Contest Alert!: Define what a 'geek' is!

One whose first action after shutting off the alarm clock in the morning is booting up the computer, THEN putting on the coffee.

New technologies, gadgets & overclocking make you "hotter" than your significant other does. LOL

When license plates remind you of employee logins or your software...you are a geek!

While watching the appendices for the extended DVD version of LOTR:The Two Towers, you use instant replay and pause to see the Weta Digital server room more times than you do to see Liv Tyler! (My wife picked up on this VERY quickly!)

A person who considers him/herself superior intellectually, but who is usually socially awkward.

One who understands that which is intended to aid its' users, yet tends to invoke fear, mistrust, and misunderstanding among those same said users. Unfortunatly this understanding of the "unknown and feared" causes the same reaction to the machine to be conferred to the "geek", hence to be forever misunderstood by mankind!! BTW-Merry Christmas!!

1. A guru of a specific technical field: A Supreme point of contact (SPOC)
2. Senior technical person often billed as a misanthrope whose act usually includes biting the head off less experienced personnel or inept users.

Well to me a geek was someone to beat up in high school , but I'm older and geeky now myself.

I also saw Ozzy as a geek for biting those heads off but I wouldn't degrade my hero.

I think a geek nowdays is anyone who can fix YOUR computer. I have semi-savvy (new geek term?) friends who can help thier mom with her email and thier neighbours with sound card problems etc. They are often seen as geeks by those they help. When the problem passes him and gets to me, now I'm the geek. If I can't fix it and my TR peers fix it, THEY are the geeks.

So in short, anyone who can fix YOUR computer RIGHT NOW, is a geek by todays standards. No pocket protectors, no piles of old equipment, you don't even have to like Star Trek, you just have to be the "computer go-to-guy" and TAG, YOU'RE the geek.

Someone who can not be understood by general computer users, they are the people who are called in as a last resort and when they explain what is wrong it is never understood by the customer and you can see their eyes glasing over as you speek to them with no comprenhension of what you are talking about. Inveriablt this just leads to the expression "Just Fix It and Don't bother me with the Details."

Sleek lines refer to your new ATX Case.
You are always looking for a new app to install in our PDA to make life easier.
You have a password-protected app to store all your passwords
You have at least five different e-mail accounts.
Work out - means running the latest intense graphics game on your PC.
You secretly love being called a Geek.
Gadgets are necessities.
You get a thrill every time you find a new hotspot in your area.
When watching a movie you know what brand and model PC is in the background.
A BBS is not the British Broadcasting System, if fact you owned a BBS.
Your emergency kit is composed of a toolkit, anti-virus disks and instant coffee.
Techno lust is your weakness
Your Expert Knowledgebase is GOOGLE.
You check mail every 10 minutes., 5 if you are waiting on a new password for a new account.
You own a couple domain names and are thinking of another one.
Your wife wants you to get rid off all your spare parts at home.
You have Banyan Vines on floppy disks.
You buy everything on Ebay.
You have a server at home and you are the network admin at home as well.
You miss typing in DOS.
Edlin is not your foreign neighbor?s son.

Description:
A miracle worker, after the IT sales staff leaves the client.

Basic requirements (but rarely gets it):
1. Free food
2. Free bandwidth (lots)
3. Free gadgets (with upgrade possibilities)
4. Fully fitted lab (with its own coffee machine)

Attributes:
1. Expected to understand business terms, with no degree or interest in that direction.
2. Defaults to the project manager for Enterprise business system implementations and be expected to understand business processes in a day (everyone else up to then was to lazy to document them).
3. Broad shoulders to take the blame for everything vaguely resembling technology that goes wrong (even when the paper filters runs out at the coffee machine).
4. Have empathy when you ask someone over the phone to check the cables, and the reply is "Do you take me for an idiot, I've already checked it 6 times", but when you get there the cable is unplugged.

Career aspirations (and true geeks normally get there):
A multi-million company, selling overpriced highly demanded goods to the company that "did not understand me".

