It’s long, but great – go read the Nerd Handbook and understand your favorite nerds just a bit more. Here’s a quote from the top:
Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. It’s clichéd, but a nerd is defined by his computer, and you need to understand why.
First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how
a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know
how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When
you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to
show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has
a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the
rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he
knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your
screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move
faster.
The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as
we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the
world. He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and
effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your
nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through
the day. When the illusion is broken, you are going to discover that…
