Archaeology

How does one become a Nerd Sherpa?

GADGETS:
For me, it started early. By age 4 or so, I was playing Combat against my sister on the ATARI 2600. By age 7, I had moved on to the King's Quest series on the old 286. I seem to remember the machine being somewhere around 4-6 megahertz, and maybe 8 or 10 on Turbo. Of course, kicking it up to 10 megahertz made most games far too fast to play. Around age 10, my dad taught me to build my first PC. It was a 386, 12 megahertz! That thing was a monster. A few years later, Wing Commander was released, and in order to get it to run on my computer, we had to go buy this giant surfboard of an expansion card so we could install more ram. Friggin game took two kinds of ram (extended and expanded, or something like that).

Eventually, I would build many other computers, be the first person I knew to get an mp3 player (the old blue and gray Creative NOMAD), and somewhere in there, I became the go-to nerd for computer and gadget issues for most everyone I knew.

POP CULTURE:
I like the idea of comics, but in practice I'm mostly an animation junkie. I consider myself super lucky to have been the exact right age to get in on the ground floor with Batman: The Animated Series. Kevin Conroy is my Batman. Then the saturday morning X-Men cartoon came along and transcended time and space to ruin all three future movies. Flash forward to the late 90s: Cartoon Network began importing animation from Japan. Of course some other outlets had done it before. I vaguely remember watching Robotech as a tinyperson. And there was Ninja Scroll, Akira and Ghost in the Shell on VHS. I remember Saturday Anime on the SciFi Channel, but they pretty much blew it. What really did it for me was Gundam Wing on Adult Swim. Then came Cowboy Bebop and a few others.

Of course I also like movies, music and tons of TV, but we'll get to more on that stuff later. The common denominator is that I like my pop culture to tell me a story. Make me feel stuff. Trust me, you'll like it to do that too.

SURVIVAL SKILLS:
You cannot live on Ramen alone, though lately I'm making a pretty good run at it. You need many other things to keep you alive as a person, and not some shoddy facsimile thereof. Many nerds fail in this area, but I have long held that I'm the sort of nerd who makes a reasonable impression on outsiders. There are many things that can make being a nerd bearable. Travel. Hygiene. Alcohol consumption.

Now, I'll grant you, up until about a year ago, I wasn't doing much more than subsisting in this area. But lately, I've turned things around, and made fairly aggressive progress on the learning curve. Hang in there, I can help.

Gentlemen, BEHOLD:
My sherping credentials in brief.
Follow me on Twitter, and I'll let you know when new posts happen. And what I'm watching on TV. Or what I'm having for lunch. (Hint: It's usually Ramen) @nerdsherpa