Monday, July 27, 2009

Nerd-dom

This is obviously my first post in quite some time. I think I may try for more frequent, smaller posts in order to not be the guy failing to provide any updates or amusement to the 4 (-ish) people that quasi-follow it. I just figured out that I can now post via the iPhone, so that's a bonus. I'll see if I can work that into parts of my pretty boring existence.

OK, so here are a couple of short story / factoids for someone's amusement. Both are evidence that my nerd factor is higher than I want to accept.

Last week I wrote code in an email that would randomly select a restaurant for lunch to a friend of mine on the west coast. He originally wrote me to see if I had an old program that he thought we had at work that would select a restaurant from a list, and could take into account how much each restaurant was enjoyed by different people and how long it had been since our last visit. In reality this program didn't really exist in that much detail and glory, so I just wrote him a simple one to take care of it. Turns out he didn't really want the simple one, but I didn't know that at the time.

The real nerd in me came out today on the way to lunch. The guys I was eating with were talking about some insane fantasy books where there were parallel dimensions that all contained some variation of earth. One earth was technology-based and the other one was magic-based, or so I'm told. There were strange expeditions going on throughout these universes, and apparently the expedition teams were fighting a war between one another. I seem to remember some details about one universe gaining computers from another universe, but they were unable to maintain them. As the computers were slowing failing due to age the society used the last remaining ones to genetically engineer dragons that could be used to fix the computers, or some shit such as that. I don't really remember what was going on, but it was wild. Anyway, my friend was explaining all of this stuff, and he points out that there were different types of dragons - some could breathe fire, others could shoot lightning, and there was some 3rd power I can't remember. Anyway, he was explaining how the different types of dragons were used for different combat. He said that actually the lightning dragons were used to attack other flying dragons, in a strange sort of aerial combat. My response - "That's stupid. You can't shoot something with lightning that isn't grounded. No current would pass through the dragon."

This may explain why I don't read books like this. Apparently I had suspended all of my disbelief except the part dealing with electron movement.