Horn tooting? Maybe, but its good to go over some accomplishments to pump yourself up. I just finished getting a MythTV box up and running, which will eventually replace the Tivo and ReplayTV boxes (and monthly subscription fees) in my house, hence earning myself a nice chunk of geek cred. On the off chance I'll get into a "who's the biggest geek" contest with the local Poindexters, it would be handy to have a list of readily available ammunition, hence the following.
Here are some things I've done to earn me geek cred:
At 9 years old, ran a Rubick's Cube solving service for my fellow 4th graders. I eventually had to reduce demand by requiring one face be pre-solved.
At 14 years old, I ran a dial-up BBS on an Apple //c that supported local email, a primative FTP server, and message forums.
Wrote a homegrown database system in Applesoft BASIC that allowed building tables, inserting and deleting rows, and browsing rows (before SQL).
Discovered an object model security hole in Netscape 3 that allowed for the use of one HTML file to draw two frames and populate them with HTML dynamically. The security hole I exploited for this to work has since been plugged.
Wrote and ported a recreational project (log file decoder) from JavaScript to pure VB, and then from pure VB to a C .dll with a VB GUI.
As a CSR, rewrote a commandline tool used in a package I supported and sent it to several customers to speed up their data processing. (This should give me extra geek cred for coding to solve a problem outside of my scope, and that carried substantial risk of termination and lawsuits.)
Gave my daughter a large 4800 baud CSU/DSU to use as a stool/busybox when she was a toddler.
Learned Java so I could write a paint Applet for my daughter when she was 4.
Wrote an IRC trivia game using the mIRC scripting language.
Wrote a Connect Four bot in JavaScript.
Wrote a calculator in JavaScript with a Pi and e calculator
Built a PC from scratch.
Registered a domain.
Run Linux on a headless server in my home closet as my web and email server for my domain.
I get paid to code in perl.
And lastly, configured a working MythTV system to compare with my Tivo and my daughter's ReplayTV system.
Regarding the comparison mentioned in the last item, MythTV wins hands down. The interface is feature rich, searching for shows to record is lightning fast and has features which trump both Tivo and ReplayTV. Not only is the system completely advertisement free, there is an option to delete commercials when transcoding a file. There is even an option to scrub some channel logos before burning to DVD!
- addendum, Oct 18 2005:
I forgot the item that was once the pinnacle of my geek cred: At my last job I wrote an emacs LISP macro to telnet to an OS/2 box and start it's FTP server, then invoke a new emacs shell and FTP down some log files. This was set up to be called from a cgi script. So basically in one process there was cgi, FTP, OS/2, LISP, and an emacs macro for multiple buffers.
