Some people are turned on by power.

Others, by money.

No matter what people tell you, there's something non-physical about their partner that turns them on.

I don't mean to undermine the importance or relevance of physical attraction. Often, it's the first thing that people notice and at times it can completely nullify your chances of seeing someone more than once.

Physical attraction is extremely important, but for me, it's not necessarily the outcome of a physical trait. There are certain personality traits about a person that can make me physically attracted to him.

Love is one of those things. With every boyfriend I've ever had, I've gotten more and more attracted to him as I fell deeper and deeper in love.

Power doesn't turn me on; neither does money, not even education necessarily. I've met some extremely well educated people who make me want to puke as soon as they utter a word.

Kindness turns me on and strong family values. I think I'm not the only woman who likes men who are kind to dogs, babies and the elderly. I am turned on by patience. By someone who's truly interested in what I think. Someone who makes me laugh and doesn't have a bitter and cynical look on life.

Yesterday I found something new.

One of my teammates and I went to a meeting with a research person who wrote an application that we're supposed to use for our client-side applications. This one hour meeting grew to four and a half hours as the guy gave us a full background on why they had built this package and how excited he was about it and some of the problems they were aware of, etc. While I could tell that my teammate was about to pass out from boredom, I was so excited that my neck pain disappeared for some time.

I discovered that geeks turn me on.

Actually, that's not entirely true. There are several kinds of geeks. One kind thinks he's better than the rest of the world and looks down at everyone who asks questions. This breed is often bitter and condescending.

The other kind, the one that excites me way more than it should, is the kind who is so thrilled by the work that he wants to share it with the whole world. He comes into your office and says, "Look what I figured out, isn't it neat?" He's not showing off, he's like a little kid who discovered a new toy. He's giddy.

Maybe that's what really turns me on. The giddiness. The intoxicating level of fascination with something that is obviously driven by large doses of passion. And that turns me on.

It's contagious.

It's not the intelligence or the technology. It's not the knowledge.

It's the child-like ability of exercising pure joy.

And this guy had it. I sat there, getting drunk by his love for it. At that moment he was much hotter than Tom Cruise. (Okay, so Tom doesn't do it for everyone. Put your own hottie here, since that's not my point anyhow.)

My list of favorite people just got incremented by one.

What turns you on?

Previously? Durable.

I am the queen of multitasking.

It is completely impossible for me to do only one thing at a time. Even during high school, I couldn't do my homework unless the TV was on. I can do eleven things simultaneously and all of them successfully.

A few weeks ago, I bought a digital recorder that used IBM's voice recognition software to take the audio file and create text from it. Since I can't type as fast as I'd like to, I thought that would be an invaluable gadget for me.

Putting aside the severe issues the digital recorder had, I decided to just use the software with a microphone. Well the way this software works is that you have to turn off all the other noise at home. Even our birdie got in the way of the software doing its job.

To top it off, the output was only 85percent accurate. For the entire weekend, I battled with thoughts of whether I should keep the gadget or return it. I liked the concept so much that I didn't want to return it. I wanted it to work.

After a few days, it hit me: I wasn't going to keep it. The software completely rules out any possibilities of multitasking. I have to sit there and read out, including punctuation, every single word and speak slowly and distinctly. Not my forte. I speak too fast.

So the software went back and I had no regrets.

It seems the only time I am only doing a single task is when I read. Even then, I do a lot of thinking but I think the reading should count as a single task. For some reason, I never feel restless when I read.

There are many weekends when I sit in the same chair and read from 9am to 5pm, non-stop. So the good news is that I don't have ADD.

Still, though, I wonder what it is about reading that doesn't make me seek eleven other things to be going on simultaneously.

Previously? Work.

There are many excellent point made in the book that made me think. As a person who grew up in Istanbul, computers didn't enter into my life until I was in fifth grade. My Commodore 64, floppy drive and dot matrix printer from those days is still sitting in storage in my parent's house. The interesting thing is, I never had the community that David had at school. In my high school there were no computer classes until after I graduated. Maybe this was because I went to an all-girls school or maybe the whole country was behind, I'm not exactly sure. Either way, I never saw a Macintosh, let alone a UNIX machine, till I stepped into the clusters of Carnegie Mellon. Filled with kids who'd had a computer since they could walk and ones who had already programmed in several languages before they made it to college, it was no wonder that I felt intimidated in my computer science classes. I was thinking, as I read this book, that it's amazing how much I've learned in the almost eight years I've been in this country. Then again, in some ways I'll probably never catch up to those kids who, like David, grew up hacking with 1,200 baud modems.

While reading the part about Zork and how he and his roommate stayed up until late hours, playing the game for several weeks straight, I was reminded of my college years when sleep wasn't really an issue. I remember when my friends and I spent endless hours playing the LucasArts game Full Throttle. College is a time when you do fun things just cause they're fun. You listen to the same song over and over again or you yell out an inside joke ("I'll never find that secret passage") and laugh till you pee. You stay up all night, making the most of your T-3 line. I'm not sure what happens once you graduate; maybe because you have to get up and go to work in the morning, or because you no longer live in a building where the average age is 19, you just don't pull all-nighters anymore. You don't spend several weeks playing Doom across the network, boding with strangers as you try to sneak up on them and blow their brains out. I really think college is magical and unfortunately, as it is with all good things, you never appreciate it till it's over.

I laughed as I read Harvard's lack of foresight on computers and what they represented for our future. Then again, Harvard has never been famous for their innovative technology. The interviews with Microsoft also made me chuckle out loud. As I read that he was excited about Microsoft, I felt terrified cause I'm a firm hater of the company, the further I read, the more I enjoyed what happened. Microsoft has never been and will never be about innovation.

Finally, the issues of sharing code and not keeping secrets intrigued me. It's interesting that, in the beginning, people shared code and promoted the idea of building on top of their programs to make it more custom to your wants or to perfect it further. As companies like Microsoft and others emerged, the programs became close boxes that didn't dare share the details or 'secrets' of how they functioned. With the Open Source Movement we're returning back to the time when programmers can see the magic behind a program and tweak it and learn from it. I think that's the true power of computing. The idea of sharing and learning through the wisdom of others is what will bring programming to another level.

Here's more of David's work. If you couldn't figure it out from my long passages above, I highly recommend this book.