I was looking recently at the “I’m a Geek” video again and glanced at the comments. It irritates me to no end, that people think all geeks are the same, that all of us sit at home all day, play games and have no social life, well, for your information I just spent the last two nights at bars until closing thank you very much, I was with friends, and drinking, because I am over 21 and it is completely legal to do so, plus it’s social, yes,. SOCIAL not anti-social.

This is why I hate stereotypes, even though there ARE people who fit stereotypes, which is why I hate to be labeled a gamer, because it is my personal experience, that most of the gamers I have encountered online, honestly make me not want to game at all, because they are extremely rude and unkind, and they think they are better than everyone else, which I guarantee I can prove is not the case, I know people that are way WAY more skilled than these people.

I don’t like to just call myself a geek, it is only part of me, I’m not just a Catholic, a geek,  gamer, son, brother, friend, nephew, grandson, cousin, choir member, blogger,  FCC licensed amateur radio operator,  IT guy, tech support for friends and family, courier, chauffeur, audiobook fan, podcast listener, music fan, web surfer, and then some, and all these are part of me, part of who I am, NOT WHO I am. Oh, and Sorry Kevin Rose, the Internet is not my identity, only PART of it.

Recently I was having to move a co-worker to another computer, and I was reminded of something.

For me, a limited number of desktop shortcuts if possible and alphabetical order is the only way I can find anything I need, however this coworker, apparently likes to save like everything important to her desktop, and has icons grouped in various parts of her screen. Funny how that’s the only way she can get her work done, but for me that’s way too much mess.

In fact, the computers that our real estate agents coming into the office are allowed to use, the desktop folders are set to read only and there’s a note on the machine that they must save everything to the My Documents folder, because I do not want them putting anything on the desktop that I will have to delete, and the MyDocs folders on those machines are synced to a single folder on the server, just to make my work easier, because apparently they don’t delete anything when they are done with it, my old college had a solution for that, everyone had to save their files on a disk or ZIP disk, yes, they still used those, and probably still do now.

I recently ran into a little problem, that I had to come up with a workaround for. See my mom takes her notebook to a few places pretty regularly, one has Comcast, one has AT&T. Comcast apparently blocks our server’s SMTP SSL port, and AT&T blocks our normal SMTP port, and that’s not something we can change, it’s our hosting company.

You can see how this could be a problem, unless she either had her own SMTP server running on her machine, or used a different outgoing server altogether. Enter Gmail, and it’s SMTP server using TLS instead of SSL. Problem supposedly solved, but I might not know for sure until next week.

Ugh, seriously, just stop it. I get that it might put a stop to SPAM, but it causes problem for legitimate users, just like copy protection on game discs does, the ones you are trying to stop, are the ones that find a way around it, it’s pointless, and makes no difference.