Occasionally, innocent bystanders are sucked into ill-advised conversations with me. From time to time, they will even try to get a word in edgewise.  Risking being trapped in a never-ending loop of animated hand swinging and Jim Carry-esque facial contortions, they toss out the old desperate standby question:  “So, Tia… what did you go to school to do again?”

You were wondering that too, weren’t you?

Let’s pretend that you were. *cough, cough* M’kay?

(Insert Wayne’s World “doodley-doo, doodley-do” time warp hand motion here.)

Hey! I’m glad that you asked, friend! Would you like the CliffsNotes on that, or the version that’s worthy of several epic Peter Jackson flicks?

*crickets chirping*

Sigh.

The short answer is that I graduated from high school, and then I went to college to study Psychiatric Nursing. (Hey, stop laughing!) I forced myself to study nursing for two years, but, for a host of personal reasons, decided to change my career path three semesters before graduation. (Very swift of me, right?) After that, I worked in the hotel industry for a few years. I made money slinging coffee for Japanese tourists, business travelers, and the occasional celeb.  One morning, I woke up, and for reasons unclear to me now, decided that what the world really needed was another Computer Programmer/Analyst. At that moment in time, Dotcoms were at the height of their most bloated and frenzied peak. I figured that I would harness my vast and impressive left brain power (snort!) and get in on the action.  Two years later, I walked away with a diploma, and was allowed to call myself a professional Programmer/Analyst.

Let me be blunt – I have never, ever used anything I learned in nerd school.  48 months of mainlining Coca Cola at 0800h and subsisting off of a steady diet of apple fritters while hacking away (badly) at Visual Basic and C++ turned out to be for naught. (Although I went from a size 2 to a size 14 in 6 months, which was really cool.) I wouldn’t be able to code my way out of a cardboard box these days. It’s pathetic, really.

On the upside, my ill-advised foray into programming has blessed me with a love of All Things Which Are Not Gates. I change OS platforms with a frequency normally reserved for underwear. I fool around with browsers like Midori and SeaMonkey. I run what I fondly refer to as a “transgendered” computer: a PC, running Linux, with a big Mac sticker on the front.  I heart Linux – especially Ubuntu 7, which has to be one of the most user-friendly distros going. I was keen on Linspire too, but it had a few buggy glitches that made me cringe.

Yes, I’m a geek-poseur, but I also get to walk around, smugly laughing at the mere mortals who crab about Longhorn Vista  endlessly.

Fast forward to yesterday. As usual, I was taking over small nations and curing cancer on Twitter.  Scrolling through the Tweets, I  noticed @dudetodad had posted a YouTube clip link, promising  something about Ubuntu and babies.  Naturally, I had to take a look.

I think you need to take a look too…

Dude! How awesome is that? Nerd Daddy wrote a simple Linux program that would rock his tiny Nerdling to sleep with a piece of string and his CD ROM tray! Wicked!

Ahem.

While this does take “hands off parenting” to a new level, the sheer brilliance of this idea makes me bow in reverence.

Rock on, Spawn of a Geek.

Rock on.

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