Tag Archives: rant

What is wrong with the Geek Pride Manifesto

So, May 25 huh? Geek Pride Day! Or… is it?

The wikipedia article on Geek Pride day lists a “manifesto” of sorts, or a “geek code”(see below) for Geek Pride Day…

…here it is:

Rights:

  1. The right to be even geekier.
  2. The right to not leave your house.
  3. The right to not like football or any other sport.
  4. The right to associate with other nerds.
  5. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
  6. The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
  7. The right to be out of style.
  8. The right to be overweight and near-sighted.
  9. The right to show off your geekiness.
  10. The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities:

  1. Be a geek, no matter what.
  2. Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
  3. If there is a discussion about something geeky, you must give your opinion.
  4. To save and protect all geeky material.
  5. Do everything you can to show off geeky stuff as a “museum of geekiness.”
  6. Don’t be a generalized geek. You must specialize in something.
  7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
  8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.
  9. Don’t waste your time on anything not related to geekdom.
  10. Try to take over the world!

So, I have a problem with this. Not all of it, and mostly the ‘responsibilities’ section…

But I get ahead of myself. Here is where I disagree with the rights…

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Subway voting…

I recently had pause to use Subway machines to choose my lunch. Which bread did I support (Dear Subway. Bring back Parmeson-Oregano bread. If you do not, I cannot respect your advertising campaign based on the concept of “choice”), which fillings match my views, and which condiments are just “me”. It gave me a paper receipt, and I had food. (it was tasty)

So. Why can’t we have a voting machine to do this? Continue reading

Linux UI: crippling itself?

I was recently talking with a friend about commandline prompt gadgetry, and our tangent conversations drifted to 256colour support in X terminal emulators. xterm. gnome-terminal, and presumably kterm and others also, though only the first two have I looked at.

256 colour support is there. It’s in the code. It works. It’s nice. And it’s… not only not enabled by default, there is no clear and simple way of enabling it even if you WANTED TO.

I was going to blog more about this, but the following IRC fragment I think says it all. Any questions?
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