05/29/2005 - It isn't often you find something that hits a nerve quite so... but here it is care of this this Slashdot post:

"Isn't that what they feed everyone in school; "You can do anything if you just put your mind to it"?

In my younger years, I took this to mean "Do everything, because you can". Now that I'm in college, that entire lesson was bunk, and now I'm stuck with a bunch of what I'd consider useless knowledge.

The "Pretender" gene, as I often call it (after the TV series) is something a lot of us are blessed/cursed with. We have the ability to sit down at a computer and code anything, then get up, walk into a garage or workshop, pick up a hammer and build something, then go to a rally and speak about how you can change the world if your party will support you.

The problem with it is futility. Others like me, myself included, find it futile at times to do anything, since we've done everything we're interested in doing. Us general-purpose, disposable task people have to cast ourselves into single purpose, repetitive task people, and that's really hard for us, in college, and in life.

Sadly, I don't see an easy solution. Except I won't be telling my children that "They can do anything". I'll tell them "you can do something. but it's up to you to choose what that something is."

12/04/2003 - Wow, what was I thinking with the color and design of this place? Someone ought to do something (later). I have posted a new Linux tutorial. It is more or less a listing of all the basic commands you need to get by using the command line, and can be considered an addendum to the basics page.

5/29/2002 - A new Linux tutorial has been posted in the "Linux" section (funny how life makes sense like that). This one is a combo article with two different methods of setting permissions, written by otheos and krohnjw. The first half is dealing with permissions numerically, the second half is how to set them by rwx.

5/22/2002 - There is yet another new article written by jkrohn about how to decompress and compress files in the Linux section. It covers .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.tgz, .tar.bz2, and .zip files.

5/22/2002 - Check it out, the first update, and the very next day too. The basics page is now up, with with everything you need to know about directories, file deleting, and editing covered care of ChaoticWhisper. Also, a snazzy tutorial on how to mount your windows drives by yours truly.

5/21/2002 - All right then, this is the very first update of my very own website (weeee), and so a little layout of the plans. The "Evil" section will be dedicated to companies like MS, AOL, and spyware producing companies like Radiate and new.net . Mostly ranting there.

Linux will be ultra simple tutorials for people (like me actually) who need more instruction than "cd to your base distro discombobulator and su -tefjskal --dadwa=pnutt then copy your kernel tree to the bottom of the dogpile." All these will be written out as clearly as I can make them, and explained in terms as "as far as I know." I will warn you in advance that they will be written specifically with RedHat in mind (7.3 as of writing), but I will try and consult some experts to give warnings about what might be different in other distros.

Rand is just whatever I want it to be. It'll probably end up some combination of Simpsons/Futurama/Volkswagen crap.

ME - Figure it out.

Also, check out http://www.phonebashing.com/, possibly the coolest thing ever. Take that annoying cell phones!