Oh, the memes we’ll say. Oh, the shenanigans we’ll have.

I just bought my ticket to ROFLcon—I could never forgive myself for missing out on something this awesome, in my backyard no less.

So yes, I’m going to go. I’m going to blog it. I’m going to take pictures. I’m going to get ph4t lewtz, or at least say hi to Anonymous.

April 25th and 26th at Harvard University. ROFLcon or GTFO.

Now, let me brief you on my background and let me know what you think.

If you read my bio, you’ll notice I spent two years at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. I was a very frazzled Fu Fighter. My major was computer science, I took intensive Java classes on top of an engineering curriculum of physics labs and high-level math like 3rd level calculus (which I flunked), discrete math (which I passed and loved), and ordinary differential equations (which convinced me to leave computer science).

So, yes, I have some programming and math under my belt. Before college I took a few classes in high school on C++, BASIC and Pascal, even. I tinkered on my own with HTML and was designing sites in Notepad by the time I was 12 or so—back when almost everyone used Geocities or Tripod. I still code HTML, CSS and PHP fluently, and now that I have access to my own SQL database, I’m tinkering with that as well. Javascript makes sense to me, I play with it, but I can’t really code it beyond the very basics.

So the on-going discussions about reporters coding confuse the hell out of me. I’m not sure where I fit, or where I should.
I love doing production-side work for fun and work—website tinkering and video editing are labors of love for me—and I’ve always wanted to learn more PHP and SQL so I can do neat applications. That’s why I get DigiDave’s post about coding for journalists. It’s grand that there will be programs on journalism for programmers, but seriously, what about the other way around? Should we just fend for ourselves?

There are a lot of geeky journalists. Way more than I thought there were at least a year ago, at least. And I’m glad to know that I’m not alone in my confusion about the future of geekery in journalism (i.e. journalism in general).

What’s next? I’ll keep plugging along, learning as much as I can about reporting—and I do have a lot to learn there—but there are a lot of conflicting messages out there about what freshly-minted journos should or shouldn’t be doing.

So that’s my long, boring, confusing story. Advice is always welcome and appreciated.

click to enlarge the picture

Reaction #1 (too-cool-for-this neo-geek-hipster wanna-be snark): O RLY?

Reaction #2 (cripplingly self-conscious): is my greek so bad that flickr assumes i don’t even know how to say hello?

Reaction I should have had: How many Greeks wrote emails to flickr to get “yasou” on the international greetings banner? And how long will it take for a counter-reaction of Turks to mobilize and demand “merhaba”? ;)

Not to completely brown nose—he’s not going to read this anyway!— but he has a fun writing style and a lot of good stuff to say. (Unlike this blog.)

Anyway, due to his own admitted geekiness, he’s a good host to a lot of jokes made at his expense, like this one, affectionately dubbed LOLWesley:

Yea, you have to be a bit of a geek to get that. But I LOL’ed. (If you’re somewhat new to t3h Internets: Hi, there’s this thing called LOLcats. And LOLtrek. And even LOLcode. Everything’s funnier on the internet WHEN IT’S IN ALL CAPS LOL)

So I just want to give props to the Mr. Wheaton. He’s a geek among geeks, and he’s not afraid to share his life with the rest of us salivating masses.

…Would you rather I write about World of Warcraft? Because I could totally do that.

You see, most blogs are trying to make a difference in the world, I think. They want to say something of consequence, mobilize the masses, that sort of thing.

Not me.