Our little cinema project has inganeers working in 7 countries spaced out
pretty evenly around the world. My favourite technical design tool to keep it
all moving is a pen and a quad pad. Around the office the less technically
savvy they are, the more silver boxes they carry. It seems to be normal for
people to show up carrying 2 cell phones, a blackberry and an iPod. If they
ever get caught out in the open during a lightning storm they're toast.
Here's a stretch back for the list geeks. My father studied Electrical
Engineering at a college in the UK during the early 50s. During the time he was
there the school (UCL) held a party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the
invention of the thermionic tube which had occurred there. A surprising number
of the original scientists were on hand for the event.
Before college, for a time my dad was a technician at a lab. There he was
employed in cutting and polishing quartz crystals by hand to make the
oscillators for individual analogue devices. Polishing by hand to get 10 MHz
+/- 50 Hz. He just laughs now when he sees what is being done with huge
machines making zillions of components at a time.
It's true that the Internet has made the world smaller, or at least more
immediate. However, compare it to the generation before this one. In the space
of 20 or so years, my father went from being raised for a fair time in the
English countryside in an old stone farmhouse with no running water or
electricity, became a RAF radio mechanic, electrical engineer, emigrated to
Canada and then started working on nuclear fuelling systems. Lately he uses the
Internet rather agressively to cull data for sailing trips and a geneology
project.
The new generation (25 and younger) today feel very proud of how quickly they
adapt to the changing shape of things. I don't know; other than the numbers,
the experience isn't actually moving all that fast compared to what the war
generation saw. We in the middle (I'm 42) are fortunate in that we can sort of
understand both the generation that saw the birth of the technologies behind
the Internet and the generation that couldn't imagine life without it.
Now where did I leave my pen...
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-triumphs@autox.team.net
[mailto:owner-triumphs@autox.team.net]On Behalf Of Randall
Sent: June 1, 2005 11:55 PM
To: triumphs@autox.team.net
Subject: RE: Geeks
> Nowadays if you look on campus, the geeks have some sort of personal
> computer that they carry around with them.
Whaddya mean "nowadays" ? Both PDAs & laptops have been around since the 20th
century ...
Today at the absolute minimum a true geek has at least a wireless Internet
connection plus GPS, so his PDA knows where he is even when he (or she) doesn't
!
(Thankfully I have neither, being somewhat of a Luddite geek <G>)
Randall
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