Ones who comunicate in mutlti-lingual with end user.. knowing that they wont even knew what the h*** you are talking about.

A geek is someone who, when informed that their company is at risk because the CEO has been found with his personal assistant, both semi-naked, and sweating, indulging some passionate physical intimacy behind Cisco layer 3 switch cabinet, looks worried, and asks if multicast IP routing is turned on.

A geek should not be confused with "dork" or "nerd". A geek is simply someone who is WAY INTO a particular bent, most likely SO MUCH MORE INTO a bent than the average Joe, that when asked a simple question about that particular bent, the geek will provide responses that will seem more like rantings in a foreign language than simple explanations that Joe can understand.

Carries around a photo of her (PC) in his wallet
Upgrades more than 3 times a year.
Boot up straight to the command line.
Uses "/" instead of "\".
Types faster than talking.
Understand that the term "Getting your wires crossed", really mean GETTING YOUR WIRES CROSSED.
Can solder board level components
Still have a few XT CPU chips hidden in a shoebox just in case it is needed for spares on the many satellites up there still using these chips.
Cried when the "Turbo button" was eventually dropped from motherboards, now knows everything related to "Over Clocking" and "Cooling".
Thinks up acronyms like ?TCP/IP, ADSL, ISDN, EIDE, SCSI, Serial ATA, MPLS etc.?
Tries to interface everything with everything.
Download the Internet in one lifetime (or seriously tries to)
Read books for pleasure like? Advance TCP/IP V6, Building your own moon station in 24 hours, Getting serious about software reverse engineering?
Write books like ?Advance TCP/IP V6, Building your own moon station in 24 hours, Getting serious about software reverse engineering?

Has the default home page set to TechRepublic on all the 5 different installed web browsers.

you are contenplating how to add TCP/IP to your pinball machine...

http://www.starrtrek.com/html/starrcade.html

"Geek isn't a four letter word, it's a six figure one" - One of my colleagues is always saying that.

William Clinton's greatest act as president was to popularize the term wonk (technically know spelled backwards), which seems more acceptable than geek.

Either way, my (self) definition is as follows, which unfortunately includes myself:

A person who is so heavily involved in a field that they at least occasionally lose the ability to communicate their knowledge to non technical people. Every field, from the sciences to art history, has technical jargon and a rich history of meaning that only a geek can appreciate.

The result is that when a non-geek asks a geek a question, the geek will often explain way more than the non-geek is interested in (or capable of understanding). Geeks understand something in DEPTH, usually in excruciating detail, as well as the high-level view.

What makes them geeks instead of scholars (in the eyes of non-geeks) is their inability to reach the non-geek at their level of understanding. So, many teachers are inadverdant geeks, as are some archaeologists and art historians, and some sports enthusiasts.

The geek phrase used to be the non-geeks way of leveling the playing field, by overcoming a feeling of not knowing with a feeling of being socially superior. Thank God that is changing, and geeks are finally garnering some respect.

The short form of my definition of geek: someone who knows so much about a topic that they sometimes have difficulty communicating with those who do not know as much on the topic.

With our advances in technology, eventually, we will be a planet full of geeks, and will have to grok to be able to talk at all.

...an individual who can describe a technical function in "simple language" that only another geek can understand.

A geek is someone who has more RJ-45 connectors and screws in their changepurse than change!
A geek is someone who, as soon as a new "toy" arrives, has to take the cover off immediately to see the inside workings.

There are geeks of all types. They?re someone that knows a great deal about a subject or several subjects that other people either do not take the time or have no wish to learn about so they call you to fix any issues they may be having with a particular problem. These days it?s usually technical people that know about networks, internet connections, protocol routing, computer viruses, firewalls and so many others that the term geek is referred. Just a few things associated with being this type of geek:

Someone that has to ?dumb down? what they?re saying to others to be understood.
You think carrying around a PDA makes you look cool.
You have a building pile of old computer junk at home.
You think getting paid to work with computers is like being paid to play with your toys.
You think ?Intel Inside ? Idiot Outside? is hilarious.
You?re automatically the blame for the problem just for showing up to fix it.
Someone has said to you ?I hit a button and everything went all gray.?
You can really identify with a lot of the Dilbert comics.
The minimum size of your technical downloads takes over 6GIGS of disk space.

