You know, these days I spend quite a bit of time wondering about what I like to call “the engineering issue.” Here’s the thing: I always rode the rail between nerd and cool (or so I thought). I wasn’t quite smart enough to be a true nerd, but I was enough of a follower to attempt to be ‘cool’ in high school. In college, I wanted to gravitate entirely over to ‘cool,’ so I dropped engineering (8 hours of studying a day!) and transferred to English, which I could do with my eyes closed practically (and frequently did). My grades zoomed upward and all seemed well…ahem!…until I graduated and started looking for a job. And looking. And looking… That’s when I discovered all my friends taking jobs as secretar administrative assistants.
Now I find myself having gone full circle and back in the nerd world, and I realize…wow. This really suits me! I get the jokes! I like playing with computers all day! Even if I still use too many exclamation points! (I like to let the user know they’ve put something in that is ***wrong!!!! **** when I write code, which makes my supervisor a little crazy). Anyway, so for my birthday, we did nerdy things (like buy a new Wii controller) and I got a nerdy t-shirt (see below) and I suggested, to Marti’s delight, that we put candles on my cake in binary. Binary is the basic numbering system used by computers, and it goes like this: 00 (0) 01 (1) 10 (2) 11 (3) 100 (4) and so on…well, 34 is 00100010 using 8-bits (that means 8 spaces, which is typical for a computer chip and is why RAM is measured 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc). So we put 8 candles on, with the pink representing 0 and the blue representing 1:
And here I am, at 34 years old exactly:
(Where would I be had I stayed an engineer? Hard to say….)
