April 18, 2005

April 18, 2005 Monday Glenn and I went over to the Thrift stores near the Hard Rock gambling place. One day be the rough part of town. It has a new coat of paint and lots of palm trees now, but there are no bargains left. I bought shoes and a hat that Glenn insists makes me look like an old English sports car driver. This spree set me back $15.88, but like I told Glenn, if you want to make a fashion statement, you have to spend the money. Thank goodness it is only every other year. Seriously, there is a shop there with some excellent clothes and I hope to go there one weekend. We also looked in at the new library on Stirling. It is quite nice and I may spend some time there. You can only get into it if westbound on the north lane of Stirling, a bad move on the part of city planning. Don’t ask me why, but whenever Glenn cuts across a lawn or through a hedge, he gets plastered with burls and sticky plant seeds. It doesn’t bother me or I should say not nearly as badly. We tried a soda that was made from cashews, I did not care for it. I got back here in time to study some more, making a total of eight hours today already. Following the exact written instructions, I still manage to get a “wrong media type” message from the new Aptiva. It is going into the shop with me – not just to find out what is wrong, but to point out that we are not being taught what to do when things go wrong. Every exercise we’ve done in class has worked out perfectly and all problems solved by the end of the lecture. I was up until 3:00 AM without success. Yes, I know there is a trick to it. But nobody is showing me what that is. School was aggravating again. There are lots of suspicious glances around the room whenever we are asked, “Don’t you remember, we covered that?” I mean, it gets pretty sad when other students have to catch me at break to explain things to them. It is even worse when that Chris is not there, because his presence can be very intimidating to the new people. He works full time at a country club fixing their networks and computers so he is not the ideal classmate. Today we flew past some spyware programs, which looked very interesting but there was no time to follow it up. We were busy installing some new hardware and the drivers which I gratefully acknowledge was real hands-on. We had a card that allowed you to watch TV while working on your monitor. It was weird, the TV picture played in half-transparency on the face of whatever you were running. Not something I’d run out and buy. Everybody else loved it, and they are heavily addicted to TV. Isn’t is strange how people who watch TV 60 hours a week don’t think they are as addicted as those who watch 65 hours? Alfredo got the new Aptiva running. It was dumb troubleshooting on my part, true, but I would like to know why after two months of expensive school, I am still not sure how to fix a computer. The argument is that of course, I am far more confident with computers now, but that is far more related to the fact that I’ve been reading the textbook eight hours a day than to anything we did in class. I’ve taken a lot of courses and usually there is some balance where here the textbook was 95% of it all easily. The lecture material is skimmed over far too rapidly and there are neither handout notes nor time to properly write anything down. The problem was that the backup copies I’d made of the Windows 98 SE startup disk were missing a few files. (If this type of problem drives you around the bend, take up another field of work. I am doubly angry not because of the problem, but because I am still not familiar enough with computers to have spotted the symptoms a day earlier.) Something new today. One of the class computers had become clogged up with spyware and pop-up ads. Since I’ve never used the internet on a computer without top notch firewalls, I had to take a look to see the damage. It is a category of event that I had no incentive to keep up with. Wow! That crap just takes over your computer. I’m surprised the law let it get so bad (I’m informed later that there is legislation pending). I mean, when it gets to the point that the ads prevent you from using your computer, I think the problem has just as much to do with you than the ad makers. This single log-on from that unprotected computers installed close to 400 different pieces of spyware. The ads do all kinds of sneaky things, such as demanding you fill out a survey before you can uninstall. The instructor spent over an hour trying to get rid of all the viruses, and probably thinks we all learned it watching him click the mouse while we were working on our lessons. It was funny, because these people are still ten years behind me – Mike does not realize the exact things I prevent by keeping reign on my personal information are causing the spyware problem. He keeps telling us there is nothing you can do about it because nobody knows who is writing the spyware. What a thing for an instructor to mention. There is plenty you can do, starting with reading the ad and targeting the company that’s using it. Send all American Express junk mail back to American Express. Phone them and tell them you won’t use their card because they advertise on the internet. At the rate things are going, it will take years for certain people to figure things like this out on their own. I did not want to use my real name on the internet, it is something all intelligent people never did in the first place. Mike insisted we long on using our correct first and last names and I found 8 instances of spyware using my name, all in the past 26 days. You can’t say anything to Mike because his attitude is, “So what?”. Yet in the next moment he fancies himself clever uninstalling the consequences of such stupidity. It does not good to explain to such a moron that you intentionally kept your name off the airwaves. He’d be proud he ‘blew your cover’ type of thing. He is a product of a society that invades privacy and supports that kind of activity, defending himself by denegrating anyone who thinks otherwise. As stated, the classes have become almost continual insinuations by Mike that anyone who does not know something we talked about must be suffering from a severe learning disability. He is getting it back, because the class has also learned that I won’t stand for that kind of nonsense. Several of them have privately told me that they knew something was wrong but did not have the worldly experience to justify why they felt that way. One of them has even thanked me because he thought he was alone and did not have the vocabulary to state what was wrong. The whole teaching experience is what is wrong. Most of them did not know there was a proper lab to lecture ratio and just took whatever was thrown their way. Twice today Mike said to watch him if we “wanted to learn anything” and twice I told him that I do not learn things by watching other people do them. There are too many knowing glances around the room when for him to ignore that fact. Too many people already know in general knowledge I am far more educated than Mike, and in a short time, I will know more about computers as well. Networking. It is a minor part of the course, but that is where the class is getting a full demonstration of what I said a month ago. As long as everything is in a controlled environment and we all push the computers keys in unison, every exercise has a successful outcome. I said that is not how the real world works. Last day, several people tried to do the networking thing we breezed over a few weeks back. It didn’t work – but it was also clear that they were not really supposed to try it. (Nobody really has a network they can practice on at home, and there was certainly no time to do it in class.) Well, Mike had his hand at getting it to work. He does not know his stuff when it comes to networking. Ha, ha. But the real revelation was watching how he approached fixing the problems. He is no better than the rest of us were at problem solving. It is plain now that his knowledge of computers is not a reflection of his intellect. It is also very observable that I knew what was going on after the second week of classes. Last, I am really abbreviating the explanations of how the class has sided with me on most of the issues. I never meant to lead the palace revolt, but unless I learn to repair computers in the next twelve hours of class, we have a problem. Furthermore, all the other students knew it, but each felt isolated and afraid to say anything. I’ve never let fear hold me back. Well, that is not strictly true, but suffice to say the level at which I back off is far beyond average.