1. If you introduce your wife as “mylady@home.wife”
2. If your spouse sends you an e-mail instead of calling you to dinner
3. If you can quote scenes from any Monty Python movie
4. If you want an 8X CDROM for Christmas
5. If Dilbert is your hero
6. If you stare at an orange juice container because it says CONCENTRATE
7. If you can name 6 Star Trek episodes
8. If the only jokes you receive are through e-mail
9. If your wristwatch has more computing power than a 486DX-50
10. If your idea of good interpersonal communication means getting the decimal point in the right place
11. If you look forward to Christmas only to put together the kids’ toys
12. If you use a CAD package to design your son’s Pine Wood Derby car
13. If you have used coat hangers and duct tape for something other than hanging coats and taping ducts
14. If, at Christmas, it goes without saying that you will be the one to find the burnt-out bulb in the string
15. If you window shop at Radio Shack
16. If your ideal evening consists of fast-forwarding through the latest sci-fi movie looking for technical inaccuracies
17. If you have “Dilbert” comics displayed anywhere in your work area
18. If you carry on a one-hour debate over the expected results of a test that actually takes five minutes to run
19. If you are convinced you can build a phaser out of your garage door opener and your camera’s flash attachment
20. If you don’t even know where the cover to your personal computer is
21. If you have modified your can-opener to be microprocessor driven
22. If you know the direction the water swirls when you flush
23. If you own “Official Star Trek” anything
24. If you have ever taken the back off your TV just to see what’s inside
25. If a team of you and your co-workers have set out to modify the antenna on the radio in your work area for better reception
26. If you have ever purchased an electronic appliance “as-is”
27. If you see a good design and still have to change it
28. If the salespeople at Circuit City can’t answer any of your questions
29. If you still own a slide rule and you know how to work it
30. If the thought that a CD could refer to finance or music never enters your mind
31. If you own a set of itty-bitty screw drivers, but you don’t remember where they are
32. If you rotate your screen savers more frequently than your automobile tires
33. If you have a functioning home copier machine, but every toaster you own turns bread into charcoal
34. If you have more toys than your kids
35. If you need a checklist to turn on the TV
36. If you have introduced your kids by the wrong name
37. If you have a habit of destroying things in order to see how they work
38. If your I.Q. number is bigger than your weight
39. If you can remember 7 computer passwords but not your anniversary
40. If you have memorized the program schedule for the Discovery channel and have seen most of the shows already
41. If you have ever owned a calculator with no equal key and know what RPN stands for.
42. If your father sat 2 inches in front of your family’s first color TV with a magnifying lens to see how they made the colors, and you grew up thinking that was normal
43. If you know how to take the cover off of your computer, and what size screw driver to use
44. If you can type 70 words a minute but can’t read your own handwriting
45. If people groan at the party when you pick out the music
46. If you can’t remember where you parked your car for the 3rd time this week
47. If your checkbook always balances
48. If your wristwatch has more buttons than a telephone
49. If you have more friends on the Internet than in real life
50. If you thought the real heroes of “Apollo 13″ were the mission controllers
51. If you think that when people around you yawn, it’s because they didn’t get enough sleep
52. If you spend more on your home computer than your car
53. If you know what http:/ stands for
54. If you’ve ever tried to repair a $5.00 radio
55. If you have a neatly sorted collection of old bolts and nuts in your garage
56. If your three year old son asks why the sky is blue and you try to explain atmospheric absorption theory
57. When your friend tells you all about his Cressida V6 and you reply “Yeah, I had V5, and it was full of bugs!”
58. When driving you see a license plate with the letters DSR, and you feel compelled to touch your bumper to the other car to see if you can raise CD.
59. When you are counting objects “0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D…”.
60. When you lay down in the afternoon for a short rest, end up sleeping 4 hours, and call it a “mega-nap”.
61. When your friend is going to Essex for vacation and you tell her, “You really should go for the DX, it has the built in co-processor.”
62. When you dream in 256 palettes of 256 colors.
63. When asked about a bus schedule, you wonder if it is 16 or 32 bits.
64. When you have to go to the bathroom, but you wait until bladder meltdown, since “goto” is bad programming style.
65. When you convince yourself that Tetris really does improve eye-hand coordination.
66. When the radio traffic reporter talks about a backup caused by a crash, and you correct him that a backup is good protection in case of a crash.
67. When floppy drive applies more to your love life, and hard drive to your machines.
68. When you call “*.*” star-dot-star.
69. When you can do hexadecimal arithmetic in your head.
70. When your wife goes to the market for some Macintosh apples, and you correct her, “No, dear, it’s ‘Apple Macintoshes’.”
71. When your wife says “IF you don’t turn off that damn machine and come to bed, THEN I am going to divorce you!”, and you chastise her for omitting the ELSE clause.

As a programmer, fast typing is important. Ever since those boring classes in high school on computers that barely had an operating system, I’ve tried to improve my typing. I hate systems that charge you to see what your score is, or try to get you to buy something from them. Finally, I found a good system.

The 10 Fast Fingers Speedtest offers a free typing test that uses the most common english words. So, not only do you see how fast you type, but you also improve every time you take the test. When you finish the 60 second test, it displays how many points you earned, how you score with other people who took the test. It also shows how many characters per minute you can type, how many words you spelled correctly, and how many you typed wrong. It’s an excellent tool.
So, I can type 357 characters (or 67 words) per minute. What about you? Post your scores in the comments.

The internet has progressed quite a bit since it’s early days. Today, a good Designer or Programmer (or combination thereof) can make a website do whatever or look however she wants. I remember, just 6 years ago when I started learning HTML, what was considered “cool”, “useful”, and “standard”. However, there is one change I await eagerly.

Web Fonts.

I first read about Web Fonts 2 or 3 months ago. I remember thinking that it would be so cool to be able to choose the font you use on your website. I design new sites all the time and don’t want to use the same fonts for each website I create.

Now, WebKit has added compatibility for Web Fonts, enabling the use of them in Safari. It makes me wonder what is taking Firefox so long, but I digress. So, we have a step in the right direction. Hopefully other modern browsers will pick up on soon. I won’t hold my breath that Internet Explorer will jump on the bandwagon.

Personally, I’m glad to see this. There has been a great deal of debate as to whether Web Fonts is good or bad. I think there are valid points on both sides. I think that having the freedom to choose the font can add a level to the design that we simply haven’t had in the past. I can however see how there could be some copyright issues with protected fonts, while on the flipside, don’t see why said fonts should be usable in print but not on the web. There are concerns about inexperienced web designers (or people who want to believe they are web designers) misusing Web Fonts and creating horrible, unreadable, unusable, inaccessible websites. To that I ask: “And that is different from now, how?” Honestly, it just means I get more work.

So, as I wait eagerly for the majority of browsers to support Web Fonts, I have to make do with common fonts. I did a great deal of research to figure out which fonts are most common on which systems so we could have a little more variety in fonts. I included alternatives for Mac and Linux distributions. So, I put together a compilation of fonts that are available on at least 50% of computers with that operating system. You can check it out here.

If this list helps you, please, I want to hear about it.