They canceled the course I was taking.

>:(

When one (or four) boards a boat, one (or four) usually knows what they’re doing. I’m not really a boating man, and I don’t know much about being out at sea (basic survival skills apply, but uncharted waters will be uncharted waters). But still I find myself tripping at the big dock of life and falling into an unfamiliar boat called “college.”

I enrolled in a ten week summer class called “Software Design,” taught by one Mr. Mendonsa. Although it’s called software design, its purpose isn’t how to tell me how to create the next overpriced product on the market; and instead offers an overview of computer science so that we understand what goes on in the secret lives of computers while we are designing our software. This includes several fundamentals, like binary, hexadecimal, data storage, et cetera. (For the record, we start programming in C near the 6th week.)

This is all very new to me: I’ve never really been exposed to a classroom setting, and certainly not one where I have to worry about a grade, so I didn’t know what to expect.

My mom, brother, and I left our house at around 5:15 PM. After dropping my brother off at Synagogue, we trudged through insanely slow-moving traffic from Norfolk to Chesapeake… a treck that ideally would have taken about twenty minutes. Still, we arrived at around 6:30 and I hurried awkwardly to classroom 2038. Standing in front of the room was none other than my teacher (I didn’t know it at the time), who directed me instead to room 2010. Luckily I knew where it was because I went the wrong way upon building entry.

I brought along my new Kingston DataTraveler 4GB flash drive (on sale now, buy buy buy) just in case we were in a room with computers. I’m not good at writing by hand, so that I thought I might be able to take notes that way. Unfortunately we were in a small room with rows of chairs squashed together in a stick-your-gum-under-the-desk-and-pass-notes sort of way.

It’s a small class of seven people, but of the Enrolled Few, only four showed up. I sat as far back as I could. There was a brief discussion on intelligence where we were asked to give our opinion of what it is. Knowing this was going to turn into a “computer intelligence” shpiel, the best answer I could come up with was “the ability to learn.” For the moment I felt proud of my answer, until we had to expound upon why we said what we said… that’s where I start tripping over my words.

Incredibly and much to my disbelief I survived the fiasco (but not before saying that computers had to be “encouraged”). The rest of the lecture was focused on binary. Logical operations with binary, math with binary, shorthand binary, how binary relates to storage units, binary representing text… binary. Binary for three hours. Have you ever listened to someone talk about binary for that long? It does a number on your brain (or two numbers—I’m sure you can guess). It’s more interesting than it sounds, it’s just that I had to clean up the brains that leaked out of my ears when we were finished. Much of it I already knew, but Mr. Mendonsa was able to connect the pieces that were fragmented for me, so apart from trying to be an answer hog I was able to do some learning.

Class finally ended (late) and I was able to go home. It was nearly 10.

I’m currently sitting at my desk at work (in my lunch break of course), using a PC that even a homeless shelter would throw away. I’m sure I’ve mentioned something of this nature before, however I really felt this needed to be written in stone.

I dislike corporate PC’s. They are literally riddled with numerous startup items we’re not going to ever use. Around six months ago, basic users like myself were to be able to cut down any running process which enabled us to reduce the page file size by more than 150 MB! Considering the maximum size is 1248 MB with 512 MB of RAM (on this PC anyway) this allowed me to regain some semblance of sanity.

Once you’re logged in, past the Windows screen, we’re presented with a cursor in the form of an hourglass which will remain in place for a period of about two to three minutes while it all starts up. To me this was an unacceptable waste of my time. While most users, when first coming into work will immediately switch their PC on, wait about thirty seconds, login and then spend a few minutes passing the time by engaging in casual chat, re-arranging papers on their desk or making themselves a coffee, I would replace that last step in the form of barreling straight into the task manager and cancel unneccessary processes with a vengeance. This enabled me to have my work-related applications open (i.e. Firefox complete with Ganadu’r V4 bookmark and Outlook) in a period of thirty seconds. I was happy enough with this solution. Surely I can spend a few seconds coaxing a computer to perform better – it gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside – and all is fine and dandy.

Until about six months ago. I breezed in to work one morning, probably nodded a greeting to my colleagues or maybe even a bright ‘Morning!”, switched on the PC, made myself comfortable and logged in when the relevant window popped up. I immediately CTRL+ALT+DEL-ed to the task manager (right clicking on the taskbar and accessing it from there is no good as your cursor will immediately turn into an hourglass). I sort processes all in order of size. Moving down the list from the essential processes hogging the top shelf of the page file, the selection rests on an application called SmartBoardTools (a software app which is only ever used on the company notebooks) running at 45,000-odd K. Yikes. I immediately click on ‘end process’. A little box asks me if I really wanted to terminate this process. I click on ‘Yes’ with perhaps more force than was strictly necessary and a second box pops up. To my horror, it tells me that I do not have the permissions to terminate this process. What new evil is this?

Moving on, I find QuickTime is using up 20,000k – it seems this computer has the Pro version. The free version is bad enough. I’m able to terminate that app with no problems. After experimenting with the task manager, I quickly deduce that I can only terminate processes under my own username. This is a very small selection of software, some of which is essential, the majority of processes I used to terminate previously are all located under SYSTEM, LOCAL SERVICE and NETWORK SERVICE, which of course I’m not able to terminate. My warm and fuzzy feeling each morning is gone forever.

I now make myself a coffee each morning immediately after I login, with the rest of the office.