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is a Professional Geek for Microsoft Australia. More info lives underneath the About Box...

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This digital life (version 2.0) May 2007

By Nick Hodge | January 30, 2009

From Vista magazine, May 2007

This digital life (ver­sion 2.0)

Nick, a recent addi­tion to Microsoft, is a long time blog­ger, presenter and geek. Read Nick’s exploits and stor­ies at http://www.nickhodge.com. A part of Nick’s “job” at Microsoft is to col­lect and record Australia’s Geek Stor­ies. Turn your web browser to http://thegeekstories.com. To hear what Nick is doing almost on a minute by minute basis, catch Nick on http://twitter.com/. Note: Twit­ter is the latest online suc­cess story, and no one who uses twit­ter exactly knows exactly why. Cre­at­ing an account is easy, and adding Friends to watch and talk to is easy. Ignor­ing the tweets (sin­gu­lar noun of a post­ing) is tough. The web industry calls twit­ter “micro-blogging”

Thanks to the pre­vi­ous owner of this real estate, Frank Arrigo. Frank is the per­son­i­fic­a­tion of “geek”, and the owner of the title as Microsoft’s local Pro­fes­sional Geek.

My per­sonal geek story starts when I saw my first per­sonal com­puter: an Apple II in 1981. Prior to this exper­i­ence, I had only drawn on used com­puter punch cards. See­ing that com­puter changed my life, a whole new world opened up and career star­ted. A small Seattle com­pany had licensed a pro­gram­ming lan­guage to Apple, called AppleSoft Basic. That small com­pany was Microsoft.

Con­tinu­ing the lan­guage trend, the first pro­gram­ming lan­guage in which my par­ents pur­chased and in which I become flu­ent was Microsoft Basic 1.0 for the Mac. Friends still pester me for the pro­ject I star­ted way back in May 1984: Mac­Farm. It never shipped, or at least is in per­petual development.

Leap ahead through time and vari­ous com­pan­ies over employ­ers such as Apple and Adobe – here I find myself at Microsoft. With the her­it­age in lan­guages now extend­ing into oper­at­ing sys­tems, applic­a­tions, serv­ers, Xboxes, online Live ser­vices – there is no short­age of fun things to install, exper­i­ence and tell the world about.

Now my par­ents are now semi-retired in the Barossa Val­ley, still have that ori­ginal museum piece Mac some­where in their shed. Their primary PC is run­ning Win­dows XP – and it and an inter­net con­nec­tion changed how grand­par­ents inter­act with their grand­chil­dren. The use of web­cams with Live Mes­sen­ger, emails via Out­look and pic­tures back-and-forth keep my par­ents in con­tact with their Sydney-based grandson.

As memor­ies move from phys­ical to digital: pho­to­graphs, music, snip­pets of video, blog entries and twit­ter tweets; the world con­nects and the tyranny of dis­tance exper­i­enced by our ancest­ors dis­ap­pears. A pho­to­graph can be uploaded into the “cloud” of the inter­net for all to see and com­ment on almost immediately.

Hav­ing read books such as Gibson’s Neur­oman­cer and Stephenson’s Snow Crash, won­der where this always on, instant inform­a­tion world is could take us. It’s great to be here at Microsoft, being a part of help­ing Aus­trali­ans embrace tech­no­logy – to get us closer together. My optim­istic inner geek thinks the world will be ok.

Yes I admit it, I am a Pro­fes­sional Geek at Microsoft just like Frank.

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