Year: 2006

Pure Geek
43 % Nerd, 60% Geek, 39% Dork
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 Geek, earning you the title of: Pure Geek.

It’s not that you’re a school junkie, like the nerd, and you don’t really stand out in a crowd, like the dork, you just have some interests that aren’t quite mainstream. Perhaps it’s anime, perhaps it’s computers, perhaps it’s bottlecaps, perhaps it’s all of those and more. Your interests take you to events and gatherings that are filled with people you find unusual and beyond-the-pale, but you don’t quite consider yourself “of that crowd.” Instead, you consider yourself to be fairly normal.

Which, you are.

Congratulations! You’re the one on the RIGHT!

Also, you might want to check out some of my other tests if you’re interested in any of the following:

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Professional Wrestling

Love & Sexuality

America/Politics

Thanks Again! — THE NERD? GEEK? OR DORK? TEST

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

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You scored higher than 99% on nerdiness
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You scored higher than 99% on geekosity
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You scored higher than 99% on dork points

Link: The Nerd? Geek? or Dork? Test written by donathos on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test

This is a list of the 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy novels, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien*
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein*
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children Of The Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card*
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson* This is really three books that they’ve lumped altogether and I don’t see any combined version for sale on Amazon. The individual books are: Lord Foul’s Bane (Book 1), The Illearth War (Book 2) and The Power That Preserves (Book 3).
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams*
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview With The Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash., Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein*
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

I moved to a new house not that long ago. A couple of weeks back, my wife and I went to the DMV and updated our driver’s licenses. While we were there, we both requested that the DMV update our voter registrations. Approximately one week ago, my wife got a card in the mail confirming her voter registration had been updated. I got… nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true. I got busy fighting with HR and the insurance company trying to get my health insurance cards1.

Then today rolls around. On a break at work, I start checking the Internet to find out where I’m supposed to go and vote tonight. While I’m doing that I run across a link allowing Iowa voters to check their voter registration. I try it out and find that my voter registration did NOT get updated. Grrrr. Tonight after dinner (roughly 6:15PM), Ariesna and I head over to the polling place to vote. I tell the person inside the door that I need the provisional ballot. She tells me to tell somebody else after I’ve signed in. I sign in, get in line and then tell the pollworker who has the book of names. She looks confused and refers me over to my 3rd pollworker of the evening.

Again, I get to wait around for my chance to talk to her. I explain my situation, including the bit about already talking the county auditor’s office. Her eyes look a bit glazed over and she seemed pretty confused. She mumbles something and then brings me some paperwork to fill out. Then she goes to try help 3-4 other people, disappears for a while and eventually comes back to take my paperwork. I hand it over and she disappears again. I hear somebody mention that the phone in the polling place doesn’t work, so apparently she’s running around the building to another room to call the county auditor’s office. Of course, if she could have kept track of what I’d said she wouldn’t have had to do that…. Eventually she comes back, gives me one of the provisional ballots and lets me vote. Wheee!

Next year, I’m so totally going to sign up for the absentee ballot. It’s just so much easier than dealing with understaffed (one of the other pollworkers mentioned they’d all been there since 6AM) & undertrained people at the polls.

1 So far, I’m still waiting. *sigh*

I recently ran across a couple of items online, but not on Amazon.com that I showed my wife as things I would like for Christmas. Since they weren’t on Amazon, I cannot just add them to my wishlist. She requested I add those items to CB.net as a blog post. I started to do so, but it occurred to me when I find other ideas I’d have to keep coming back and editing that post. And eventually the post would disappear off the front page, making it more difficult for her to find those suggestions. Then it I thought, why not just use my del.icio.us account and tag interesting items with “wishlist”? I couldn’t see a downside, as it’s easy for me to update and I can setup a bookmark for her to pull up the page to look at. So have at, oh wife of mine! 😀

At work, we had a massive potluck and I definitely won’t be packing a lunch next time we have a potluck. I’m used to potlucks where most people bring desserts and you have to bring your own “meal”. Yesterday’s potluck had the expected massive table of desserts but people also brought in 2 kinds of chili, 2 kinds of stew, roast beef, potato salad, a veggie tray, crackers and cheese.

At home, we weren’t sure what to expect for trick-or-treaters as this is our first Halloween in the new house. I’d talked to a neighbor and he said to expect something like 50-80 kids. We bought 2 large bags of candy and had some Halloween toys from previous years. Naively, we thought this would be enough. And perhaps it would have been if we only got 50-80 kids, but we actually got somewhere between 100-120 kids1! Still our goodies held out until about 7:45PM and trick-or-treating officially ended at 8:00PM; so we didn’t do too badly.

Overall, the kids were polite and it was a fun evening. Especially since I was lazy and let Ariesna do all the running around to get the candy to the kids2. However there were a couple of downers during the evening; for one, there were several kids who stood on the porch looking in their bags after getting their treats asking what they’d been given. What the heck is up with that? Sure, Ariesna was tossing some toys in with the candy but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what they were. Especially if they wait until they get home and really look over their loot. I probably wouldn’t have minded it much, but most of them doing it were the older kids who were probably borderline too old to be trick-or-treating anyway. So it was really ticking me off.

1 My wife has the exact number, but I forgot what she said it was.
2 I wasn’t entirely lazy, I spent about half the night trying to get a a fire blazing in the fireplace.