# Street Geek

## By Bram Noidz

My day in meatspace wasn't going well. I woke up in the late morning and acquired the day's outfit using my usual clothing drawer LIFO mechanism. This week's permutation of clothing in the drawer left me with a depressingly common combination: black t-shirt with black jeans. I thought for a brief second that I should break out of the LIFO ordering and make a daring attempt at a more arbitrarily stylish outfit. Brief panic attack. Ultimately I decided against it. The purpose of a system is what it does. If I decide for even one day to ignore my LIFO clothing system, then it really is no system at all.

I hobbled downstairs in my algorithmically chosen outfit and made a cup of coffee. Double espresso with a bit of hot water mixed in. While reading something on my computer, I accidentally spilled about half of the coffee onto my shirt. Luckily for me, the stains were practically invisible on the black t-shirt, and very little ended up on my pants. The only evidence that I had spilled something on myself that morning was the faint coffee smell that lingered after I mopped it up. But who doesn't love the smell of coffee? I actually wouldn't mind a cologne with the scent of the glorious roasted bean imbued into it. Similar to the clickety-clack sound of the mechanical keyboard, the coffee cologne might have the Pavlovian effect of stimulating the electronic productivity of the people around you. Free idea for any of our young entrepreneurial readers out there.

You might be wondering why I spent more time than usual at this time of the morning thinking about what I'm wearing. Today, I am meeting my friend ByteLord for lunch at the vegan restaurant Cha-Ya on Valencia. ByteLord is a one-of-a-kind genius level programmer that I met on an IRC channel one evening. This guy slings code so neat and clean, he puts Linus Torvalds and that guy who made the McMaster-Carr catalog website to shame. Therefore, needless to say, I felt intimidated and eager to please.

I got to Cha-Ya a little bit early and ordered a green tea while waiting for ByteLord to arrive. I spilled a little bit of this on my shirt as well. Unfortunately now, mixed with the coffee stain from earlier, the combination gave off a toilet smell that was quite unpleasant. I started praying that ByteLord had a cold and wouldn't be able to smell anything. Luckily the stains were still mostly invisible on my black t-shirt.

When ByteLord walked in the front door, I almost mistook him for one of those cool hip-hopper guys. He was decked out from head to toe and looked on fleek.

A typically chilly San Francisco summer afternoon, he was dressed for warmth. A beanie with an off-white pattern, reminiscent of the Windows XP start menu background. A comfy gray overshirt with a clean geometric pattern. Some kind of smart watch whose battery was obviously dead. Most tellingly, a *Java* t-shirt underneath the overshirt, which in the context of the rest of the outfit, gave the programming language an undeserved level of coolness.

Besides the comfortable textiles, I was impressed with ByteLord's choice of accessories. A wallet chain, which I hadn't seen anyone wear since the mid 2000's, added a metallic balance to the lower half of his appearance. His neck was adorned with a necklace that didn't appear to serve any functional purpose, but matched the wallet chain quite nicely. Finally, he was wearing rather large, television-sized eyeglass frames. Frankly, I had never given much thought to accessories in an outfit, unless they have some kind of microchip in them. But ByteLord had arranged them in such a way to make the outfit look effortless, yet stylish.