You are hereBlogs / srepetsk's blog

srepetsk's blog

Good Technology Articles (and others)

It’s been quite a little while since I did this, but the number of links I have open in Opera is starting to get large enough I think there’s something wrong with me. So, with that, have some more interesting links relating in some way to technology!

Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software [wired.com]
Video Tutorials of Everything [networkingprogramming.com]
After ‘The Wire’ ended, actress Sonja Sohn couldn’t leave Baltimore’s troubled streets behind [washingtonpost.com]
The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data [arstechnica.com]
Remembering the "long distance warrior" who took down Ma Bell [arstechnica.com]
As Anonymous protests, Internet drowns in inaccurate anti-ACTA arguments [arstechnica.com]

Add new comment

And with 2012, we have the end of the world!

Ok, maybe not. Actually, definitely not; the odds of anything ending the world sometime this year are slimmer than the chances you’ll see a cow wearing roller skates while taking a plane flight across the Atlantic.

But don’t forget Iran!

Anyway, I had a really good break. We had a total of three weeks this year instead of the regular two, so that was a nice little change (I think; I’m at the point where the extra week gave me worse sleeping habits that will stick around for longer than I’d like). We got back here the second week of January, and started classes that Monday. It was interesting getting back to class since we’d been off for the three weeks, so people either didn’t want to work or just forgot most of the things from before the break. It was a week partially wasted, but not completely since it still served a decent use for catching up.

2011…what a year. I won’t bore you with all the details, so I’ll just list some of the highlights I get from looking at my calendar (ok maybe there are a few boring details in here, so you can skip to whatever you’d like):

January – I continued working at ITS Desktop Support, and was in the beginning ballroom dancing class, which I didn’t completely mind (fancy that!). I was enrolled as well in Systems Administration I which was certainly a challenge, but well worth it with the professor.

February – I officially left ITS Desktop Support after an extended review process, and started working at RIT Research Computing. I’ve been working there ever since, and have learned a ton about Linux video streaming, creation, and distribution.

March – The new quarter started, and I took Computer Crime, Information Security Policies, as well as a couple others. RIT Players put on Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog which was fantastic and which I went to see twice.

Week 9!

Well it’s Thursday of week 9…we have the rest of this week and next, and then get into our finals (what fun). I figured I’d take a quick break to post some sort of update on here.

One of the few activities outside of school/homework I’ve done lately was attend the PostSecret presentation last Wednesday. I had never heard of it before, but it’s “an ongoing community mail art project, created by Frank Warren, in which people mail their secrets anonymously on a homemade postcard.” People send things in on all kinds of things to him, including bananas and a whole host of other items, and reveal some sort of secret on the card that they’ve never told anybody else. At the end of his presentation the floor was opened up to people in the audience brave enough to get up to the microphone and tell everyone about something they were willing to share.

Reflecting upon what people were saying got me thinking about some of my own personal secrets and internal feelings. I mulled things over in the back of my mind as I went about life and classes, and eventually just started writing everything I was thinking down. The act of taking partial thoughts and forcing myself to be able to form full ideas on paper from them was certainly an interesting task, especially when I’ve sometimes only half thought about the idea. I started with the original intent of making myself a list of secrets that I have, but it really evolved more into general feelings and thoughts that I have, some that are fairly recent and others that have been evolving and changing shape for a while. At the end of it, I ended up with about three pages of random thoughts in no particular order, but all of which influence the way I act, feel, and generally go about life.