{"id":106,"date":"2008-08-27T04:57:57","date_gmt":"2008-08-27T04:57:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=106"},"modified":"2025-08-18T13:08:28","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T20:08:28","slug":"ok-im-a-geek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2008\/08\/ok-im-a-geek\/","title":{"rendered":"OK, I’m a geek"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve always resisted the word “geek”. I mean, after all, it’s not like I actually write code or anything. I don’t actually make my living with a computer (I’m a teacher!), I’m not an educational technologist or instructional designer. <\/p>\n

But then it became necessary to avoid the cable company, and the world of U-Verse<\/a>. I was going to boycott the Olympics, but having heard an alternate position on Tibet from my activist student from China (another post for another time), I decided to watch after all. I have a DSL modem through AT&T, and it broke. They were so awful about replacing it, I didn’t want to give them more money by buying U-Verse for my TV. And the cable company turned out not to be the cable company any more. I haven’t had cable in years, and didn’t realize they’re all divided among various vendors offering different deals. I didn’t trust the company that offered me the good deal, and the actual TimeWarner wanted me to pay a bunch for two weeks of Olympics.\n<\/p>\n

So I geeked out. I had read that nbcolympics.com<\/a> was going to broadcast a lot of the games. I borrowed one of those really big screen televisions (like I’d buy one), and tried to hook up my iBook to it. I had a cable for that<\/a> from hooking it up to an external monitor, so no problem. But when I went to the website, it informed me that to use Microsoft’s new Silverlight<\/a> technology to watch the games, I needed to be on an Intel Mac.\n<\/p>\n

So I disconnected by iMac from everything on my desk, moved it into the living room, and had to borrow a special cable<\/a> to hook it up to the TV. That meant setting up my iBook to the external monitor on my desk (luckily I found that cable in the old box for my iBook). But the iMac couldn’t play sound into the big TV, only video. So I got out some USB speakers I use for my iBook, and plugged them in.\n<\/p>\n

Between NBC on my little antenna<\/a> and nbcolympics.com, I was able to watch Olympics happily (even the equestrian and synchronised swimming events!) for two weeks. So yeah, now I’m a geek. Except for those low-tech sticky notes stuck to my computer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve always resisted the word “geek”. I mean, after all, it’s not like I actually write code or anything. I don’t actually make my living with a computer (I’m a teacher!), I’m not an educational technologist or instructional designer. But then it became necessary to avoid the cable company, and the world of U-Verse. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-online-teaching","category-the-web"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10063,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/10063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}