Women

I have often heard the term "girl", being bandied about, as though it were a term I understand. As far as I have come to gather, it is an oft used reference to people of the opposite sex. However being the generic geek that I am, I am quite unsure of what the word "sex" actually means, and always thought it was a myth or a fallacy. For instance, it has come to my attention that Bill Gates has children. How this fellow geek managed to attain such acts of reproduction is beyond my feeble biological knowledge, but i think it has something to do with recursion. So, as I sure you will understand, my knowledge of this other breed, these beings of the feminine species is rather limited.

Spending most of my time down in the Taylor Basement, where the Linux machines, I have often caught a fleeting glimpse of these rare (and often exquisite creatures). They often flee as they catch a glimpse the reflection of the computer screen on my eyes, under the ringwraith hood that I wear on occasion.

Such as it is, my interest was piqued, and I decided to my fellow engineers and scientists with them as to how to go about gathering information about them. After my conversations with my more tan peers(seeing as they actually saw this sun thing once in a while) , I gathered that getting to know women (as they were alternately called), was made up of 2 steps,

1. Watching
2. Hitting on them

Apparently, there are more steps to this process, but none had proceeded beyond phase 2. And so came time for practical aspect of this experiment.

The watching aspect of this activity is none too difficult in theory, but in practice, things can get a little hairy. Being unexperienced in this field I had never experienced the overwhelming effect on the senses that these females can have on a human body, the mind is stunned, the senses reel and you are often left speechless. When something is especially beautiful, a condition not unlike infinite recurion takes hold and you are left speechless and calling out your own name over and over again, or as it is in my case, I kept chanting "Oh my Gawd" under my breath repeatedly. If you're lucky, you may get away with a stack overflow error ;)

The second aspect of getting to know these females involves actually talking to them, an activity which requires the accelerated growth of something know as cajones, and no, people, Bawls cannot help us here. But as the master Yoda once said, Do or Do Not, there is no try. I am losing faith in him as well. I did talk some girls once, and in the typical mating syndrome of a male geek, I asked them about Star Wars. One refferred to Chewbacca as a "monkey", the second thought that the script in Star Wars Episode II was "awesome", and the last ( the worst one of all) found Jar Jar Binks...funny.

Needless to say, I have tried to avoid them since then. However, within the last couple of days it has come to my attention that other types of girls do indeed exist. In fact, one apparently posted a comment on my blog a few days back.

To quote her,
"I LOVE geeky guys, totally my type...and i do understand and am fascinated by star wars...and thats not just because I find anakin skywalker hot or R2D2 cute.
i also play a lot of computer games, (FF, CS, quake, ut to name a few) i've studied C++ for a year and i can completely relate to what you're going through. So yeah, stop generalising about girls. I may be one in a million, but hey, i DO exist."

This post did give me hope, and the sudden feeling that I could give my social security number to her. But the truth about the internet hit home, and I realised that "she" was probably a guy, and about as real as Tinkerbell. Perhaps she would only exist if I clapped my hands and prayed real hard.

Sanju

The CS Life

They call it the CS life Crisis, the point where you actually look up from Coding, and start realising that there are many things, such as the Sun, or Girls, that have manged to evolve without you realising their existence.

You do start to feel insecure, because you do not realise where you will be a year or two from now, but you feel more afraid, when you don't even where you are now. You start realising that Java is a bitch, or whether that variable that you are changing right there, is actually a non-static variable that is being referenced from a static context, or why your friend beside you is actually smiling as he codes, wile you slump to the ground. What you do not realise, is that as you close your eyes to prevent the tears from flowing, he too realises that his code does not compile, that he comes to realise that he has no clue what he is doing, and he is just as brain-dead as you feel.

You look at your algorithm, Perhaps is not even close to out-putting what you thought it would output, or maybe you are looking for that missing identifier, and you realise that you will have to start at the top of your 5000 lines of code, and work your way down.

You miss the comforts of life, until you gradually come to realise that you do not have a life. But as the computer once again hypnotises you, you begin to realise that you do not need a Life, or food, your body is evolving, photosynthesising by the light of the computer screen. You begin to realise that you realise nothing, and that God is nothing but a Public static final variable x.

You see what that variable x is doing, and find yourself contamplating it a wee bit more, beacause you realise that it has certain boundaries, and that it might be out of scope, and thus you add it to your "to-be-debugged" list.

You hold it insecurely, and then your grip is more secure, more firm. You maniacally laugh, and cry as you attempt to destroy that uncompiling screen with that hammer in your hands. You realise that changing your code could be the wors thing you could possibly do, and that infinite recursion in your current code isn't as bad as they make it out to be. But change is inevtable, and one must move past the Beta stage.

You realise that your life has no more meaning, that your heart is broken, wondering why nobody gets your cheap geek jokes, or understands why thinkgeek.com is where you get most of your enjoyment, or why no girl you like even tries to understand star wars or star trek as well as you do. You like Penny-Arcade, and PvPonline, and wonder why everyone seems to hate you for that, or why it means you are a bad person if you keep making slash-slash(//) sounds before every sentence, or ( /*) at the beggining of every paragraph, */ One night stands and random hook ups start to lookcheap( b4 you realise that you've never had any) in comparison to the maniacal pleasure of Halo 2, or Hal-Life 2 Deathmatch.

Sure we make a lot of errors, Things may not compile ALL the time, but we help by giving each other the Google Keywords required to find that already-written code online. We may thrive on the light of the screen, and are pale and malnourished, but we are stuck in this seemingly
infinite loop together. We will piss each other off every time our frag count increases in
Counter-Strike, Quake or Unreal Tournament, whenever we forget to save the others code, but whenever I LET you kill me in the aforementioned games, you had BETTER feel warm and fuzzy inside.

We are the group that doesnt need words, not when we have IM, or MSN, or Trillian, but will laugh at the end of a g-mail conversation that started off with a bad smiley :( We will laways be a band of Brothers, and in 10 years, when I'm richer than you, rest assured, even though your code may be crappy, or your variable names might be retarded, and even If you do not have a single desire to use Linux, I will still pull a few strings to get your unemployed ass hired.

Sanju

Based on Quarter Life Crisis.