UPDATE: Unexplained Phenomenon Google Trends?

Turns out, it's just Google being silly.

See This Post for the gritty details.

Short Version: Google had it's 'O' abducted by aliens, possibly a reference to the Exeter Incident, bandied the phrase 'Unexplained Phenomenon' about, and will do something whacky again on the 15th, probably as a tie in to H.G. Wells birthday.

The Will of the Hive Mind

Apparently, as mused in my prior posts, I am not the only one talking about the usage of the term geek in modern culture.

But while I'm generally talking about the multiclassed, multidisciplinary cross-over phenomenon among geeks and the phenomenon of chaining from one interest to another through social circles, Jess is tackling geek-dom from the direction of a discussion on manners in the modern geek. Take a gander at One Geek To Another tag and see what I'm talking about.

Clue is spread pretty thick across the internet, although I suspect Jess hoards her share of it.



On the subject of the gestalt here, I figured I'd point out Google Trends. Er, Google Trends. I always find a quick glance fascinating, although I'm still looking on a smaller scale. After all, I'd rather find out what the most common search term alongside 'Roleplaying' is, than know that people on the internet spontaneously searched for Unexplained Phenomenon at about 2 pm today (Although I find the concept Very meta.) Nor, did I really need to know that tons of people wanted to know about the female lead in Inglorious Bastards (Which I still need to see...) Although, I can probably guess why. Thanks, Internet.

I think the part I like best about Google Trends is trying to figure out why something became popular suddenly. Which is usually followed by the realization that my gut feeling is usually quite off from real factors. Still, Trends is a tool to try and help dispel such assumptions with Data. Or maybe it's merely because Trends is such a fine tool to get data at your fingertips... And we can't all have virtual worlds full of text to fly around in. Yet.

Braggin' and Defraggin'

My Saturday morning project was simple, and useful, even if my initial task proved to be a failure. This discussion might be a bit technical, but, suffice to say, if you know what Page Files or Disk Defragmentation is, you might find it interesting.

Quick Disclaimer:
I'm not, in theory, a hardware professional. This is personal knowledge, and I might, gasp, even have things wrong. I've been doing things this way for awhile without glaring system instability or trouble, but this risk is warranty-free. YMMV.

I may have spoke too soon on not having hardware problems - As it turns out, Mirror's edge is the first game I've bought in awhile that taxes my systems. I went digging for ideas on ways to improve my performance, short of upgrading my machine with a new video card or RAM, and recalled some ideas for page file tweaking, and defragmenting.

I spent the rest of the morning seeking ways to clear my hard-drives to that crucial 15% that Disk Defragmenter wants, but I found a few other tidbits. Here's a quick rundown of the idea behind defragmenting, and my experiences with the process:

Defrag 101

The idea is, that if a big file is in a contiguous block, it's basically in one place on your hard drive and easier and faster to retrieve. Otherwise, the system is jumping around, trying to find the different parts. On a full Hard Drive, big files tend to be heavily fragmented, and so when a game or program seeks that big file, it has to look more places, seek time goes up, performance goes down.

Defragmenting, in theory, takes all of your scattered files, tries to make a spot on your drive big enough to stash it in one piece, and moves it. So defragmentation works best when you have a lot of empty space at the end of your hard drive, so it can move those big files to the end, then compress the rest back into those gaps that open up.

Page File 101

Your computer needs space to put things it's working on. That's Memory, usually RAM, Random-Access Memory. More is better for most computers, Especially when gaming, since the machine has to juggle tons of textures and graphics and other information.

RAM is fast. It is like thinking about something - you pretty much just have to think about it and you know it. However, Ram is expensive, and Windows can only handle so much of it. So, Windows wants a Page File. This is like a notepad on your computer that windows writes down things to remember on. At first, this seems awesome. You have Gigabytes of space on your hard-drive, but only 1 or 2 gigs of RAM. But, using the hard drive is an order of magnitude slower. As if you had to go look things up in a filing cabinet when you wanted to think about them.

Windows thinks it can manage paged memory for you, and knows what's best. Windows is actually retarded, and in high performance experiences, it's really not that good at this. So, the best bet is to make your 'page file', the scratch file of 'virtual' memory that Windows writes to, a specific size, so it's always in the right place, and always open to use. I think the recommended size is like, twice your system RAM, give or take. It's my rule of thumb anyways.

However, like files, the chunks of your hard drive you set aside for page files can become fragmented. If each piece is, like, 500 megs, this isn't bad. But if it's in tiny slices all over your hard-drive, then seek time becomes even worse.


The Procedure

The theory is, open up tons of space at the backside of the hard drive, turn off page files, defragment, and then turn the page files back on, allowing them to settle into the big chunks at the end of the hard drive. The process took me a good part of my day and about 2 system restarts. There's a few basic steps.

1. Turn off the page files.
This is done by right clicking on my computer and then clicking properties. under the 'Advanced' tab, there's three buttons. You want the one up top, under 'Performance'

The second tab of performance is 'Advanced' again, and then once in there, you'll see Virtual Memory at the bottom. That's where these page files are. In order to turn them off, you need to set each drive you own to 'No Page File'.

