Conspiracies?

You know, I usually don't go much in for the paranoid conspiracy theory, despite being a highly paranoid individual when it comes to security of mailing lists and similar forums. That said, I just saw a very interesting story. http://english.pravda.ru/main/2003/01/31/42821.html

It's completely bizarre, and unbelievable... and yet, if it were true, some of the bizarre actions that Bush has undertaken as well as the apparent complicity of foreign intelligence services in providing pretexts for the Iraqi war would actually make sense to me.

Class is Good

Just thought I'd give everyone a quick update on how my classes are going. We've had three classes and gone through two chapters already (the first class was really more of an orientation, we got our books and stuff and pretty much just went over the syllabus.) So far, it's been an interesting mix of review and new stuff for me. I think I'm learning a lot. I already understand a lot more about what specs are important to look for in a computer, beyond the basic stuff like high amounts of ram and hard drive space and processor speed. I've also been learning about some of the things that go on behind the scenes when you start up a computer, and about some diagnostic and repair utilities that I never knew about when using windows systems before. I've even learned about binary and hexadecimal, two number systems used by computers (base two and base 16, respectively) and can convert both of them to decimal and vice versa. And so far, we're still on what the course considers "the basics".

We've had two quizzes already, and I've gotten perfect scores on both of them. On Monday we're going to start some hands-on stuff with partitioning hard drives, configuring bios, installing an operating system, automating the install, installing drivers, and updating the OS. Some of this I've done before, some of it I haven't, and if it's anything like the other material we've covered I think I'm going to learn new levels of information even about the things I've done before. At some point after that, not sure which day exactly, we should have our first major test. Wish me luck. :)

I'm really enjoying this so far, and I think I'm getting a lot out of it, though it's definitely keeping me busy. But by the end of this first course I should be able to build computer systems from scratch and perform routine maintenance and repair on both the hardware and the OS itself, and that's something I'm really looking forward to.

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. I'll try to keep in touch and let you all know how things are going as the course continues.