It’s Friday night and I’m slipping into a dimly lit, loud, packed club in New York. By traditional standards, I’m not a *cool* person, I don’t go to NY clubs, and my wardrobe is utterly deficient in terms of label-love-sexy, but this club and this party are being held and attended by *my people* —tech geeks who also fall into the same category or do they?

High-tech and haute-hip have officially converged into a very happening social scene where geeks are cool. Of all the events taking place last Friday night, it was popular blog Mashable.com’s MashBash that was one of Manhattan’s hottest tickets. A look at the various wristbands worn by attendees revealed who had access to the open bar, A-list entrepreneurs and sponsors, and dancing.

I was at once intimidated and fascinated by the crowd. Having attended a number of tech-related events over the past year (where there were no lines or bouncers) it's clearly become chic to be geek. When did levels of geekness become so complicated? Having only two wristbands, I found myself having a flashback to finding the right lunch-table in the proverbial high school cafeteria.

Growing up, I found solace in a nerd culture by circumstance, not by choice. Simply stated, if there had been an eBay in 1990, I would have auctioned off my clarinet for a proper pair of cool shoes. In fact, I spent most of my awkward teen years fighting off my “nerd-like” tendencies only to reconcile with and embrace them as an adult, choosing an obvious path for the socially awkward and alienated — high tech.

My career has been a safe haven for my awkwardness for several years, but recently, I’ve been noticing that the culture of the uncool has transformed to become the culture of the cool. Though, it feels like it happened overnight, it’s been rapidly developing alongside the 21st century expansion of the Internet and the more recent blowout of the social web.