Friday, June 20, 2008

Geek Moment

I'm moderately geeky.

I've been known to quote Buffy and stay up late to watch Dr. Who and who doesn't love a nicely laid-out spreadsheet?

But not too long ago, during a meeting with a vendor, my colleagues and I were discussing a bizarre file-naming convention used by a previous vendor (all part of the previous vendor's plan to lock us into a proprietary system and force us to hire THEM again when the system needed updating)

Anyway, we were talking about the fact that there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to the naming convention (there are alpha-numeric file names for purely numeric records????) when someone says "I wonder if it's just hex?"

My first thought is "The game?" (There's a game similar to "Go" except that it's 11x11 instead of 14x14... gak! Geek!)

But they were talking about hexidecimal numbers - a base-16 system (0 to 9 plus A to F)

Immediately, half the room (all the old-school programmers) bent over their notebooks and started to scratch out the conversion, while a couple of others flipped on the conf room PC and opened the windows calculator.

Unfortunately, they couldn't get the calculator to take the first file name (001A43B0C) They couldn't even enter the numbers in.

My geek moment happened when I thought: "Can you have leading zeros in hex?"

Nope. You can't.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

OMG, a girl who likes Dr. Who and knows Hex, no wonder I have a crush on you =)

Seriously, I didn't know you were a tech geek - my BS was in Software Engineering.

Catch ya later - Neo

EEE said...

Hahaha! So.... You have a crush on me, Neo???? Whatever will your wife say?

(She scares me! I'll have to start carrying kitty treats to distract her...)

:D

I'm not really that techy. I can hold my own, but I know enough to know what I DON'T know, if you know what I mean.

I was always in advanced math in school but I've lost a lot of it now. (Except geometry - I have mad spatial skills!)

I'm completely hopeless at programming anything more complex than macros. I'm more of a power-user.

Anonymous said...

Hehe kitty treats, she's actually pretty laid back so I don't think you have much to worry about.

Those advanced math skills fade pretty quickly in the business world, kinda of a bummer actually.

Are you still going hard core with the workouts?

EEE said...

She sounds cool.

Yes, I'm still working my ass off - literally!

Munching on carrots and broc right now and can I TELL you how excited about the spinach salad that's waiting for me???? Hmmm...