How many of us are lost in the machine world and the Blue Nowhere? I know I am a dreadful addict… 98% of my correspondance is via the computer. I keep track of everything on my computer and my palm pilot (which is dreadfully slow but at least it is able to go in my pocketbook!) and I use my mobile phone over land lines. I have been known to dream in code and yes I have been talking and used chat abbreviations. Nothing like saying “LOL” instead of actually laughing!

My start in the machine world was at a young age. Which doesn’t say much to people who don’t know me, but considering I am 29 and have had a computer for as long as I can remember… that does say something. My father always had at least one working computer. He would also tinker around in boxes so I learned the inner workings as well. I remember programming in basic and using dos. I remember writing my own games. My dad and I worked on a pizza delivery game. We should resurrect that. It was quite fun! OK, not really we would have to deliver pizza and well, it was text based. But we thought it was fun! At school I would fill the screen with words to piss off the teachers in the computer lab. And I hated playing Oregon Trail and found a way to complete the “journey” in under five minutes. Of course I’ve forgotten how I did that NOW because that was around fifth grade.

I remember logging onto BBS’s in the late 80s and posting messages and sending mail through the FidoNet. Of course back then I was just Ozma as no one else had ganked the name. I had hotmail in 1996 and I started my website in 1997 after getting a scanner. I tell you being military and poor put a real damper on my computing. But in 97 I opped in a chatroom about quilting of all things. Yes quilters are very high tech! HA!

When I write I type. I can’t stand to write on paper and then have to turn around and input it. It just seems so much easier to open a screen and hammer away at the keyboard than to write and then hammer. Drove my teachers up the wall in high school because I simply couldn’t stand to do all those funky little index cards and blah blah blah. Just seemed easier for me to log onto a BBS and cut and paste or to just key stuff into a txt file. Getting a laptop in 1993 helped out a lot with that, but of course that was the year I graduated. That laptop was a lifesaver at college though. Everyone else spent hours in the library and I just had to lay in bed. Excellent. People couldn’t believe I actually brought not only my own computer but a laptop. Of course I also had a cell phone then and I would think it’s fairly safe to say that I was one of the only people in my freshman class at college with one and most likely the only girl.

I’ve been thinking about all of this because I just read a book entitled “The Blue Nowhere”. The book involves a murderous hacker who somehow lost the distinction between reality and the machine world and basically went under the theory that “All the world is a MUD.” (Yup been there, done that as well!) The cops can’t track him down since he’s so elite that they spring another hacker from jail in order to bust the perp. So there’s tons of fiddling and hacking and zooming through the net. The story was great. And I was even surprised at the ending for who the “partner” was. That’s good! The book was indeed geek worthy. The only downfall is apparently the writer decided to write a book aimed at computer geeks but then dumbed it down so the most computer illiterate could read it. I mean there was actually a point where he defined “BRB”. I think that’s a little much considering the audience this book plays to.

Would I recommend it? Sure, but only with a warning of the constant explanations. Up to the end. Argh! But of course it was all men. Well there was this one woman and she was chubby and ugly and yadda yadda. But even she admitted to how “rare” she was… a woman in the true computer world. I suppose we are rare. Generally I give my email address out to my female friends and they are like “Well I barely know how to use email” and they think I’m odd since I do everything online. I am the general tech help girl for just about everyone I know, even today. People from Church call me up and say “Hey I need some help and heard you know about…” But I think there are more of us “geek gurls” than people know about. And we aren’t all fat and ugly and alone. Hey look at Kate from the original Screensavers back when it was ZDTV. Megan and Cat and Sarah are my icons. Girls in geekdom who are proud of it.

Anyway, this book… very fascinating. And of course it was great to take a walk down memory lane as the author fleshed out the characters. I’ve never hacked big government stuff or anything like that, but the rest of it… yup… the talk about BBS and take apart computers and how young these guys started computering, and MUDs and all of that… Was kind of fun.