I've been pondering what it is that makes a person a geek. It's definitely an identity. But is geekiness inherent, or is it acquired? Which came first, the chicken or the easter egg?
It's interesting that most geeks can point to one or two events that sealed their geekdom. That seems to be an argument for "nurture" rather than "nature". For me, it was when my family bought our second computer when I was 10. Because my dad had a new computer to use, I was given nearly total control of the old one. It was that moment that sealed my fate as a computer nerd. I learned to use MS-DOS from the command line, because that was all there was. My father helped "educate" me by messing with the computer. I found out about the autoexec.bat file because one day I booted the computer only to see, in four inch high ASCII text art, the words "Justin is a dork." So I learned how he did it, and I changed it to "Justin is so cool!", or something a little more flattering. Perhaps I should have left the original statement, since it was more true than I could have known.
apparently a nerd is nothing more than an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine... read this to understand.