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When Geeks Go Camping
mikep.maine writes "CNN and Business 2.0 have an interesting article on Tim O'Reilly's Foo camp for geeks - not just any geek - people like Google founders, Tim Bray (invented XML), and venture capitalists. Stashed away in the rolling hills north of San Francisco ... Foo Camp, a new breed of geek gathering organized (somewhat) by O'Reilly & Associates. The idea: Get 200 or so smart folks with a lot in common together in one place at one time, let them pitch tents, toss in a Wi-Fi network, and see what happens. Turns out, quite a lot. You are as likely to bump into a founder of Google (both were there) as the vice chairman of Warburg Pincus. Yes, they had Wi-Fi and marshmallows."
When I used to work at a small start up company, we weren't full of those stereotypical portly nerds that drink mountain dew all day long and have a goofy laugh.
Instead, we had nice upstart individuals that were well motivated and very athletic. (if it's any consolation to you, they didn't take showers after working out)
Whenever there were any sorts of group events, we'd have at least two individuals with experience with hiking, backpacking, rock climb, scuba diving, spelunking, sky diving, flying jets or planes, rocketry, maguyvering stuff(a lot of them were engineers in mechanical, electrical, chemical, etcetera btw), and even inventing little items for personal use with fellow hobbyists.
Yes, I believe it is the insatiable quality of nerds that keep them above the rest in society. Always prepared for any event. If you stuck them on an island without electricity or any signs of human life, they'd be able to make a quaint existence on it until someone rescued them.
For examples of weirdness and whackiness for self made items. Check out this forum for flashlight enthusiasts.
A bunch of them make their own flashlights, or even offer modifications to Mag-Lites to make them into hand-held HID setups just like the UnderWater Kinetics Light Cannon 100 HID Dive Light
Yes, nerds are too overprepared.