Come and fess up to the ways in which you are really square/bit of a nerd

[baubleybobbityhat]

I love a nice big jigsaw, me. Preferably something like a thatched cottage surrounded by flowers.

I am too embarrassed to do them at home because my 80 year old mother and inlaws who are in their 70s share my enthusiasm and I just think if any of my uber-cool London creative/media-type mates came calling and saw a bugger like that on my dining table they would think I was a very sad case and immediately drop me.

That is adorable, LeQueen.

I am obsessed with cycling. I think about cycling ALL THE TIME. I dream about bikes. I look at sprockets on the internet. I bore on and on and on about bikes until the other person has fallen into a coma.

LaQueen

Long may they not care what others think regarding what they wear and enjoy doing.

Geeks are cool.

I love watching pro wrestling The Undertaker is my favourite Kane is cool and I think C.M. Punk is sexy.
I play table top D&D
I love Star Trek TNG
I like Doctor Who
I listen to Radio 4
I like CSI, NCSI, QI and Mock the Week
I like computer games
I love the PS3
I enjoy reading most Agatha Christie books except miss Marple
Its nice to know I am not alone in being a geek

DD1 has one poster of the French rugby team and 8 posters conjugating irregular verbs in French and Spanish. I love that she's wordy like me.

DD2 and DS are sciencey like DP - whenever I need malt vinegar and/or bicarb I check their room before the cupboard because they'll likely be being used in an experiment in progress.

DD (6) raced into school this morning after chivvying us all out of the house ten minutes earlier than usual.

The reason?

We got a letter home from school yesterday about a new science club which was offering places on a first come first served basis.

She was the first to get her form in .

She does maths workbooks for fun.

She took in pictures of her daddy in the instrument hall of this place for show and tell in school last year.

She also loves Star Wars and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of female Jedi and a passion for K9 and Doctor Who.

She loves reading, words/language and history.

I'm so proud

All this talk of maps reminds me that my parents had this Reader's Digest Atlas when I was a child - I loved it, It was enormous - my dad would put it up on the table for me to browse through. And joy of joys IIRC it also had maps of the moon in it!

Also, - I lost my Dad fairly recently, and when we were sorting through his study we came across his collection of Ordinance Survey maps from the 1940's [not to mention every copy of Scientific American printed in the 1960's]. He was a physicist like several people on this thread - bless his heart

I reached a new level of Geekdom yesterday, which was bad, even for me.

About three weeks ago, I was talking to someone who, in retrospect, has probably been permanently stoned for about 15 years, so not the most reliable. Anyways, during our conversation this person said that Tobago is a third world country "but we're coming up for review in 2020, and hopefully we will no longer had third world status". I was all "that doesn't sound right" and spent three weeks wondering about this. Last night, I checked on google (I finally remembered to do it) and was all " I KNEW it" and gave DP a long lecture about how the terms first, second and third world originated in the 1970s to describe the Capitalist/Communist divisions and you can't be "reviewed" to get out of third world status, as it's an informal term. Possibly stoned dude was referring to an OECD review. I LAWYERED stoned dudes ass.

DP was

maps being cool - tick - i taught dd1 (7) how to read a tube map when we were in london at the weekend and now she's hooked too.

scifi/fantasy/elves/magic/swords - tick

science geek - tick - almost wet myself with excitement on seeing watson & crick's model of dna in the science museum last weekend. the actual model they actually made their actual selves.

usually welded to a computer - tick

knitting/crochet etc - tick

I was also too embarassed to tell my colleague that I know that 40% of Russia is covered in birch forest because, on Friday evening, I spent a happy hour reading an atlas.

absofcroissant

You are like me. I am nitpicking over certain things..

Not that i am saying what you did was nitpicking, Abs.

KurriKurri

A perfect geek legacy from father to daughter.

Crocheting was very big when I was a teenager, actually, a lot of us were keen on it!

