Arrogant Computer Guy

I’ll be the first to admit it, IT guys are arrogant. I can’t explain it; they just are. I think it may be the apocryphal notion that computer guys are smart, sometimes even dubbed as “geniuses”. Maybe this has got to our head? I’m lazy. I’m terrible at math. I sometimes spell ‘cake’ with a ‘k’, but I can probally fix your computer. Ergo…

I caught myself being that guy last night…

Sister: How do I do that thing again on the computer? You just did it so fast and left. I couldn�t follow.

me: man, you’re terrible with computers.

Mother: He never teaches me anything. Why can�t you teach me to use Excel?

me: Mom, you can�t ask a programmer to teach you to use computers. They’re too intimately involved with them. It�s like � hmm, how can I explain this without sounding arrogant. It�s like � Alright, suppose your lost in the city and you’re looking for a particular street, you’re not going to go ask the Mayor for directions are you?

Okay! bad example.

Finals, how exciting!

There’s nothing like the solidarity of students that know they’re going to fail a final.

During the few dwindling hours before my CSC final, a group of us gathered around the couches in the library and desperatly went over some looseleaf handouts and some badly taken, not to mention, hopelessly incomplete, notes from class. But surpringly ( when two or three are gathered), I think I may have learned more in that 2 hour study symposium, then I did all semester.

Well test-time arrived, I scrawled a few formulas on my palm (i need a bigger palm), and well… I think I got enough ink down to pass. Here’s hoping :-/

Evil Spyware

One day I was looking for naked pictures of former attorney general Janet Reno on Google, and I clicked on this link that seemed promising. Lo and behold, about 20 windows started to pop-up, one after another. I’d close one, two more would appear, asking me to install things, and I kept saying “no”. And not the polite “no”, it was the loud and colorfully languaged “no�. Then, after clicking “no” about a dozen times, and seeing that the sea of questions were no way relenting, I did the vulcan live long and prosper on my keyboard to get it to just terminate my web browser. But, it was too late. After I restarted my computer, all of sudden it had become a nesting ground to a gross brood of various new programs that surreptitiously installed itself –like “Bargain Buddy”, and “Cool Web Search”, oh, and the ever popular and bitch to remove “Home Search Assistant”.

I was mortified by this. I think it irks computer science guys even more when stuff like this happens to them–because (arrogantly) we’re better than this. Anyway, today I finally got rid of all my spyware, without having to reinstall windows. I had one particularly pernicious one that couldn’t be removed by conventional means and proved to be quite disabling. It caused my AIM to crash, and slowed my computer down significantly; it went by the name “Home Search Assistant”.

If anyone has this listed on their “Add/Remove” programs list, and having trouble removing it, there is a great step-by-step tutorial online here that will help you out.

Anyway, I finally went Mozilla Firefox all the way now; you won�t catch me dead using Internet Explorer. I recommend you do the same if you happen to like your computer– download it: www.getfirefox.com

FYI: I was obviously kidding about looking for naked pictures of Janet Reno

(It was really for Ruth Ginsberg )

Waking up is Hard to Do

I remember as a kid growing up, having to be woken up ever morning at 6:45 for school. I remember being dragged out of bed, kicking, screaming, pleading, begging, for just 5 more minutes of sleep as though a mere 5 more minutes would be all I need to be somersaulting out of bed. If the begging didn’t work, I’d perk my ears out, trying to hear the patter of the shower, an occupied shower usually guaranteed at least 5 more minutes of sleep. A nod of acquiescence and I’d drop my head on the pillow, curl up, fetus-like, and as soon as I got comfy BE WOKEN UP SINCE FIVE MINUTES WERE UP. Ah, yes, what a miserable hour that “6:45” is. I’d then drag myself in the bathroom, to be even more depressed looking at the bathroom window. How can it still be dark out? Where am I, the moon? What sick maniacal joke is this, and who are the misanthropes that decided school should start so damn early?

Now here I am, in my last years at college, bit*hing about 10’o clock courses–fists in the air and grunting that their “too damn early”. But I think I’m alone on this one. Everyone I talk to, unless their lying (which is a reasonable explanation) asserts that they have no trouble getting up in the morning. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe there is a certain quantity of hours set for every individual that you can’t exceed, or be delinquent of, to be able to jump out of bed in the morning, grinning like Bob from the Enzyte commercials. You know, Bob, the Once-a-Day tablet for natural male enhancement? –Don’t look at me like that!

I still haven’t figured out my optimal sleep amount, but one thing is certain, it’s not 11 hours. I had 11 hours last night and I’ve been a walking zombie all day. It’s not 8 hours either, that’s my average amount, and my eyelids still fall like guillotine blades.

So the question is: my optimal amount of sleep, does it fall in between 8-11 hours? Does it even exist? Or is it just a pipe dream.

Procrastination Becomes You

I am the epitome of procrastination. I am what procrastination would be if it took on a human form.

I have had this term paper assigned for class, I believe the second week of school. It is now the last week of school, and I have yet to start. Why is it so hard to start something before the night-of it�s due date? What is it about “starting early” that is so… unattractive?

Even now, instead of working on this paper, I�m over here writing a posting on my website!

Alright, enough distractions, here I go. Two nights, 15 pages, a medium Dunkachino, I can do this!

*********

Finally finished, never thought I’d be able to say that!

