On The Weird Blog Name

A few things, before you call me out on the admittedly pretentious blog name: there's a story behind why I'm calling this blog what it is. (A story?! By gum, I'd already written you off as a hack! You can't be serious about this, can you?!)

But yes, I'm serious, and here's the story. This blog owes its name to Assoc. Professor Stephane Bresson, who taught CS1231 last semester. As I remember it, we were in a lecture on number systems, and on one of the last slides Mr Bresson threw up an image of a strange wristwatch. "Du yuu know what thees ees?" he asked us. (Mr Bresson is French, and he speaks with a rather quaint accent).

"Theeese ees a watch that displays the time ... in binary form! It is a watch for nurds. Do you know what ees a nurd?"

Some people were already turning in their seats, looking at each other, and grinning.

"Yuu don't know what a nurd ees? No?" - and Mr Bresson got all excited now - "YOU are a nurd! I am a nurd! We are all nurds! Because we are computer science students, we are nurds! Maybe ... perhaps, I should buy one of the watch for eech of you!"

And that stuck with me, it did, because it was hilarious.

Now I know that the syntax is all wrong (it should be if (isNerd) {return true;}, for Java) but I'm omitting the curly braces because it reads better, especially to non-programmers. Oh - and this reminds me - if you're a non-programmer and you're reading this, what the title basically means is: if you're a nerd, say yes! (which is, by itself, inherently nerdy, but cut me some slack, alright?)

If you don't know the difference between a nerd and a geek, look no further:


And if you want the font I used in the blog title - it's Monaco, which is the default programming font for the Mac (the colours, too, are the exact same ones I see when I open Textmate); people who'd like alternatives may find some here.