The mnot standard geek index

Sometimes Amazon scares me. Last night I was browsing the site looking at some novels (nothing whatsoever to do with technology) and here is what I see on the left side bar: a suggestion for an advice list called “So you’d like to… be a standards geek” by an Amazon user called mnotting who of course turns out to be Mark Nottingham. The scary part is that I know for a fact that I wasn’t logged on the Amazon site and there was no Amazon cookie on my disk. So either this was a complete (and unlikely) coincidence or Amazon uses the not-so-dynamic IP address provided by my DSL provider to try to recognize me. And even then, my Amazon profile clearly flags me as someone interested in technology among other things, but I don’t see how it would flag me as a standards person unless it reads my email…

In any case, this tempted me to measure my level of standard geekiness and the result is that I rank a 3 out of 8. To get to this ranking, I only looked at the list of books. I ignored the travel gadgets such as battery chargers and cell phones because there are so many of these that the chance of having a match is pretty slim (my personal recommendation for those who work a lot in airplanes is a Tablet PC).

So, focusing on the books, my three points on the mnot standards geek index come from:

• Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. I read it in French but I assume it still counts.
• Robert’s Rules of Order. I can’t say I read every single page but I’ve browsed it enough to know where to looks for things. I received my copy (in a different edition than Mark’s) from the hands of OASIS’ Jamie Clark when the WS-Notification Technical Committee was created that I co-chair with Peter Niblett.
• TBL’s “Weaving the Web” of which I talked in a previous blog entry (BTW Mark you might want to check the URL you provided for this book in your list, it is incorrect and causes Amazon to not list this book in the recap of all products you recommend).

I don’t really know what to think of my score of 3/8. So I’d like the other standards geeks out there (Chris, DaveC, DaveO, Glen, Jeff, Marc, Mark, Gudge, Sanjiva, Jorgen, Tom and many others) to take the test and report their results so I know how serious my case is.