You know you've been hacking too long when...

The set-up line for a genre of one-liners told by hackers

about themselves. These include the following:

* Not only do you check your e-mail more often than your paper

mail, but you remember your network address faster than your

postal one.

* Your SO kisses you on the neck and the first thing you think

is "Uh, oh, priority interrupt".

* You go to balance your chequebook and discover that you're

doing it in octal.

* Your computers have a higher street value than your car.

* In your universe, "round numbers" are powers of 2, not 10.

* You have woken up recalling a dream in some programming

language.

* You realise you have never seen half of your best friends.

[An early version of this entry said "All but one of these

have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them

quite often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the

ringer." The ringer was balancing one's chequebook in octal,

which I made up out of whole cloth. Although more respondents

picked that one out as fiction than any of the others, I also

received multiple independent reports of its actually

happening, most famously to Grace Hopper while she was

working with BINAC in 1949. - ESR]

(1995-04-07)