Wil Wheaton, the former Wesley Crusher of Star Trek: TNG, is one of the most interesting geeks I know. Geeks, as a species, come from fantastic and variegated backgrounds — doctors, lawyers, ditch-diggers and shop-clerks; it's a salutory effect of the absence of any real professional practice of geekdom. All that's required to be a geek is to geek out — to pick up a computer and find something there that speaks to you, loudly and compellingly.
Wil has written a very good memoir of his journey to the present day, called Just a Geek (my blurb: "Here's the gimmick: Wil isn't *just* a geek. He's a geek who's come to nerdvana — the Paramount lot where they dropped the first Trekbomb and forever changed the world — to tell us that it's not all it's cracked up to be. He's also a geek who can *write*. Finally, he's a geek who's unafraid to sit at the keyboard and open a vein: there's a lot of scorching honesty mixed in with these convulsively funny memoirs."), published by O'Reilly.
Wil recently appeared at the Gnomedex convention and read an hour-long excerpt from Just a Geek, and the ITConversations people have put it online.
(Thanks, Wil!)
