My hard drive is bigger than yours!  It has to be the lamest thing I’ve ever heard; but sadly enough, I heard it.  Of the dumbest things someone can say, this one quote has to rank up towards the top.  There are many other cases I can think of off the top of my head that have the same lame effect.

“XBox 360 pwns PS3 graphics!”

“I am elite”

“I’m a hacker because I know BASIC”

“Stupid noob”

You’re thinking - ok, shut up already.  No one is stupid enough to say that stuff.  I mean, the PS3 hasn’t been released yet; the only thing elite about you is your ability for people to make fun of you; BASIC could be used to hack when Bill Gates said “You’ll never need more than 384K RAM!”; and noob… the only thing I notice about that word is the red line jagging under it as I type it in MS Word –the line that signals my inability to spell.

All of these quotes have two things in common.  First, they each lack firm technically documented proof.  Secondly, they each indicate the speaker has no life, and cannot comprehend how to get one.

This is the story of my Programming II class this year.

In one corner, we have all the kids who think they are, with lack of a better word, God.  They sit at home all day, play XBox, and then come back to school and talk about how they pwned each other.

In the other corner, we have the people who think their stuff is better than everyone else’s for the simple reason that they own it.  Often times, the first and second corners combine to form a section.

In the other corner, we have the people who think they can hack.  In this group includes many of the little punks who cause trouble on networks simply by being idiots, not because of any extreme hacking power they’ve made.  This group also tends to meld in with the above groups to form a semi-circle.

This semi-circle envelops the three people who I refer to with any respect at all.  They are the people who have nothing to prove, no elite gaming skillz, not even any concern about their hardware.  Yet, this group is surrounded by idiots.  And this gets pretty amusing.

In the group of three that I respect, we have Mario, a super talented coder who has experience coding just about anything you can think of–this kid is a genius.  Then we have Tyler B, a quiet kid, someone who programs because he’s interested in it, not because he’s particularly good at it –someone who is interested in learning.  And then there’s Tim.  Tim is one of those people who will only talk when you ask him a direct question, and his direct answer is usually yes or no.  He is much like Tyler B in his programming abilities, but he is respectable because of his interest.

These three friends sit back and listen to all the utterly stupid comments being thrown around the room, and laugh about the whole class period.  We love the first grade style fights (or the more common high school word-fight that I can’t say here) “My *insert hardware here* is bigger than yours!”  Or even the classic self-promotion stunt “I’m better than you!”

Now, I may be just kind of partial to those who don’t make idiots out of themselves… but seriously–these kids don’t have the slightest clue what they are talking about.  But, this one has to be my favorite:

“My hard drive is bigger than yours!”

“What are its specs?”

“Its an emachine!!!!”