"How are you?"

"gumballs!" is how I am.

How to answer? It depends. Who is asking? What is the context of that particular relationship? Did we just meet or have we been friends for years? Do we have an audience?  It depends on what aspects of my life -- the "you" in the question -- this person is actually asking about.

Aside from the part to do with me, I am faced with the need to quickly build a complex mental model of the asker, who I may have only just met. There's rarely time to do the person or the question justice before they follow up with the inevitable: "something wrong?"

Uhm.

It's hard to explain all this on the fly. I do try sometimes, especially with the cashiers at Trader Joe's, who seem very nice but I don't think quite follow my reasoning.

XKCD to the rescue! Now all I have to do is whip out my phone and point to this page, which explains everything.   Surely with this tool at my disposal there will be no more less confusion.

Hacker Humor: Programming Languages as Religion

Yes Devpals, this one has been making the rounds for years, but I hadn't seen it for a while and had forgotten. I think hacker humor tells us a bit about where our geek lies. For me it was the one about LISP that really got to me:

Lisp would be Zen Buddhism - There is no syntax, there is no centralization of dogma, there are no deities to worship. The entire universe is there at your reach - if only you are enlightened enough to grasp it. Some say that it's not a language at all; others say that it's the only language that makes sense.

Hacker Humor

As a writer and devoted documenter-of-my-code, I found these laugh-out-loud hilarious.  Heck, maybe this even qualifies as a geek test. You read it and tell me, k?

Top funny source code comments

And if you've got more, tell me. (Maybe that's the real test, wanting more.)