Harcourt Fenton Mudd, Mudd’s Women, innit?
Back on the subject of ST : TMP - does anyone else, when watching it, get cross-referencing images to, oh, Airplane 2?
“Decker. Decker… Decker. Decker!” Sulu shrugs, and punches Uhura
Actually, it was I, Mudd. 
I am holding you directly responsible for the coffee I just spit all over my desk.
Well, that’s what you get for correcting me on a Star Trek episode title. 
I remember a beach party where we amused ourselves by throwing ancient hard drive disks into the wind. (They were 12" ferric-oxide coated stainless steel disks, and deadly.) When they came down, the wind was strong enough that they would roll into the ocean if you couldn’t run fast enough to retrieve them.
Later that night, after many beers had been consumed, one fella wandered away from the fire to transfer some fluid from his bladder to a tide pool. This resulted in a joyful exclamation: “Hey! Bioluminescence!” Several people gathered around to watch his pee stimulate the little glowing critters.
Much later, when standing became impractical, we lay on our backs and took turns naming constellations.
Geekiest beach party ever.
I guess this is a “co-geek” moment.
At work, in the hallway, approaching a security door. A couple of our IT guys arrive there micro-seconds before myself, so one waves his badge at the wall-mounted sensor.
Nothing. Another quick wave.
Nothing. His friend tries a pass, but not moving the badge as quickly.
click goes the door.
“Observe,” he says - “The slow blade penetrates the shield!”
We all cracked up, grinning at each other broadly, sharing a special moment of geekality.
D
When I was a kid my baseball bat was named Glamdring. My Schwinn ten-speed was named Shadowfax. I used to play Lord of the Rings scrabble with my friends. Over the years I have gotten better. A bit.
That’s it! Fazoli’s, yes. (I didn’t spend too much time at that job, the assistant manager there gave me my first taste of sexual harrassment at the tender age of 15.)
I’m in Australia now, but lived in the US until 2003
Most things I do are geeky.
My friend (also a geek) made me a necklace with a dinosaur charm in the middle. But she’s going to redo it to add more teensy dinosaurs. Which is hella cool 'cause I am a dinosaur docent at the Field Museum. We’re also planning to go see this documentary at the Museum of Science and Industry on bugs. It’s projected onto a six story tall screen. I am so excited!!! GIANT BUG DOCUMENTARY!!! Can’t wait.
I can also speak in the style of Joss Whedon when necessary. And let’s face it, it’s often necessary.
Lol! I think I caught the tail end of that same parasite documentary. I felt bad when it showed a close-up shot of something and i said “Hmm. Ascaris lumbricoides.” Then the announcer said it. I laughed about it.
I’m a 30 year old geek with a BS in Comp Sci and can quote much Monty Python, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and the Monster Manual.
However, hearing stuff like that makes me urinate submissively. 
Good heavens… I understand all of that, but lawd… I don’t want to do them.
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With all this talk of Harry Mudd and since **Larry Mudd **posted a few posts up, I suppose I should mention that every time I see the latter post, I think of the former.
My own geekiest moment(s) were probably in my junior year of high school when I taped Star Trek: Voyager for my former math teacher and brought it to him every week. Talk about being a teacher’s pet.
During the same timeframe, I was a member of the chess club but maybe only three or four of us actually played chess… the rest of us used it as a roleplaying / Star Trek / general geek club.
I am fashion-challenged. I have a shirt that says <GEEK> on the front and </GEEK> on the back, and the other day I put it on backwards, but I didn’t know it until I looked in the mirror and saw the HTML tag. The same day, I put my sweatshirt on inside out and backwards, and I didn’t know it until my friend brought it to my attention. :o
So I bought Unreal Tournament 2003 today. Yeah, a year late, but who cares? I get it home and start “emerge ut2003”. Unfortunately, it took a shit sometime after it was done with the third disc and was supposed to start a real install. No fear, just check the error message… looks like it stored it somewhere in /var/lib/portage. I check it out, and there’s something called setup.sh in the directory. ./setup.sh gives me an installer remarkably similar to the one included with UT2004. And it asks me for the discs again. I comply, noting that I have to mount each disc as the installer needs it (2004’s installer mounts and ejects the discs automagically). Then it asks me for the CD key.