Mostly, you?re actually the go to person when someone does have a technical problem. You?re the one that understands you have to take the bad with the good and not everything will work out perfectly every time you do something. You know that changing one thing can, and usually will, affect a great many things. Just from knowing these things, every once in a while you?re the one that gets to be the hero in the eyes of those that don?t understand the workings when you fix the problem.

A geek is someone who lives and breathes technology 24 hours a day but is in denial. A nurd on the otherhand, is someone who lives and breathes technology 24 hours a day but is not in denial and doesn't care.

A "true" geek is someone that carries a "startup" disk in his pocket. True scenario: My computer would not boot up one morning, and I called out asking if anyone had a "boot disk" handy, and low and behold, my instructor walked over to me and reached in his right top shirt pocket and handed me one. We both had a good laugh.

I'm very disappointed that CIO/Tech Republic has seen fit to engage in a contest of defining what a "geek" is. Will you also have a week to define other derogatory terms like "slants, slopes, spiks and spooks"?

You do I/T no favor when you put your efforts towards seperating I/T from the rest of the business. You should be working on strategies to form a stonger bond between the bright, intelligent, hard-working people that make up I/T organisations.

We're on-call 24 hours a day like doctors, solve problems that often are "life or death" for businesses, and we are paid like nurses. As a subscriber, I would rather see your publications use your sizeable journalistic powers to improve the way I/T people are viewed by the business community, instead of adding fire to a sterotype that only degrades individuals because they are intelligent.

I've very disappointed.

Dan Dybwad

A misunderstood person that communicates better with technologically advanced machines than biologicals.

You Know You're a Geek When .....

- You know more computer languages than foreign languages
- You wear clothes with computer-related logos on them
- You bring program listings to the bathroom with you
- The salespeople at the computer store cannot answer any of your questions
- You work in a cubicle containing any of the following:
==> one or more Dilbert comic-strips hanging on the walls
==> a stuffed Dilbert doll
==> a Dilbert calendar
- On vacation, you bring a programming book to read in your "spare time"
- You have a web-page of useless personal information and pictures of yourself
- You receive more e-mail than snail mail
- You have more friends on the Internet than in real life
- Your reason for not staying in touch with family is that they do not have e-mail
- You recognize IBM equipment just by its 4-digit code
- There are more than 50 floppy disks or CD-ROM?s in your desk at work
- You recognize any of these terms: TCP/IP, Usenet, terabyte, BSD, DASD, IPL, EBCDIC, maxint, bytecode
- You have more mega-bytes than mega-bucks
- You never attracted the opposite sex when you were in school, but now that you?re a highly paid techno-geek, you have become a veritable mate-magnet.
- You seriously considered bringing your laptop computer with you on vacation (or even worse ... on your honeymoon)
- You live close to the beach in California, but the term "surfing" primarily makes you think of the Internet
- You know the names of the fonts you see in various advertising.
- You religiously study the weekly newspaper advertising supplement from Fry's Electronics
- You can quote scenes from any Monty Python movie
- Your wrist-watch has more computing power than the computer you used five years ago
- You track the progress of your diet on a spreadsheet (complete with a full-color graph)
- You have actually emailed or faxed greeting cards to relatives and friends.

?You Mite be a Geek? ? Jeff Foxworthy Style
* If you tossed out your ?Pocket Protector? for a PDA ? you mite be a Geek.
* If you can do Hexadecimal or octal math in your head - you mite be a Geek.
* If you can converse with others in programming language better than you can in your native language - you mite be a Geek.
* If you have more computers at home than you do in your office cubical - you mite be a Geek.
* If you have 3 different operating systems running on your home machines - you mite be a Geek.
* If you carry on your belt on in your purse a page, cell phone and Blackberry device ? you mite be a Geek.
* If you can?t do without the latest picture phone, PDA or other electronic device ? you mite be a Geek.
* If you spend more time working on your home network than you do with your wife and kids ? you mite be a Geek.
* If you?ve gone through more monitors at home than televisions ? you mite be a Geek.
* If you tell techno jokes and find them funny ? you mite be a Geek.

