Nerd, Geek or Dork?

My cousin Angela posted the results of the "Nerd, Geek or Dork?" quiz.  She turned out normal...  My result was as expected.  "You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd."  The full results along with some comparative analysis can be found at this page.  If you're too lazy to follow the link, here's the text from the results...

 

Your result for The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test...

Modern, Cool Nerd

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd.

Nerds didn't use to be cool, but in the 90's that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn't quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and "geek is chic." The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)!

Congratulations!

Software on the Side

I recently started a software development blog, Software on the Side.  Most of you probably won't be interested in it, but hopefully it'll be interesting to those of you that work in software.  Those that are possibly relevant I'll cross post here as well.

Rest of June and the 4th

I've posted the rest of the June photos and some from July... here are some of the highlights.

Alex being goofy.

Tyler showing off his new church shirt and tie.

We smoked some ribs and grilled some corn on the 4th... tasty!  This was the first time that I've tried doing ribs on the grill and they turned out pretty good.

Alex had a blue popsicle and stained his hands and mouth blue.

And here are links to the albums...

June 2008

July 2008

A Few Good Developers

Caselle (where I work) is hiring software developers.  Ignore the fact that it's not listed on the site yet.  These are new positions as we expand the development group.  Our existing code is in VB.NET but new code will be written in C#.  We're using Visual Studio 2008 and Subversion.  .NET experience is good, but not required... mostly we're looking for good software developers that have a good grasp of object oriented principles in whatever language and are willing to learn.  I've posted before about Caselle (After one week and After eight months) and some of the challenges that Caselle is facing.  A very important part of improving things is getting more good people in to help continue to turn and steady the ship.

We're currently in Spanish Fork but will be moving to the Novell campus in south Provo as soon as some final issues get worked out (hopefully in September).

In any case, if you are a software developer looking or if you know somebody that is, please contact me or leave a comment in this post and I'll answer any questions you might have and, if you're interested, get your resume.

On Power Supplies

My computer problems seem to end up being power supply problems... at least they're usually not catastrophic (to data anyway), but they are sometimes tricky to diagnose.  In any case, I wouldn't be writing about this if I hadn't had such a problem and wanted to share. :)

On Sunday the computer "wasn't working".  It appeared to be on but I couldn't get the display to come up.  So I rebooted and got a POST error about something being wrong with the CPU.  I wasn't too thrilled about that...

I waited a bit and tried again... this time it booted and then went into Windows, but then after a minute or so it "sort of" died back to the weird half dead state where it seemed to kinda be working.  I took some canned air and the canister vacuum and gave the inside of the case a good cleaning in hopes that maybe it was just some dust causing a problem... but that left me at the same spot.  I gave up for the night and planned to resume tonight.

All day I've been worried about my data... we've been thinking about using Jungle Disk to do offsite backup of some of our stuff, in particular our photos but hadn't gotten around to it... In any case, this event has made that a higher priority.  I'll post again in a few days once I have that set up and can give a decent review.

Back to the story... I resumed my diagnostics tonight.  This time it wouldn't start up at all... Not good.  But at this point I figured that it had to be the power supply though... or at least it was part of the puzzle.  I luckily had an old computer lying around and I hooked up its power supply to this computer (just the motherboard and main hard drive).  It looked a little like I was "jumping" it (like a car) since I didn't take the power supply out of the other computer but laid it down next to it and stretched the power cables over. 

After using the other power supply, everything seemed to work fine.  As a test, I used it to look up what stores were still open that would have a reasonably priced power supply.  The one in the other computer is older, doesn't have all the right cable endings and probably would end up being a little underpowered for what's in this computer.  Plus we were planning on setting it up for Tyler in place of the ten year old HP (yes, the one that Jeff got when he started his freshman year at BYU, with some upgrades along the way like more RAM and a better video card). 

Anyway, Circuit City is open until 10 (it was almost 9 at the time) and they had a decent deal on an Antec Basiq 500W power supply.  I ran out there to pick it up and that seems to have done the trick and everything is working fine now.  Hopefully this will prolong its life until we're ready to buy a new one.  Hooray!