51 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
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Content_Type: blog
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Title: Change
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Date: 2022 5 6
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<p style="text-align: center;">
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<i>"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in
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a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of
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smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a
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Ride!"</i>
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<br />
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(Hunter S.Thompson)
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</p>
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There comes a time in one's life, perhaps multiple, when there
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is an unquestionable need for change. Maybe you're not sure how, why, or where it came
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from, or where even it is you're headed, or how to get there, but here you are taking
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your first steps toward a new life. A journey into the unknown. I've just set out on one
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of these journeys, and even as I sit here typing this now I can't help but feel a little
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bit nervous, but even more excited. I have absolutely no idea where I'm headed to be
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quite honest. But I know where I've been.
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Growing up I would always be taking things apart, I HAD to see
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what was inside. What makes this thing, a thing. What makes it tick? Can it tick faster?
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For no particular reason I just had to know every little detail about what made the
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thing the thing that it was and why it did what it did. It's a gift and a curse of
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sorts. Quickly this led to taking apart things of increasing complexity, our home
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computer for instance. Luckily I was able to get it put back together before my parents
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got home because it was made clear that this was not allowed, and the CPU didn't seem to
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mind the sudden absence of thermal compound either. I must have been around 7 or 8 years
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old at that time, and it still puzzles me just what is going on inside there.
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I have a better idea now, naturally I had to figure out just
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what all those pieces were, what they did, and how they did it. What if I replaced some
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of these parts with other parts? As I honed my web searching skills to try to answer the
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seemingly endless hows and whys I ended up building myself a little hotrod computer and
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then raced it against other peoples' computers because why not, right? And I actually
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won! It was an overclocking contest called the winter suicides, a kind of computer drag
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race. Highest CPU clock speed wins, you have to boot into Windows XP, open CPU-Z, and
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take a screenshot. If it crashes immediately after that (and it did) it still counts. I
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got some pretty weird looks from my father as I stuck my computer outside in the snow
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but that was a small price to pay for the grand prize which was a RAM kit (2GB of DDR400
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I believe) and RAM cooler.
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After getting comfortable with hardware I started to study the
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software side of things, I tried teaching myself C++ (and didn't get very far), I did
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teach myself HTML and CSS, some JavaScript, and started playing around with Linux. It
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took until only a year or two ago to finally be completely on Linux full time (gaming
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holding me back), I even have a Linux phone now (Pinephone Pro). At this point I reached
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high school and my attention moved from computers to cars.
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To be continued...
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