Just a few quckies - more are welcome..

Graduate with
Exemplary
Electronic
Knowledge

You get excited about the Geek Trivia Calendar and try to download it multiple times and keep getting a 404 error.

A Geek is a person for whom jewelry commercials elicit the response, "You could buy a PDA and a laptop for what that thing costs, and they'd actually do something besides hang on your body and tempt thieves."

A large group of extremely creative, excentric people.

Someone who willingly browses the computer and/or science section of the local bookstore for leisure reading material.

As I would define it in this example, a geek is one who possesses and displays specific, in-depth knowledge, of very interesting information from a vast field; however useless that information may be percieved to "outsiders"; that is found to be very informative and entertaining and to a select group of like-mided geek wannabees.

Q: How many geeks does it take to change a light bulb?

A: None - because their bulbs never burn out, they just burn brighter.

Greatly Exaggerated Expertise and Knowledge (-:

Your local mechanic may come looking for you.

I was riding on the elevator with the CIO of the company I am working for. I stated that they should design a queuing system for elevators so that people are optimally positioned in the elevator for getting off. He stated ..." you really are a geek!".

Geek: One who puts function over form. Always.

pocket protector loaded with pens, pencils and various other devices used to measure and calculate mathematically in front shirt pocket. Various referance books in pants pockets or hands. Black rimed birthcontrol glasses used to look at the ground anytime around people. Normally introverted except when discussing anything having to do with their realm of expertize where they soar like eagles.

A geek is any person who displays an eccentric dedication to any particular technology or group of technologies. This dedication is displayed as passion, with geeks often collecting mementos of their chosen technology.

While many geeks are unable to relate on a normal social level, this is not always the case. Some geeks are not emotionally stunted, and display the ability to translate high level technical matters into much lower level dialect.

Being a geek means...

- Wardrobe consisting of nothing more than jeans, t-shirt, denim jacket and Colardos

- Jolt cola, home-delivered pizza, burgers and freeze-dried coffee

- where a "'Friends' marathon" refers to watching and talking to characters in Morrowind for six hours stright

- The number of computers in your room outweighs the number of available hub connections

- being a rebel means buying AMD and Linux

- IT is more than just a job and a hobby

- Relaxation means playing games on your playstation instead of your computer

- having Dilbert, Tux and Kenny stuffed toys to fill the space between the programming texts

and

- being geeky means taking out the time to enter contests like this one!!!

Cheers,
AndreaSim

A dork is, quite simply, a whales penis.

I couldn't agree more ... I often heard, "It (refering to a computer) wasn't like this before you came .... and now it's working !" *I haven't even touched the user's computer yet .....*

A person, having a job in another field, who deeply studies a complex and "uninteresting" field, even to the point of spending money.

A true geek will be able to complete any line from the Star Trek Movies; such as the end of Star Trek III The search for Spock, when Sarek tells Spock "I would take my leave of you Spock, do you have a message for your mother?" and Leonard Nimoy (Spock) responds "Tell her..."

The real geek will be able to finish that sentence.

As a Geek, we have mastered the English language based on acronyms.
We correct salespeople on technical specs.
WE have criticized normality.
We find beta testing stimulating.
We have skipped parties to program or repair computers, Switches, or Routers.
We have read entire computer manuals.
Have earned our MCSE in 4 months - sad but true.
We have more acronyms after our names then our family doctors.
We own more then 3+ computers.
What do you mean "I don't need a rack mounted server in my house"?
Our homes are networked.
We can subnet a subnet.
Write in binary, just to confuse people.

