You are right- we are different. I go through the interior aisles of the supermarket first before finishing with a perimeter swing (where the cold stuff is kept). The perimeter swing is, of course, counter-clockwise. I like to keep my angular momentum up.

Do you go in the opposite direction when you shop in the other hemisphere?

Seriously, are you suggesting that part of "geekiness" is a tendency to think through and design an approach before doing anything? Or maybe that it's a skill for rationalizing any approach afterwards?

I think there is a tendency to get bored by repetitive tasks an find ways to do them better. No forward planning necessary.

One of my first jobs was maintaining a national phone book library: 50lbs of new books in and 50lbs old books out every day, just the kind of thing to keep a 15-year-old busy all day. Within a couple weeks I had redesigned my pipeline to reduce labeling errors and speed the whole thing up by a factor of 2 or 3, which meant I could do other work as well (which lead to me learning print design, then animation, then programming).

I was not planning ahead, just bored, and it seemed normal to me. I was shocked when I tried to train my replacement: she stared at me like I was from Mars. I tried to explain how she should sort the new books first by state, not size, rip through the label printing process in one shot, remember that the list is now backwards when you apply the labels, spot-check every tenth book (ie, when you hit a perforation in the label fan-fold)... etc. She just went on with print-stick-shelf process for each book, and it took her all day.

I believe our language is a lot less precise than you imagine. It is a common practice to over-generalize to make a point, and it is assumed that there are exceptions.

Saying, "all geeks" means she sees something as a trend. I suppose her wording was a little bit stronger than it needed to be, but I doubt anyone reading this would suddenly take it as a definitive guide to geekdom.

You must really hate political speeches.

Reading all/every/always as a mathematical definition is a pedantic point I see a lot of when reading technical people's responses to non-technical posts. It gets on my nerves as it does not promote the conversation. Although there are exceptions to that. I don't recall the phrase "all the time" get picked on the same way (e.g. "I get stuck in traffic all the time"), perhaps it is more deeply ingrained in everyone that it is hyperbole.

This blog posting is more of a nonchalant personal statement by the author. Your retort is longer than the original posting.

Not to mention that she thinks all geeks are software geeks. Some geek programmers are geeky about something else and don't give a damn about software beyond getting it to work.

Exactly - I happen to know an diesel-engine geek, a train geek and a submarine geek.

May I suggest that you are not a geek: No Star Trek? Blasphemer!

I grew up without cable (rural Jamaica) but even I caught a few episodes of Enterprise...

All things being equal, Earth Final Conflict was better...