…and thou shalt be Geekier!

Disclaimers:
1. Puhleez understand that this post might leave you with a feeling of immense aggression towards the author. Kindly control your feelings and remember that violence is sin.
2. A part of this post is imaginary.

Prologue
Have you ever:
1. Lost your keys and thought, “Oh! I can make a quick Yahoo! (or Google) search”, only to realize that real life entities aren’t indexed. Not yet, at least. OR
2. Looked at a marriage invitation card and said, “The layout is nice, but the fonts.. yuck!”? OR
3. Prepared a changelog of your….. new girlfriend? OR
4. Smiled and hugged a friend while trying to figure out a bug in your program? OR
5. Told you friends that you’ve married your…. laptop?

If the answer to any of the above mentioned questions is YES, then…. you are in a great trouble my friend. You’re a geek…… and there’s no turning back.

However, life, as cruel as it can get, makes you realize at times that you’re lagging in your quest for geekdom.

The Phantom Menace
It started long long ago when our protagonist was born… But. We won’t go in details. The curious one’s can refer to this post. We will start our story from a latter date when he was recruited in a computer services firm, but wasn’t happy at all. This isn’t where he belongs. He was supposed be somewhere else… to be more intimately involved with computers.
He had a bad feeling about it all!

Attack of the Clones
He, anyhoo, joined the firm, but…………….. it was all a mess.
Or at least that’s what he felt initially. There were (so-called) engineers all around him who’d topped the exams in their respective colleges… but; as The Mentor says, “Damn kids! They’re all alike”.
They were like… Zombies… Parasites… Clones.

Revenge of Swen
“There’s a match for you, not matter WHAT you are”, they say.
True it was for him. He found a match in Swen.

Swen was different.
Not as good looking as him (???), but smart enough (:-o).
Dumb, but geek.
Married, but looking.

Swen soon realized that the young chap was a nerd. Swenny’s nerd-ometer had confirmed it.
…and this wasn’t acceptable to him. He gradually became jealous an started searching for the loophole which would drop The Nerd from geekdom to non-geekdom. He didn’t have to wait too long. He soon realized that the protagonist is a sinner.
He had not watched a single episode of the Star Wars.

The force wasn’t with him. Clearly, he was a non-geek, or still a padawan.

A New Hope
He was devastated… but life moves on.
Swenny left him and went to Chennai and he got involved in training and preparation of new geeks at Hyderabad. He also co-authored a book during the time… spent 16-20 hours a day in front of a computer, mostly on FOSS and security issues. This is the time when he married Bittu.
His hardwork made it clear that there still was some hope.

The Non-Geek Strikes Back
After his back-breaking tenure at Hyderabad, he shifted to Bangalore. This was the time that saw a rise in the stature of the padawan. He worked on a number of things related to Web security (education + pen testing + research ++). Recently, he also started off with PHP training. The force was growing strong….. but Oh! The harsh reality.
He still was a non-Geek.

Return of the Geek
Our very own Jedi Master (Swenny) had by now achieved enlightenment on the matters of brotherhood. He realized his folly. He travelled to Bangalore one weekend and brought with him a gift for the padawan he had once deserted.

A pack of all the six episodes of Star Wars with the following words inscribed on them:

Your path, your destiny lies within,
Discover your inner Geek.

It took only two days for yours truly to get baptised. Thanks to the master, he was no more a padawan… He’s become a full-fledged homegrown Jedi now.

Epilogue
The force grew even stronger and the Geek attained enlightenment in no time.
He realized that Geekdom ain’t no event. It’s a process. A continous quest for GeekDom itself.
The quest continues……

p.s.: I recently presented a webinar at my company titled, The Web is Broken. It’s an introductory presented to web security, and should be conceivable by anyone. It’s fun too