The Nerdery: s02e19: On The Nerdery
As many nerds may know, waiKato has had more than a fair share of it's nerdiness. There's something about the fine farmland air that produces the best nerds in the country [1], and probably the best in the world. From the warm routers [2] of WAND, to the students SSHed into the labs, to the first-years mocking the management students who are trying to learn how to code, to the end of year pub-crawl, we're a proud bunch.
Nexus has been here for us nerds. Back in 1996 was the first glimpse into mainstream nerdery, with an article about the internet written by my cousin Malcolm (hmmm... I wonder if you still read Nexus/my blog...). Thats right, a 7 page long feature on the internet. Let's see a modern contrubutor rant and rave on that long! Then a few months later started a column called "Computers", which was renamed to The Nerdery a few issues later. Each column started with 42.
I had the intention of analysing the columns, how things have changed between then and now, but got distracted by how the first Nerdery column talked about online dating, and just how little had really changed. There was even a mention for those who couldn't get an online date to revert to a site with free pr0n passwords. Unfortunately, I don't know of such a site to give you, but I'm sure if you google hard enough you could find it before the ITS people find you.
And there's been the advertising revenue to go with our long-running nerdy column as well. If you ever get a chance (hopefully you'll be able to just look to your left), have a look for the raunchy Microsoft ads in Nexus issues that were. They launched a campain back in '2k (and then again 2k3) promoting their student-friendly priced Office editions. I gotta say, not only do they really get the message across, but it's amazing they were published in the first place.
[1] I'm not just talking about our PBRF ranking
[2] if you're a kiwi bloke out for giggles, get Donald Neal or someone with an equivlently awesome accent to pronounce routers
[3] http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/department/history.html