Work & Play

Are You a Tech Geek?

By Thomas P. Farley

You’d rightly bristle at being called a nerd, but these days it’s practically chic to be labelled a geek. Take this quick quiz to see whether you can count yourself among the few, the proud who know their NVRAM from their H.264.

1) The first thing you do when you get up in the morning is:

a) Pull on some clothes and head outside to grab the newspaper.

b) Yank your smartphone from under your pillow and check your messages.

c) Wake up your iPad and surf to engadget to see what you missed since your last visit — which was at 2:30 a.m.

d) Unclasp your sleep bracelet and launch an app to review how your slumber numbers compare to the ones from the night before.

2) It’s the first weekend in months that you don’t have to go in to the office. You’re going to reward yourself with…

a) A romantic getaway weekend — just you and your girlfriend at a hill station so remote it doesn’t get mobile service.

b) A strenuous hike that will let you put your new Magellan MobileMapper CX through its paces.

c) Back-to-back watching of Battlestar Galactica seasons three and four — streamed straight to the TV from your 4 TB hard drive.

d) Deep delving into the product links you grabbed by scanning QR codes up and down the aisles of this year’s C.E.S.

3) An abbreviation you use on a daily basis is:

a) AOL

b) ROFL

c) COD MW3

c) TRA (If you don’t know this one, you obviously don’t work for India's MOD.)

4) The way you’re most likely to use the word “game” in a sentence:

a) “I can’t believe there’s no game meat on this menu.”

b) “Anyone game for a ride on my new jet ski?”

c) “I finally figured out an untraceable way to game the cable company!”

d) “Dude, Portal 2 is not just a game to me — it’s my life.”

5) When it comes to cameras, your philosophy can best be described as…

a) “Let’s keep Kodak in business! Digital is for cissies.”

b) “Why should I buy a camera when I’ve already got one on my phone?”

c) “I don’t care what the experts say. I love megaloads of megapixels.”

d) “My life before buying a light field camera is just one big blur.”

6) The TV personality with whom you most identify is:

a) Jersey Shore’s washboard-ab’d Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino.

b) Walden Schmidt, the Internet billionaire played by Ashton Kutcher on Two and a Half Men.

c) Bear Grylls, Man Vs. Wild's  hardcore survivalist.

d) Adam Savage, the bespectacled special-effects designer who co-hosts MythBusters as well as the new science- and engineering-themed game show Unchained Reaction.

7) If you could meet any historical figure, it would be:

a) Ned Ludd, the rebellious eighteenth-century English youth whose name was adopted by that era’s Luddite movement.

b) Mahatma Gandhi, Founding Father, author, freedom fighter and spinning wheel-user.

c) Alan Turing, World War II-era scientist and creator of the Turing machine.

d) Watson, the annoyingly smart computer that beat a human at the US gameshow Jeopardy! last year.

8) You’re all ready for the Olympics this summer, thanks to:

a) Friends who’ve offered you their place just off Leicester Square — and front-row tickets to the opening ceremonies, diving competition and decathlon.

b) The new flat-screen your friends have just bought and installed at their bachelor pad. 

c) A satellite dish on your roof, which pulls in high-definition sports channels — providing there’s no reception interference from a heavy monsoon storm..

d) Your 55-inch 3-D television and a box of active-shutter glasses. Soon, you and your two best friends — whom you met while hanging out at the Apple store — will be watching the London games in three friggin’ dimensions.

SCORING
Calculate your answers according to the values assigned to each:

a = 1 point

b = 2 points

c = 3 points

d = 4 points

If you scored a total of…

8 to 12: Are you serious? Not even a pocket protector and a ham radio kit could turn you geek.

13 to 19: You’ve got some tech tendencies, but you need to make some changes before you can geek out with the best of them.

20 to 26: Well done! You’re an up-and-coming geek. Very few people make it this far.

27 to 32: Congratulations! You may not get all the ladies, but you are a true Jedi master in the world of tech geeks.


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