The technologists' (read: 'geeks') guide to the weekend

There are many bold and beautiful aspects to geekdom, but weekends aren't one of them. Many of us -- most of us -- lay aside our workplace tech tasks and go home to our friends and families and their computer travails. Or we head for movies that send us into paroxysms of fact-checking angst ("As if they'd have given the explosive charges to only Olson and not Kirk or Sulu as well -- worst logistics ever!"). Or we dig into an open-source project or a volunteer effort that looks just like our work taskload. Or we don't take the weekend at all.

And geeks, that's okay. Know who you are and what makes you happy. The secret to geek happiness isn't getting away from it all; it's being able to survey it all from your chosen perch. Which happens to be made of ones and zeros and silicon and DIY and logic and fierce intelligence.

Recovery comes to you on Friday afternoons not to bury your techish tendencies but to praise them -- and, I hope, to integrate them into your broader world. If tech is just work you do to get to the weekend, this probably isn't the column for you... but then again, I wonder if you're actually hanging out on Betanews in that case.

So what's your plan for this weekend? You might pick up a copy of The Atlantic, which is asking how Apple will get by without Steve Jobs, or (more broadly) how a high-profile CEO affects a company. There's also a piece in there about a 72-year longitudinal study that followed the lives of hundreds of men (including a guy who became president of the United States; guess who?) in an attempt to figure out what leads to long life and happiness. The coverline for this piece on the print edition doesn't serve the article well; read it anyway.

I'm going to assume you've seen Star Trek at least once already. Ignore the distraught squeaking from people who feel JJ Abrams has defiled their shrine; if Wil Wheaton's okay with the new version, lesser nerds have no beef. (Besides, didn't you hear Mr. Nimoy?) Some of you may be off to Angels and Demons; I appreciate the intrinsic tech appeal of symbology, and director Ron Howard and star Tom Hanks are both space nerds of the first water, but seriously, no. You're better than that. Put NASA TV up on whatever screen's convenient and watch that if you must stare at a screen.

Or, if your tendencies lean more toward fantasy than sci-fi, have you seen The Hunt For Gollum yet? The fan-developed unofficial side-quel to The Lord of the Rings cost about $6,000 to make but works at least as well as any of those Rankin-Bass attempts at telling the story pre-Peter Jackson. This 40-minute film wouldn't have been possible even ten years ago; check it out.

It's likely that civilians this weekend will be asking you about the Google outage yesterday, in which (allegedly) the search giant somehow re-routed a mess of traffic through Asia. The company estimated at one point that 14% of the US userbase was affected. I wasn't among those folk, but like any reasonable person I ran through a mental checklist of how much I'm relying on The Cloud in my daily life. (A lot.) I suggest that you suggest to the people who rely on you for tech insight that they not put all their eggs in one basket -- e-mail's one thing, but I can imagine that people who rely on Google's word processing or Google's voice mail services were not having a happy Thursday.

I'd tell your people also that we're still working out a balance between "the cloud" and what we do on our own local machines; that we've been having this debate for a very long time under many different names (thin computing, anyone?) and that as in most things, a course of moderation is wisest. And remind them to back up everything they care about. (Fun fact: If you nag your friends and family about backing up their data every time they ask you a tech question, they don't ask as much. And you get to do the fun I-told-you-so thing when something does go wrong. FTW!)

Finally, Recovery will be spending some non-quality time celebrating the return of 4chan, though we think moot would be totally within his rights to throw up his hands and walk away after the latest DDoS. In related news, members of Anonymous will be gathering in San Francisco to counter-protest CoS demonstrations outside the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. No one here is telling you what to think of the Church of Scientology or their anti-psychiatry ways, but there's no denying that the battle between the CoS and online commenters got much more interesting when the latter donned the Guy Fawkes masks. Let your geek flag fly and have a good weekend.