I really enjoy browsing pages of ctrl-c users. It almost feels like time traveling. I always find something that attaches me to myself at a younger age and this just feels good. What was different in the 1990’s when browsing the internet- I think it wasn’t called browsing at all because the web was still at it’s infancy or in just starting to transition into what it’s now. I was thinking a lot about the “tabbed browsing” experience that I see now as a precursor of the overwhelming presence of web-mediated information retrieval. I have to come back to this thought at a later time.
Yesterday I found a signature in the style of a PGP public key signature that looked interesting and was labeled GEEK CODE. It is an interesting code to describe personal style and interests for geeky persons. Some codes that fit for me would be GCS GMU d-s:a50 C+ L++++ C– “Where’s the on switch” a kind of a practical joke the kind I really enjoy. Some code are also sad reminders of my working past, e.g. I once was P! But iI found a way to escape (by quitting).
That’s all for now. I hope I will come back to this and craft my more complete geek code. Remember JS? A way of expressing the floppiness of strict code assignments to a moving target, using JS codes could jump between some values of fade between them. Also need to look at the geek code modyfier and see what can be done with them.
As a last thought: I learned about validated scales used in social sciences. Those scales are used in empirical research usually with questionnaires. Whenever a scale has been used and published in a research journal, is it a validated scale? My take-away for now is that given you plan to run a study using questionnaires then relying on validated scales just can save you a lot of time.
How do those scales differ from codes like the geek code? Can we find geek codes in the wild and compare their decoding with findings extracted by modern natural language processing (thinking about sentiment analysis, text classification).
You’ve reached the bottom. The geek code is an interesting cultural phenomenon of internet usage. Other codes have been inspired from it (goth code, furry code) and citing wikipedia “It was inspired by a similar code for the bear subculture”.