1 @m 5u(h @ d*r|{

So I just wrote a program that will change what you type into craziness.  Let me give you an example aside from the title of the post...

$o i ju57 wR*73 a PR*graM that Wil) [han9e w4@7 y*U tyP3 int* cr@Z1n3$5_  |37 Me 91V3 y*U an 3XaMPle @$ide FroM th3 717|3 *f th3 P*$t___

Yeah.  I know.  I'm a dork.

(I'm not sure how I feel about having the "h" be a 4...)

Although I guess it's not all that surprising.  It's what I like to do.  That wasn't an assignment or anything, I just did it because I had some spare time one day.

Dorkiness runs in the family though.  I'm the first in the family to officially study dorkitude, but everyone loves it.  My oldest brother has been as dorky as I since I can remember.

I remember when he worked coding HTML locally (and I hope you know that I spend all my time with people who will argue for quite a while about how HTML isn't a language for no more reason than to show how much they know about HTML and coding), and in his spare time... you guessed it... he taught me.

This was WELL before the days of what some dubbed "FakeTML" programs like Dreamweaver, iWeb, etc.  That was back in the good ol' days when you coded each line yourself, and the walk to the computer was 2 miles, uphill both ways... in the snow.

His dorkiness and mine are the most similar in the family.  Most everyone else has their own outlets.  Songs titled, "Love is like a Refillable Mug" were invented at the RFC, a brother has 4 pinball machines, my father used to collect VCRs and bread machines, a sister did have a collection of snow-globes, and the list continues.

But here's the best part.  That's why we are so dang cool.  Each of us has our own passions and yet, although some of them are stupid enough to be creating a program that changed the letters of a sentence, we still accept each other, despite the dork that lives within.  I have never heard anything but positive things about what I find fun and interesting.

I guess that's what family is though.  It's not the blood that binds us, but the attitude we show to each other for our passions, or problems and even our mistakes.

Plus, they're a fun group to vacation with...

PS - The image at the beginning was taken from a Google image search.  I thought I HAD to add it because I did a search for "nerd programmer" and within the first 10 images, I found a picture that looks amazingly like my brother...