Age ~13-17 I had a monthly subscription to a puzzles magazine: wordsearches, crosswords, number games, all that. I still think Sudoku is very obvious & nothing new.

I started programming in 1982 (age 15)

I first got on the Internet in 1987; Good ol BBSs. That's when I started hanging out with Geeks, but I know I don't merit that title at all. Just not geeky enough.

I have Butterfly map, Peters projection map, Transverse Mercator map and a Hobo-Dyer South-at-top equal area map (custom-made, cost me $200) map adorning walls of my home (I can tell you what those words mean, too).

In my 20s I made Cross-stitch things as gifts for friends & colleagues (science dept. at Uni), and bemoaned my lack of time to take up Morris Dancing.

I'm just learning to do Patchwork, the youngest by about 15 years in the class.

I can do very basic bike maintenance which flabberghasts all the other schoolgate mummies "I wouldn't have a clue!" :(

Maid of Honour from my wedding trumps you all, though. She did GM before anybody knew what GM was, programmes for a MMORPG for a living, carries spanners with her at all times & dressed up as a Darlek for last Halloween. Works in a male-dominated industry & gloats about the non-existent queues for the Ladies toilets at conferences.

I have an engineering degree.

I used to watch OU programmes when I was a child.

I love a good factory production line - my favourite bit of 'Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory' was always the opening titles, and I genuinely enjoyed visiting the Keswick Pencil Museum.

I stare longingly at the jigsaws in WHSmith/charity shops, and wish I had the time and space to get stuck in to a good 1000-piecer.

I love Only Connect (and indeed all of BBC4), and would like Victoria Coren to be my BFF.

Oh, I was nitpicking. I know I was.

Love jigsaws
Have built my own PC (then found a stick to turn it on with Just In Case.) :o
Love Joss Whedon
Can code HTML & CSS
Have a huge stack of D&D books and can't wait till the kids are old enough to have family games.
Take crochet projects to the pub
Have 2 Spinning Wheels
Love maps. We've just recovered the belongings from our car that was stolen at Christmas. I'm very pleased they left my annotated Anglesey map in the glove box.

And lastly, the one my computer geek friends say even out geeks them.... I still use Telnet chat groups

Oh, and my 12 week old DS is currently wearing a "Newbie" vest :o I'll put a pic on my profile.

Aw - cute in his vest (love his big bobbled hat too ) - gorgeous kids, - gorgeous names [smiles]

He is gorgeous, Biblio.

I only buy DS large Star Wars Lego sets so I can do them for him help.

I set myself a project last Christmas of reading the entire Science Fiction Masterworks series, I have nearly completed my project.

DH & I are going to an AI conference in San-Francisco next year.

DH is a software developer, DF is a Cosmologist, the most fun the three of us have after a family supper (everyone else clears off for some reason) is to strap DF's blood pressure monitor on & take it in turns to give the wearer an entry from the encyclopedia or dictionary to describe - the winner is the one who maintains the lowest BP & heart-rate whilst either being completely correct or emphatically bull-shitting (I tend to get more excited WHEN I KNOW I'M RIGHT). (Scoring is not an exact science however).

I sat down with a pack of cards over Christmas to work out how many combinations of hands were possible in a game of Texas Hold 'em (it was a lot).

I do however look completely normal.

I bought a classical music compilation (100 tracks) for a car trip with my parents, specifically so we could avoid the god-awful plays they have on radio 3 of an evening we could play a guessing game to see who could guess the title/composer!

Despite being classical music nuts we did quite badly though

I am rarely happier than when cataloguing and ordering things.

I recently spent several days devising a filing system and cataloguing my elderly father's digital photos on his computer, as he had managed to save many of them several times over. It was unbelievably satisfying.

Also a fan of lists, and naturally, spreadsheets.

I would truly rather organise things in my pyjamas than go out for the night. The 20 year old me would have recoiled in horror at the 36 year old me.....!