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This week is Speak Out With Your Geek Out week, started by Monica Valentinelli. As a fellow geek and web author I felt it was my duty to add my 2 copper to the movement. To this end I will discuss a couple of the things that made me a geek and why I am proud to be one.
As to why I became the geek I am, I have to blame my parents. In second grade we started reading the Hobbit as a family activity. As soon as that was done, we moved into the Lord of the Rings. As part of the activity my parents made me take turns reading from the books which was not a very easy thing to do at the tender age of 8. Because they forced me to take the literary plunge, my reading skills improved drastically and my appetite for books grew proportionally. After the Lord of the Rings my parents would take interest in many series I read, especially from David Eddings.
The influence on my eventual geekery was not confined to the analog world. Ever since I can remember we had some sort of computer in the house. Our first was an Apple IIc with the green on green screen. I fondly remember playing Temple of Apshai and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? After that we upgraded to a Macintosh Classic with the tiny black and white screen. On this one I wrote a number of reports for school and played Sim City 1.4 and Microsoft Flight Simulator. About midway through high school we finally got a windows PC. It had a whole 1 GB of hard drive space and a whopping 166 MHz Pentium processor; I was the cool kid on the street for a while.
My mother was the one who kept pushing me into more science and math in high school. She had a very analytical mind herself and paved the road I eventually followed. My decision to major in Computer Science was due mostly to her influence on me. I settled on going to an engineering school because of her suggestion. At first I resisted, saying I wanted to stick to home and go to a community college. Once I visited the campus however, I was hooked. So because of her I selected a very geeky major at a very geeky school.
My geekishness began with my parents as role models but I like to think I have taken it to a whole new level on my own. Not only do I enjoy many geeky pastimes, such as video games and all that, but I am a professional geek as a web developer with my cubicle full of transformers and Star Wars Lego guys.
Share your geek stories in the comments below, or better yet, submit your own story to the Speak Out With Your Geek Out website.
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