Unfortunately, the simple CD key script that the installer uses doesn’t even bother telling me what format it wants the key in. It does inform me, though, that it doesn’t actually check the key. I type it in with no caps or dashes, and I’m seemingly ready to roll.
I fired it up, the splash screen loaded, and then the compy… just peed the carpet. I put the CD key in wrong, and the damn game tells me that I need to reinstall the whole thing over again just to get another shot at the CD! Fuck that.
I check the directory under /var/lib/portage again. Hmm, there’s cdkey.sh. ./cdkey.sh just clears the xterm and gives an error. Now, I don’t know much about shell scripting, but I decided to take a quick peek at what setup.sh did. I couldn’t figure out what exactly it did by looking at it, but I did see something about a -z option. Or so I thought. ./cdkey.sh -z gave me “-z/System/cdkey: File not found” A-fucking-ha! The script just writes to a file under the System directory in the UT2003 directory. So I cd to that directory, open up the cdkey file with vi, and there it is – the CD key I entered. With a smattering of x’s, an i, the properly-typed CD key and a quick :wq, I fix the problem and am fragging within five minutes.
Now, all that being said, Derleth still wins.
Geeky moments of liberal-arts majors:
My wife and I were at a party where the board game **Cranium **was being played (no, that’s not the geeky part). The answer to something or other was “totem pole,” and I whispered to her that it would be cool if it the letters were rearranged to make “motet pole”: a bunch of periwigged classical composers (Bach, Händel, et al.) stacked one head on top of another. All composing motets, don’t’cha know…
We got to laughing so hard we were practically choking. It was only when our friends asked us what was so funny, and I explained it to them (to, of course, bewilderment all around), that I realized how truly, madly, deeply nerdy this was.
My geeky thing happened yesterday - a lady was looking for a book and sent out an email: “Hey, I’m looking for this book, it’s titled HTML/XHTML in green letters and it has a koala on the cover.”
I wrote back: “Oooh! Is it an O’Reilly book? Haven’t seen it, but when you get it back can I take a look?”
She replies: “You geek. I didn’t even know it was an O’Reilly book until you mentioned it.”
They are highly regarded, you know.
would it count if my boss, a coworker and I all walked down the hall together humming the Darth Vader theme? Thought so.
bonus points and the “uber-geek T-SHirt” to any of you who were making ventilator noises too…
I think the title is “Imperial March”
Cheers!
I love O’Reilly books! (Anyone who didn’t see that coming, get out. This isn’t your thread. :D) I have been reading “Mastering Regular Expressions” by Friedl and “Writing GNU Emacs Extensions” by Glickstein, but my favorite has always been the Llama (aka “Learning Perl”).
Llamas! There are llamas in the water!
Tentacle Monster: Good problem-solving. If you run a *nix, and you obviously do, I would suggest learning a bit about shell. When you take into account all of the command-line programs your machine shipped with, shell can be a very powerful language, rivalling even Perl in certain applications. The classic book on introductory shell is probably The UNIX Programming Environment by Kernighan and Pike, but if you don’t want to buy anything right now you can look at this document from the Linux Documentation Project.
Mirasawa: Bah. You just don’t know what’s fun.
Daithe Lacha, E. Thorp: Just so you know, both of yours made me laugh. Thank you.
I used the phrase “the epistemology of narrative” the other day at work.
The subsequent five minutes of explanation reduced the blank stares around me not a jot, but it did add a few wrinkled brows of consternation to the mix.
I cannot match many of the geeks in this thread, but I’ll share some of my geekiness.
My keychain is an old stick of SIMM RAM, and I comb my beard with an old 486 processor. (It works great! Er, as a beard comb.)
I own a dual processor 486. Yeah, that’s right. A dual processor 486! Two 75 MHz processors, biatch! Feel the speed! (It’s running DOS 5.0, and doesn’t do much except collect dust … but collects dust at twice the speed of an ordinary 486! Hah!)
I only own three O’Reilly books: The camel, the rhino, and the snake. I also own the three classic Knuth volumes, which I will eventually, I promise, get around to reading, honest. (They gather dust nearly as fast as a dual-processor 486.)
Recently, when a friend told a funny joke, I replied while laughing, “Ell Oh Ell!” Then I hung my head in shame for the next few minutes.