 Nickname: Drink
Real Name: Martin
Age: 28
Resides: Marysville, California
Occupation: I'm a full-time student at Yuba College, where I also hold an intern position in the information systems department. It's kind of self-defeating, because as long as they can have me this cheap, they'll probably never open up a real position and pay me real money... I'm actually studying automotive technology in preparation for a belated post-dotcom-bust career shift.
Favourite Website: Stereotypically enough, I'd have to say Slashdot
Favourite Game Of All Time: Aside from the "Reinstalling Windows Game," I'd have to say the best game ever is Final Fantasy VII.
What Are You Playing And Working On Right Now: I just finished Zelda: Four Swords (with three people) and I've been playing the "Evolutions" mod to Freelancer. as for working, I'm in the midst of figuring out this spam and virus filtering stuff.
Current Wallpaper/Screensaver: My current background is a scan from my western humanities textbook.
"Figure 5.27 Flagellation Scene. Villa of the Mysteries. Ca. 60-40 B.C. Wall painting, ht. 60". Gotta love early modern pornography.
How Many Computers Do You Have: My machine is an Athlon XP 2500+ on a gigabyte mainboard with nforce2 chipset, and 1GB of DDR333 memory. Main storage is a pair of 80 GB drives on an ITE8212 RAID (0).
There's an 8x NEC DVD+-DL drive and a rosewill combo drive in it. I have the obligatory windowed case (it was cheap) with red lights and such. Motherboard and video card (ATI 9600XT 256MB AGP8x) are both red. This is mostly a happy coincidence. I run windows xp. I tried to run gentoo, but it turns out there's no kernel with proper support for my RAID controller, so unless I add a hard drive, linux is right out for the time being.
My server is a Dell Precision Workstation 410, dual P3 500 with 256MB ram, 9GB LVD system, 40GB UDMA33 storage (mostly homes and some additional swap.) It runs gentoo. Dual processors help quite a bit there :) My girlfriend's system, which i built and of course maintain, is an athlon XP 1700+ OC'd to a 2000+, with a GF4Ti4200. I mention it because it's my old computer.
I also have an indy R4400SC, an Amiga 500, two i-openers, a hacked Xbox (just another PC after all), an IBM Thinkpad A21p, and some other machines I can't bring to mind right now because they're packed away.
What's So Special About Your Computer Room: I have an Athlon system with a 22" trinitron, a 5.1 Sony receiver, and all the usual doodads. My computer chair is a 240SX seat welded onto a really quick and sloppy frame I made from angle iron, and the bottom part of an office chair. The rear channel speakers are attached to it. I've got a broad collection of the usual cheap hardware, like an SGI indy, a bunch of old video games, some i-openers, and so on.
When Did You First Realize You Were A Geek: In elementary school I would regularly spend my time in the library playing oregon trail rather than outside on the equipment. I think I knew pretty well then that I was not like other children.
Geekiest Moment: I'd have to say back in the day when I was a liittle nerdling and could
talk about nothing but computers and D&D would have to be the
geekiest phase, anyway. I won a couple of spelling bees in elementary
school, but I always sort of felt that was offset by winning a
watermelon-eating contest at the county fair.
If I Was A Program I'd Be: perl! I don't necessarily make sense but I have great utility.
Favourite Quote: "You are what you do when it counts" - I can't remember if it was said verbatim, but this is from John Steakley's science-fiction book Armor --a much better candidate for being made into a science-fiction movie than "Starship Troopers," I might add.
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The Truth Behind The Geek (*creative liberties taken for the benefit of the reading audience)
Martin, who wakes up every day geekier than the last day, feels like he' in the movie Office Space. (We're hoping that he's more like the Peter character than the Milton one.)
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