Basement Chronicles

Of Pirates and Paradigms

"You can't save me. You can't change me."

I remember the days when I'd just complain about school, take a few pictures of myself, and be done with it. I could churn out a Chronicle a week, maybe two if I was feeling particularly frisky, or bored. But now...now its quite a bit more difficult. These days I try and find something to write about. You know, like a topic. A subject. A purpose. A reason for me to sit down for hours and write. And now it seems that I've written about all I really seem to care about. I know that can't really be true, but after a few weeks of the same stuff you start to worry.

It came across my mind to write a story. Hopefully a short one. It could even be illustrated, or maybe just accompanied by a photo montage. That was weeks ago. Again, I find my laptop littered with little notes, blank text files, and ridiculous premises written on small scraps of paper. Then thrown away, or deleted. My write-up on this weekend's Linux install failed to realize that nobody likes to read about computers. They just want them to work, with as little work on their part as possible.

Which reminds me of an interesting point made by my programming professor today. In explaining different programming paradigms, he mentioned the emergence of a new type: service-oriented architecture. Basically, its a new business model the computer industry is considering, based on the use of computers as a "service", much like your cable or phone bill, rather than the product based economy that exists today. Essentially, instead of purchasing a copy of Windows, you would pay $50 a month for a Windows machine. Add $5/month for email. Another $5 for Internet access. You get the point. And for that price, you would get a maintained machine, protected by your service provider's network, and guaranteed against spyware, viruses, and the occasional hardware failure.

This idea kinda pisses me off. It'll probably force me to work customer service no matter what job I'm at. Friends, I can deal with. Family, just fine. But complete strangers with an attitude blaming me for their pop-ups...I just can't do. I've always liked it when people, computer literate or not, bring up the fact that 'computers are only as smart as their programmers'. In most cases, this is just calling computers the speedy idiots that they really are, and after a year and a half of college, I can pretty well assure you this is true. But on the other hand, the notion that computers are limited only by our ingenuity keeps and has kept me interested in computers all this while. Turning every home computer into a high-speed cable box in an attempt to turn more profits seems like more of a backward step than our usual technological marauding.

Speaking of marauding, my History of Pirates class is pretty cool. Though I think most people know already, pirates, or rather "buccaneers", were quite the badasses of their time. Most were English or French, coming as indentured slaves and either completed their contract or escaped. With no ride back, and just a bunch of Dinky Islands to live off of, they became expert woodsman and hunters. While deadly on their own, when banded together they made a fierce and versatile army that terrorized the Spanish colonies from whence they'd escaped their previously abysmal lives. Had they not spent their plunder on whores and booze they could very well have been the first established independant nation in the "West Indies" long before our pilgrims sailed the ocean blue. And to think I have three more books to read for that class...

In addition to pirates, I'm also taking Asian-Pacific Islander studies as well as Religions of the World. I'm incredibly lost in these classes, having taken a year and a half of sheer engineering. If not for Basement Chronicles and the occasional bad scifi novel, I think the language/writing side of my brain would have atrophied, or perhaps in some cool freak occurrence merged with its brother lobe to create a super...lump. Critical thinking? Class discussions? Creative writing? A jedi craves not these things. Just english majors.

As for the difficulty of these courses I'm not too sure. All of my elective courses require that we be pretty proficient in writing, so much to the point that they'll refuse to grade it if its not readable. While at this point in our education this really shouldn't be happening, it makes me nervous when my history courses are saying this right at the beginning while my two semesters of English gave me the benefit of the doubt. I guess this is where things get serious.

Next week I have to apply for professional status in my major so I can have access to 300+ classes, and so I can graduate. I'm right on the border of automatic acceptance, where if you've got a certain GPA in certain courses then you're in no matter what. Its when you're below that they have to be subjective about it, and make cuts. Lots of cuts. The kind where you sit in class wondering which of these nerds is gonna beat you out of a college education. The professor's Chinese-German-South African accent sputters and grinds kinda like how your lawnmower sounds after its been sitting in the shed all winter. Slowly, programming paradigms and von Neumann fade into the background, and you start to imagine what you'd do if you didn't get in.

Breathe in. Out. Its been ten days since I left Anchorage. It feels more like a month. My quotebook is already filled with stuff to do, things to get signed, and your occasional tar -xvjpf /mnt/cdrom/stages/stage3-*-2004.3.tar.bz2. Four months to go. This weekend I even drew up a calendar on ASU's Blackboard application, compiling all my syllabi, project dates, and deadlines into a single source accessible from anywhere. Due dates are represented appropriately in red, because now it looks like my schedule is bleeding.

However, my car's registered, my stereo installed, my wireless extended to my room, and my laptop is fixed. Three hundred years later I'm reading about people who have lived as slaves, worked themselves to death or lived lives of piracy and immorality, both in search of freedom in a new world. Kind of puts things in perspective. I've been keeping busy, and somehow staying ahead of whatever comes my way. I've even got a cool looking pirate on my desktop, along with the rest of my mutinous crew of Bobblehead Jesus, Dexter, Devil Ducky, and new on deck is the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Aye, a shifty one, he...

So I guess that is what's on my mind of late. 1:52AM on an inert Wednesday morning, and I'm still laughing at my new Dungeons and Dragons "Deadly Beasts" poster.