3.06.2005

What used to be.

Tonight, I was reading through this old Power Macintosh 7200 user's guide and I came across various ways of updating the system software for the computer. The most detailed method, first and foremost, was the use of "online services", such as AppleLink, eWorld, CompuServe, and hahaha, gopher. It's funny, considering all the things that used to be.

I sometimes wonder where my first book on the Internet is. Did I throw it away? Or did I let somebody borrow it and they didn't return it (which is often the case...)? Either way, it's got some important history in it. For example, it highlights how Yahoo! was basically the best search engine out there at the time (circa 1995 or so) and also spoke of other search engines, such as AltaVista, Excite, etc. More interestingly, there was no mention of Google, because haha, they didn't exist. Or at least, they were still just an experiment at Stanford. I wonder what it is, though. Two of the most prominent search engines ever were products of Stanford University. Stanford is a huge incubator for high-tech talent, and it'd be interesting to see what folks here at Howard could come up with. I say that in the Department of Engineering, we hold an entrepreneurship fair, along with the usual career fairs.

I was going on about this earlier to somebody. I think to some extent, too much emphasis here is put on building a career with somebody else rather than building your own enterprise. My goal is to build up all the experience I can muster during my internships and co-ops, and then use that knowledge to build up my own company. As I mentioned before, I've cultivated a small circle of successful entrepreneurs as friends (not just because they run businesses...lol...no gold-digging here) who have been able to provide great insights and know-how. It's always great to build yourself up by standing on the shoulders of giants. Plus, my reading over the last couple of months has gotten nearly violently out of control. I've all of a sudden been transformed into one of those people that "read voraciously." Yeah, I've been reading through so many venture capitalist blogs and through so many books, etc. that my eyesight is going bad. Yes. I figure when I come back for the 2005-2006 school year, I'm going to have glasses.

With the amount of work that I do on computers these days, it's almost inevitable that I'll need glasses. Maybe in a cheeky little way, I'm happy about it. lol.

Either way, I believe I'll be getting my iBook sometime this week, just in time to do some serious coding over spring break. I hear from my mom that we might be still going to Georgia, so to have some coding to do on the road trip will be absolutely great. Maybe I can clear that IB off my transcript and convert it to an A with a bit of ingenuity and determination over spring break. My final project for Large Scale Programming never reached the professor and thus he gave me an incomplete for the class. When I get it to him, I figure he'll change it to an A.

Decisions, decisions...

I wasn't originally going to buy an iBook over spring break, seeing as how I'd probably catch hell from my mom about buying a computer knowing that I'm about to be out of school for the next nine months, and thus have no academic need for one. What's even more intriguing is that I'll be doing a co-op at IBM, and I could get a computer from them on employee discount. But, for some reason, I don't want to do that. I'm going to buy the iBook on probably Tuesday, if my credit card gets here in time. I suppose it might even be here tomorrow. Either way, I'll wait until I have the time to go get it: Tuesday. Whooo! I'm excited.

I was campaigning for a job on campus working at an Apple lab somewhere in the graduate school. With the IBM co-op popping up, I declined to even interview for it. The lady was pretty surprised when I told her what had transpired--that I basically accepted a position at IBM and wouldn't be around for the Fall 2005 semester. She was surprised because I'm also such a Mac person (see above, lol).

Platform independence is actually my thing. I'm also learning to work successfully in UNIX, so wherever I go, I can cope. I'm getting so proficient at what I do these days that to some extent I don't even need a GUI anymore, even though they're very nice to have on certain platforms. In the CLDC, some old hands came back and complained that there was no UNIX system running. I figure after spring break, I will come back and set up one. For right now, I borrowed an old O'Reilly book from the lab, Essential System Administration and it's actually been useful.

I was messing around with some Perl scripts on my system earlier and I decided to make the scripts themselves executables. This didn't require much, but I had never messed around with file permissions, so I went to the book and read up on how to do it. It's interesting how you really do learn something new everyday.

It really goes back to what I talked about in my interview. I'm a person who relishes learning new things all the damn time and generally, a lot of the hobbies I engage in require that. Good stuff.

So what's doing for today? I know that I need to wash clothes. But, I'm also contemplating going out into the city and rounding up a couple of pairs of pants. I bought some shirts on Friday, but I know that won't amount to much if I have no decent pants to wear with them! Grrr...

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