!WARNING!
If you have a gig of ram or less, this may make Windows XP run like a dog. this is okay - You won't be doing much other than defragmenting, and after that, it'll all be over and back to normal, or better.

Restarting turns off these page files, and allows for the hard drive space they locked up to go free. If you have defragmented before and seen big green lines, those are, most commonly, page files. Or so I think.

2. Defragging
Once your page files are gone, and you have at least 15% disk space free, the boring part - Defragging. This is the most straight forward, but most tedious portion. The defragger is under start menu > system tools > disk defragmenter.

Got that going? Good. Go get lunch or something.

When you get back, you'll want to look at the report. This is sort of the defragmentation equivalent of hypermiling. You look and see what files remain fragmented, then consider if you can fix that. If the files are very large, you might just need more free space at the end of your drivespace to move it in one piece. For me, I found that TF2, Counter Strike, Guild Wars, and Beyond Good and Evil were my big offenders. By uninstalling the latter three (Which I hadn't been playing lately) I made enough room that the huge 2.5 gig datafile for TF2 that was broken into literally 980 pieces could be put together and defragmented.

I ended up tinkering with this, but when Disk Defragmenter tells you you don't need to defrag, it's usually right, and there's little performance gain to be had.

3. Turning On Pagefiles
Hopefully, you'll have pretty blue bars at this point, with maybe just a little red or green mixed in. Now, you can go and re-enable your page file(s).

You go to the same place as before (right click my computer, properties, advanced, performance, advanced, virtual memory)

This time, you want to set the page file to a specific size, rather than letting XP handle it. If you're a typical gamer with 2 gigs of ram, 4 gigs (That's 4096 MB) is probably in the right ballpark. I'd stick with twice your ram.

Give your page file a custom size - And make sure that the initial and max sizes are identical. This keeps XP from having to screw around with allocating sizes or changing anything.

Restarting allows Windows to actually use these page files.

Quick note: if you go to defragment without turning off page files, you'll see big green bars. This is unmovable disk space, such as that allocated by a page file. You can still defragment around it, especially ig you have lots of free space, but for a thorough compacting spree, it's probably best to repeat the procedure.

The above is my defragment dialog for my two partitions, a 33 gig system partition and a 116 gig applications and games disk. This is a day after my defrag sweep, with some of those bigger games re-installed. Already fragmentation creeps back in, but I should be reaping performance benefits in seek time for awhile yet before trouble brews again.

Hats Worn Today, Thursday July 30 2009

very day, I have to take on a bunch of different little hats, each one a particular type of Geek activity. Today was a very laid-back day (No Programming homework, no personal problems with my hardware, etcetera.) and so, I didn't need to dig up too many of my hats.


Font / Graphic Design / Eco Geek

My mom lost a PDF original of a flyer she needed for her composting presentations. She was going to use our printer's Copier function with an old printed one, but I noted, after she pointed out how the flyers had changed to use less ink, that she'd be wasting ink with that blackened xerox crud all over. I popped it into Photoshop, cleaned it up, and E-mailed her the clean copy after printing some copies for her.

Bonus: Cracked Comic Sans joke.


Roleplay Geek

Participated in a smallish Forgotten Realms oneshot. I was honestly a bit hesitant;

I'm moving from San Diego back to Tucson soon, and I really miss the in-depth experience of Live-Action Roleplaying in the Camarilla. It's a very immersive RP experience, more like improvisational theater and shared storytelling. There's a lot _Less_ of a focus on this in my local group of players in San Diego, especially when we're getting together simply as an alternative to not playing. I suspected the group would be some of the more RP-light folks and was worried it might not be as rewarding. In all fairness, it wasn't bad - But, I've been in numerous small, make your character on the spot games this summer, and most of the drama and investment I'd like in a Roleplaying game has not been there. Maybe that's a topic for another post however.

Roleplay TMI: 4th edition, Scepter Tower of Spellgard. I played a 3rd level dwarven devoted cleric, for healing and buffing. I aimed to add some ties to the 4E Faerun setting and some background and a good goal, seeking a lost dwarven relic, but it all basically boiled down to pushing through combat encounters. Like most games since I got back. Minor le sigh.


Computer Gaming Geek

Double dose here. My comic of Mirror's Edge (Bought for 7 bucks, shipping included off of Newegg, thanks to Dealzmodo.) arrived today, although I haven't gotten to play it, but once I got home from the above RPG, I hopped on and played a few stirring maps of Counter Strike: Source with my friends. Strangely, only one lives in my state or has met me in person, and he was the 'odd guy out', and I had to make sure it was all right he joined us. I'm acceptable at CS, and managed to top a few maps, but it was basically just shooting large teams of bots up for a very casual experience.


Comic Book Geek

I purchased Mice Templar last night, and finished it today. Strangely enough it was originally a mix up when searching for info on the new Mouse Guard that I found Mice Templar. Any comic whose foreword name-checks Reepicheep and comes recommended by Mike Mignola of Hellboy fame had to be a keeper, and I didn't feel disappointed. The novel is much more nuanced adventure, with a lot of moral gray areas and a world whose lore is never entirely honest about what's going on. And some seriously Bad-Ass Mice.


