Yes. You read the title right. About 1 hour ago, I had the revelation: It’s cool to be a computer nerd.
Why? Aren’t computer nerds constantly the source of being others entertainment by being on? Stereotypically, yes. Actually, I can’t answer, because I’ve never found myself in that situation.
Anyway, back to the point. It’s cool to be a computer nerd because …
(Did the suspense there get you? 
)
… you know how a computer works, and therefore can make it do whatever you want (within reason). My situation: having tasks to accomplish for homework assignments and class projects that happen to be repetitive. My solution: write a small little program to do the work for me.
This past semester, I have been enrolled in a Data Mining class, which, believe it or not, requires me to analyze and work with HUGE ( somewhere between the MB to GB range ) amounts of data. The calculations, transformations, and statistics that I need to acquire and perform on said data would take me more time than I would actually want to spend on the entire assignment / project. Writing a program saves me that time. Sure, I get headaches and frustrated by the little bugs that arise while I’m writing the program, but it saves me from the even greater levels of headaches and frustrations that come from doing it manually. Plus, you get that nice warm fuzzy sense of accomplishment when a task that would have taken you hours to do manually gets completed in less that 10 seconds.
Proof:
SN1950B_II processed in 0 seconds.
SN1957D_II processed in 0 seconds.
SN1968D_II processed in 0 seconds.
SN1978K_II processed in 0 seconds.
SN1979C_II processed in 0 seconds.
SN1980K_II processed in 0 seconds.
SN1981K_II processed in 0 seconds.
Total running time: 1 seconds.
Processed date from 7 supernovas.
That's the output generated by a program I wrote just now. Each supernova has 10,000 days of observations (predictions for the ones less that 28 years old) associated with it, and the program combines each property from each observation day of each supernova into a single line of a CSV file.
7 seconds to analyze and process roughly 70,000 numbers. That probably would take me and my project group at least a few months to do by hand.
It's cool to be a computer nerd.