone company for about $2300, not including long distance charges which were about $35. On receipt of the bill, once I got over my "holy crapoly what did I do", I called the phone company and "questioned the charges" with my fingers crossed, prepared to explain my stupidity, fortunately I did not even have to. Once the rep took a look at my account they immediately determined that there was, "No way that could be accurate, there must be something wrong with the billing system and would it be ok if they just billed my number the same as last month plus long distance, since the mistake only seemed to affect local calls" I, of course, quickly agreed that seemed like a reasonable solution and much to my relief I got a "corrected bill" a few days later which I paid immediately.

I guess I can identify that as the specific moment when I could no longer deny that I was a geek with nothing latent about it.

btw: I still remember the log file as having 27 connections, out of 50,000, of which about 1/2 were banks, the rest were mostly members of my local user group.

thanks for bringing up the memories! Havent thought about it in a while.
bba2

[Jesus]

Originally Posted by Bumper

14. When you die, your burial wishes are to be:
a. Buried in a gold-plated coffin
b. Cremated at a quiet ceremony
c. Dead first
d. Buried with a full set of Windows XP floppies and Manuals

There is a huge mistake, WinXP:
- do not comes in floppies, the number of them needed, would break your back if you tried to lift the package.
- comes in CD
- is not worth being buried with!!!

[Jesus]

Originally Posted by bbA2

twas about 1983 or 1984ish and I had just gotten my first modem, I believe it was a 300/1200 baud modem. I was a member of a local 'hacker' group, this was before such teminology was taboo and it was more of a user group that shared software and ideas...

When I got hold of my first modem I searched for a BBS and got to log into a 2 line BBS, membership was free, the long hours waiting for one of the lines to be free were hard.
Then I got into a paid service, they had 5 lines and on later times they got up to 15, the hours I spend chatting in the middle of the night were very expensive, the phone company charged by the minute at those years, and having a 1200 baud modem was terrible for downloading files, arghhh.