I wandered into a lecture theatre yesterday, fresh from a pair of healthy and confidence boosting pints of Bishops Finger. Not randomly, myself and a number of colleagues, who I have finally realised are human too, were about to give a short presentation with the aim of hawking a fictional idea for fictional cash from big blue.

Are they contagious?

asks Roger. I look at him blankly, adjust my hat and notice Greg is also busy with the hat-adjusting confusion. I guess what started with a cheap joke and a Panama the day I first became a CompSci has become an institution.

In the beginning, were some words, and they were 'Kirk Hammet's hat (on the back of Load IIRC) is cool, and the hat appeared.

To illustrate how bad the joke was, I'll attempt to misquote Tony

..and welcome to Software Engineering 10: An Introduction To Programming, if you're in the wrong place leave now while you still can, otherwise hello, and hello greasy hackers on the back row. Nice hat, bad joke.

Of course The Hat was useful for reminding me which computer I was working at in the uni labs, (until they upgraded to shiny new ones and I bought one of the old ones) and catching flying goodies from lecturers aware of our short attention spans. It appears throwing Mars bars mice and t-shirts with deadly accuracy is required if you're going to make it in computing.

Over the years The Hat evolved into a black fedora (as modelled by Grim) and when that went missing, into a black nubuck Buckaroo in the style of a Carl McCoy wannabe's first accessory. Either way The Hat has been as much a part of me as my ego, and people flock to it like goths round an icecrem van. Men stole it to irritate me, non-programmer-women to irritate me, and programmers to get my attention, although what kind of attention revolves around the number of pints consumed....

Greg wearing a suitably classy black fedora had completely slipped under the radar, but there and then it hit me. Damn. I think he looks up to me, and he looks better in that hat than I do in mine.

And to complete my identity chrisis, Technichristian.net is on the same aggregator and is using the same theme as my site. Time for me to make a new theme. I guess the theme should feature the hat in some way shape or form, or maybe Milf will steal the site if it has my hat on it.