You know you've been hacking too long when

   The  set-up  line  for  a  genre  of one-liners told by hackers about
   themselves. These include the following:

     * not only do you check your email more often than your paper mail,
       but  you  remember your {network address} faster than your postal
       one.
     * your {SO} kisses you on the neck and the first thing you think is
       "Uh, oh, {priority interrupt}."
     * you  go  to balance your checkbook and discover that you're doing
       it in octal.
     * your computers have a higher street value than your car.
     * in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10.
     * more  than  once,  you  have  woken  up recalling a dream in some
       programming language.
     * you  see  the  word "Oxford" and mentally trip over the fact that
       `r' is not a hex digit.
     * you realize you have never seen half of your best friends.

   A list of these can be found by searching for this phrase on the web.

   [An  early version of this entry said "All but one of these have been
   reliably  reported  as hacker traits (some of them quite often). Even
   hackers  may  have  trouble  spotting  the  ringer."  The  ringer was
   balancing  one's  checkbook  in  octal,  which I made up out of whole
   cloth.  Although more respondents picked that one out as fiction than
   any  of  the  others, I also received multiple independent reports of
   its  actually  happening, most famously to Grace Hopper while she was
   working with BINAC in 1949. --ESR]

[glossary]