Pamela Jean Owens off-line

Yes, it was bound to happen. I learned Fortran at SMU School of Engineering when I was a senior in high school back in 1965, when the Engineering faculty hadn’t figured out yet how to teach Fortran to their Freshman Engineers. So they enlisted our Honors Math teacher from Hillcrest (High School, Dallas), Mrs. Lee Ellwood (beloved she will ever be by all her students, Amen) to teach us and then teach their teachers how to teach them. I fell immediately in love with the whole idea of a Flow Chart. I reveled in searching down and fixing bugs. I giggled with glee as page after page of computer paper flowed over the spindles of the printer, with its beautiful alternating green and white pattern (oh, be still, my heart!).

Then I strayed from the world of geeks, save for a brief foray as a college senior taking statistics in my Sociology Methods class and again writing a program to do a factor analysis of a set of data for my senior paper. Once again I marveled at the Flow Chart. I passionately swatted and thwarted all bugs in my program. I caressed that print-out and eagerly consumed my results.

Now, in another era and another day, holding more power on my lap than my feeble imagination could ever have envisioned in 1965, more power than the whole Vanderbilt computer center mainframe may have had in 1969, I confess to all, My name is Pamela and I am a Geek.

I now have a Technorati account. Here’s a link to my Technorati Profile. It’s really there.

A few months ago I couldn’t spell Technorati. Now I is one. God help us all.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 11:48 pm and is filed under This and That. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.