Geek - geek (symbol for long e unavailable), n, 1. a person, usually male, having the qualities of a focused intellect in the areas of science, math, biology or technology 2. not adept in relationship skills or emotional connectedness esp. relating to the opposite sex or children, usually resulting in separation, divorce or estrangement with others 3. a person, usually male, who fails to notice, embrace or participate in the evolutionary changes of social norms, ie language, clothing, humor, body image, etc. 4. a person disapproved of esp. by others for exhibiting the trait of cluelessness outside his focused intellect. "He was known as an absent-minded professor." 5. a person, usually male, who generously and single-mindedly creates a bridge for men, women and children of the general public to reach the equipment, programs and benefits of information technology, and will, when faced with the inevitable bugs, tirelessly pursue solution. adv adj and additional:geeky, geekiness, geekdom v. geeked "He geeked up my computer."

If you call someone a geek, you are saying in a rather unkind way that you think he is stupid and weak. An informal word used especially by young people.
Guillermo, Buenos Aires, Argentina

...in my humble, yet slightly geeky view can best
be defined as...
Garnering Engineering Excellence through
Knowledge

SighNide

Genuine
Excentric
Extraverted
Kid

you talk computers and nobody understands what the hell your talking about except geeks.

*G*reat *E*lectronics *E*xcited *K*ids, a geek is a person who will walk into a strip club with a computer controlled laser show, and watch the lights to see if there is a pattern to the randomness

Geek: One whose personality transfer got stuck at the
download stage and consequently would like to get out
more but cannot remember why.

A technically gifted and sometimes socially inactive.

Or

Someone who posts a response to a "What is a Geek" contest.

:)

You are pronouncing it wrong; it is pronounced ?Genius?!

The geek is one who revels in the knowledge of all that is electronical, mathematical and intellectual, having human relations as an alternative measure.

A GEEK is one who prefers technological intrigue to social form - a fast CPU and deep storage to a one-night-stand. A GEEK would take his computer on his HONEYMOON - (got to have e-mail!)

A sad, spotty, bespectacled little twerp, who could really do with sleeping with a woman (for the first time)...and not keep telling me how "Really cool" his new Motherboard is, and how 'Simcity Rocks man!'.......Yes Dave @ Econ Engineering!...IT'S YOU!!!!!!!!!

A sad, spotty, bespectacled little twerp, who could really do with sleeping with a woman (for the first time)...and not keep telling me how "Really cool" his new Motherboard is, and how 'Simcity Rocks man!'.......Yes Dave @ Econ Engineering!...IT'S YOU!!!!!!!!!

I like Dictionary.com's definition: "A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept."

I think a geek is someone who is given a request to define something and immediately goes to Dictionary.com for the answer.

LOL

You amy be a geek when you:-
- have worn the same clothes continiously for a week - becuase you have to finish coding & havent had time - even for sleeping.
- have worn the same cloths for a week because mum has not washed your other trousers and jumper - despite being a 35 yr old.
- your shoe collection consists of just 2 pairs of sandles (JB's).
- when the only other person that you can relate to is a another geek.
- when you run an OS that nobody has heard of.
- spend days writing code to shave seconds of a task.
- prove that the message you sent across 3,000 miles of cable & exchanges arrives on the PC next to you.
- explain things in a thousand words when 5 would suffice, and in 5 words when 1,000 would be helpful.

The guy or gal that can answer your question.

A person who has what appears to be a "devine" ability to walk up to a users computer and it start working as the user expects and without touching the machine or saying a word, make them feel stupid.

We should think outside the box; there are more geeks than computer geeks and proud of it!
GEEK (geek), n. acronym for Giver of Engineering, Ergonomic, or Kinetic information or services. Services or information rendered result in receiver's response, a combination admiration and repulsion, of a portmanteau word combining "god" and "eek." Hence, geek. That or anyone who still remembers all their administrative passwords from 1999.

I used the following sentence in an actual conversation, with real people...

"I was late getting to the party, so all the Gig ports were taken."

Geek. :)

Someone who's life revolves around technology and science; and who's adrenaline starts pumping while on the bleeding edge of technology or when a new gadget is rumored in the grapevine. A geek is someone who reads periodicals like "17th Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity
Proceedings".