Since there was a ton of material I found online that really helped me with research etc. — especially previous essays from students from other computer science courses, I’m going to put some of my CSC320 essays online as well. I don’t recommend reading them, lol. They are dull and estoric, but in the happenstance that someone in a CS course somewhere would find it useful, I’d like to share and do my part.

Minority Report Analysis:
Pre-crime and the Patriot Act
A loss in Privacy

Termpaper:
Internet, Law, and the Possibility of Government Regulation

Spamming the Spammers

We all hate those pathetic internet scammers. Have you got the one about inheritance money in Nigeria?

Anyway, Andreas, a friend of mine from my csc436 class pointed out this neat website run by a group called Artists against 419’ers, solely dedicated to fighting back internet scammers. The way it works is pretty clever, from a computer science perspective, and it�s not very hard to understand, let me try and explain:

See, when you purchase hosting from an internet site, like my website for example, you pay for something called bandwidth. My website provider allows me to have 5 GB of transfer a month, meaning every time you load this site it takes away from my 5 GB allowance. Now to put these numbers in perspective, a visit to my site will deduct about 45k or .00042915 GB from my 5 total–which as you can see, is tiny, and with my current modest readership, there is just no way in hell I will ever exceed 5GB. But, if for some reason, I get a million people reading my site, instead of, well… 5, I just might go over this allowance.

Using this same idea, this anti-spam group has created a website that you can go to that will keep reloading websites of known spammers. You simply have to go to a website (make sure you internet cache is disabled) and when enough people do this, the websites of these spammers will eventually exceed their allotted bandwidth, bringing their websites down.

Ah yes, sweet revenge.

Here�s the link

Lexica is Love

I was considering going into more detail about last weekend’s trip to Montreal–but, I’m lazy and I decided to totally kibosh the whole idea. “Kibosh,” now that’s a funny word. I remember the first time I heard it; it was on Seinfeld. I was like “Kibosh”, what the hell is “kibosh!”

Main Entry: ki’bosh
Pronunciation: ‘kI-“b’sh, kI-‘; ki-‘b’sh
Function: noun
Etymology: origin unknown
: something that serves as a check or stop

The way I am, if I hear a word I don’t know, I feel an almost obsessive need to look it up. If I don’t have a computer or dictionary handy, I use my cell phone and send a text message to (GOOGL) in the form define word-I-don’t-know, and Google will actually text you back with the definition, its quite cool.

Well anyway, the Boston Herald had an article today about 2004’s most looked up worlds. It’s interesting to note that ‘blog’, has now officially been added to Webster’s dictionary. Also, what I found particularly strange, is that among the 3 top searched words in the dictionary (100 times a second) of which ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ are 1 and 2, and understandably so (I always botch those up), the other word, most looked up, get this: love.

I am quite bemused by this–doesn’t everyone know what love is? Well, I guess just maybe I can understand the confusion. Love is always being redefined into things it certainly is not. Love is chocolate; love is blind; love is a many splendid thing, all you need is love (this is bad, now I’m singing). You get my drift. Well, that is some attempt at providing an explanation, albeit a pathetic one, what’s yours?

Over the Border

“I don’t know, let me see what my schedule looks like.”

Okay, I have an enormous programming assignment due in 4 days that I havent started– for a class I’m almost failing. Um, what else? Oh, I have that 4000 word term-paper I knew about all semester, yep, still haven’t began (you know, I think it may count for 30% of my grade). What else? Oh, There’s that other project, in that other….

“Yeah, sure Nick. I’ll go to Canada.”

And that’s how it all started. lol

(to be continued…maybe)

* read the comment 😉

Attrition

When I was 18 years old, I was so excited about computers and programming. I used to spend tons of money purchasing O’Reilly computer books on Amazon.com, and even the computer section at Barnes Noble would leave me misty-eyed, like a little kid in a candy store. I even looked up the Best VPN Reviews to protect my computer. I would plan out my next purchases– what new comp-sci technology should I invest in next? PHP, XML-RPC, ooo… wow, they just got a new Advanced Perl Programming book. Then I met Linux. It was a match made in heaven, metaphorically of course. Computers came easy for me, and my passion for them, I thought, would endure unabated.

Then I went to college, and decided to major in my passion. That was a mistake. Nothing has made the thought of computers, and hacking away for hours at a computer more repugnant then my 4 years of computer science at URI. There I learned about all kinds of crap, carefully crafted with a curriculum so carefully planned out, to provide the most excruciating, skin-pulling, irrelevant course load possible. There is CSC402, Compiler development, the first lines of the teacher: “This course will teach you about compilers. Most of you, if not all of you, will never have to write a compiler in your life. However, during the course of this semester, you will learn every excruciating pedantic detail about compilers, and a few other things we’ve made up to make the course near impossible to pass”. Then there was CSC 211, where I met my first all-nighter, and of course many more to come. There you learned that programming assignments should always be started immediately and also that the phrase “I’m done”, has no place in computer science, only “close enough”, or “Screw this, I’m handing it in!”.

Then of course, as we all know, computer science and math are intimately entwined– they sleep in the same bed. And it is no secret that in addition, math has a hot passionate love-affair with Physics, and not the easy tawdry physics, no no… the mysterious, dark, complicated physics. As CS students, we’re caught in this love triangle, thereby forced to take these hopelessly esoteric courses, ad nausem.

I don’t know how I did it. But my 4+ years in the CS curriculum are coming to an end; I will be graduating very soon. And in these 4+ years of higher education I have learned one thing, and I tell this to every new impressionable freshman I happen to meet: “Whatever you do, don’t get into computer science.”