When you use Kernel Traffic as your primary news source, and occasionally read The Economist for the occasional wider view of the world, I think that classifies you as geek, whether you like it or not.
Geeking out over computers is what I've been up to since I was six. I learned C sitting in seventh grade after I'd become bored with middle school Algebra, and hacked DPMI while my trigonometry class plodded along. It wasn't really till I hit college and abstract algebra that mathematics became interesting again.
I ran Debian Linux for six years. When I needed GNOME for work, work, and found Debian 18 months behind, I decided that, as long as I was custom-compiling X, glibc, and GNOME, I might as well compile everything myself.
Since middle school, I've dabbled in graphics, co-authored a web site about mathematics, gotten degrees in computer science and mathematics from Georgia Tech, gotten paid to develop the Linux, and dropped out of a PhD program to join a certain Internet Startup. I like exploring "hard" topics -- concurrency, programming language design, automated theorem proving -- but these days I mostly content myself to hacking on my laptop.
Vielen dank für die Apple Linux kernel branch zum Ben Herrenschmidt, und auch zum IBM und Apple für seine PowerPC Arbeit.
The summer of 1999 I spent hacking around on the simulation system in Jessica Hodgin's Animation lab and Jan-August 2000 getting a much-needed taste of hardware (IA64) at HP (formerly Convex). In the summer of 2001, I hung out at IBM's Austin Research Lab writing some Linux drivers for a PowerPC embeddded platform. I returned to IBM in the summer of 2003 to work on OpenPegasus, doing Linux clean-up work, PowerPC debugging, and hooking up our C++ code to Python via SWIG. The result was a CIM scripting environment which lives in the WBEMCLI package, a part of the SBLIM project.
I occasionally submit patches to Linux and fluxbox make my laptop work better. 2005 I spent working on a language for data layout (BLT), whose compiler has been patiently waiting for me to finish it ever since I left grad school. Occasionally I run across some recurring UNIX esoterica.