To-Do list:
Expandable Post Summaries (O)
Split Blogroll into Webcomics, Blogs, and Other (O)
Interview Fellow Geeks on Title Identity / Geek Species (O)

What is a Geek?

I think it might be easiest to explain this if people know where I'm coming from, but to get there, I guess I need to find out where others are coming from.

Before reading on or looking into the below link, think to yourself. If you're here, you probably understand, abstractly, what a 'Geek' is. You might be one. Know a few. Been raised by some. But, can you really narrow it down and put it into words, or not?

Below is the Wikipedia entry for Geek. I think it's surprisingly short.

'Geek' on Wikipedia.

The general idea is that 'Geek' is changing. It's no-longer exactly derogatory. It represents 'An enthusiast'.

I happen to like where the specific quote by Julie smith was heading:

"a bright young man turned inward, poorly socialized, who felt so little kinship with his own planet that he routinely traveled to the ones invented by his favorite authors, who thought of that secret, dreamy place his computer took him to as cyberspace—somewhere exciting, a place more real than his own life, a land he could conquer, not a drab teenager's room in his parents' house."

The definition has the things I like about the title; An implication of escapism, of a secluded covenant with things like books or the internet. And, frankly, a little bit of geek elitism.

But, as the article, and probably you, notice, there's not exactly an easy definition that works for everyone. And some of them vary a bit.

So, with so many ideas floating around, what can we agree on? Let's just break down the "Other Definitions" from Wikipedia.

* A derogatory reference to a person obsessed with intellectual pursuits for their own sake, who is also deficient in most other human attributes so as to impair the person's smooth operation within society.

* A person who is interested in technology, especially computing and new media. Geeks are adept with computers, and use the term hacker in a positive way, though not all are hackers themselves.

* A person who relates academic subjects to the real world outside of academic studies; for example, using multivariate calculus to determine how they should correctly optimize the dimensions of a pan to bake a cake.

* A person who has chosen concentration rather than conformity; one who passionately pursues skill (especially technical skill) and imagination, not mainstream social acceptance.

* A person with a devotion to something in a way that places him or her outside the mainstream. This could be due to the intensity, depth, or subject of their interest. This definition is very broad but because many of these interests have mainstream endorsement and acceptance, the inclusion of some genres as "geeky" is heavily debated. Persons have been labeled as or chosen to identify as physics geeks, mathematics geeks, engineering geeks, sci-fi geeks, computer geeks, various science geeks, movie and film geeks (cinephile), comic book geeks, theatre geeks, history geeks, music geeks, art geeks, philosophy geeks, literature geeks, historical reenactment geeks and roleplay geeks.

* A more recent school of thought sees Nerd as being a derogatory phrase, whilst Geek is simply a description. It is taken to be someone who is an enthusiast, often in things outside of the mainstream spectrum, of note is that in this definition, there is no reference to being socially inept in the slightest.

Of the above, only one of the six is explicitly derogatory. And, in truth, only two of these definitions discuss computers and technology. Yet, there's common ideas.

Obsessed. Interested. Relates academic subjects to the real world. Concentration. Devotion to something. An enthusiast.

There's social implications, too. Two talk directly about operation with society (The lack, or the lack of a lack) and two of 'mainstream social acceptance'.

So, dedicated self-selected specialists within fields outside the mainstream seem to be a common thread to most of these definitions. And it's not a bad place to start. Nor is that next to last definition, which discusses Geek as having subspecies.

That idea is really the purpose of this blog, although obviously with some bleed through from a Roleplay Geek. There's different tracks, focuses, specializations and interests among the Geek genus, Wikipedia naming most of the main ones we think of - Comic books geeks, Cinephiles, etc. But somehow, even geeks from different species seem to get along. There's some kind of commonality that lets a Band Geek get along with a Roleplay geek or vice versa. More important to this exploration, there's also very, very few examples of 'Pure' geeks with but a single focus. People who get the geek label tend to spread at least a little beyond their home turf, often as a side benefit of that easy interaction between groups.

So based on the ones I know, most geeks are, at their heart, not only in their own field. They branch out, and are, by their nature... Cross Class Geeks. I hope to chronicle all those classes, and try to figure out what Geek means in our society, and maybe discover the magic secret that makes interdisciplinary geek-dom so freaking easy.

Until then, I plan for it to be a bunch of cool stuff and musings on my different foci.


So, as best I can think of from 'Most' to 'Least', here's the geek species in me:

Science Fiction Geek (By... Birth?)
Roleplay Geek (By Practice)
Comic Geek (By Osmosis)
Internet Geek (By Exposure)
Computer Game Geek (By Daily Ritual)

Computer Geek (By Blood)
Programming Geek (In training even.)
Mythology Geek (By Preference)

Firearms Geek
Movie Geek
Art Geek


What about you?
Bottoms Up!