100+

I thought I was watching the count carefully, but apparently I wasn't, since I wrote my 100th post without realizing it. Oh, well. It's been fun so far, and hopefully it hasn't been a waste of time to read for most people. :-)

We were talking today at work about how most of us are looking for (or have) hobbies outside the normal geeky tech stuff. Things like golf, art, music, or woodwork have two advantages over technology: they're cheaper to accessorize, and they're more accessible to friends and family.

Which is easier to deal with?

"What do you want for Christmas?"
"Well, I'd like to get back into World of Warcraft, but I really need at least a Radeon X800 or GeForce 6800 to get the framerates I need."

or this?

"What do you want for Christmas?"
"I could use some new colored pencils, and maybe some nice fine grained paper."

Likewise, most geeky stuff is just harder to explain:

"How was your weekend?"
"Oh, it was great! I got to play a full round Saturday. The weather was beautiful, and I even managed a birdy on the 8th hole!"

versus:

"How was your weekend?"
"It was great! I was trying to figure out how to get search results from a webservice in small sets, then combine them together for storage in the database, and I figured out the coolest sorting algorithm for ordering the results as they're combined instead of doing them all at once later!"

Granted, any field can get technical and geeky, not just computers, but for some reason, most people seem less bewildered and intimidated by other fields. I would hope that for my generation and those that follow, technology will be as comfortable and commonplace as cars and sports equipment are to most people today. It'll be interesting to see.