Enter GryphonBricks, when I'm about eight. A sort of offbrand LEGO-like program where you could build on the computer with virtual plastic bricks. No need to spend lots of money on different sets, no worries about stepping on it, no hassle to clean it up. Well, looking around the menus, I saw that it could be automated with so called "scripts", of which it has various examples, like making bricks different random colours, building a maze, and building a pyramid. This was pretty cool! And even cooler, you could look at how these scripts were written and create your own. This was how I discovered AppleScript, and therefore, too, programming. I never got all that far with that particular language but the interest in programming has been unshakeable since. Around age 12 and 13, I went to some programming day camps, the absolute best of which I feel the need to plug here:
In junior high, some friends and I figured out how our school's library barcode based checkout system worked. Not through anything as cool as looking through dynamic link libraries, but just some looking around in the interface. We soon "borrowed" from the library various nonbook items ranging from Alan's mechanical pencil leads to Evan's chocolate easter eggs (if I am remembering correctly who had which item). I ended up getting in a little bit of trouble when I was caught in flagrante in the library which was ostensibly closed (well, not another soul was in there, but in my defense it wasn't locked) nervously trying to loan a can of iced tea to a kid named Raymond who was in a different homeroom class from ours. Also in junior high, one of my closest friends, Dave (well, one of them) had installed Red Hat Linux (maybe version of 7-something or 8) on his computer, and this was the first time I had laid eyes on any UNIX-like OS. It was really cool though I never learned about how any of it worked. He showed me the GNU Image Manipulation Program and it was really cool that a program so similar to Photoshop could do so many cool things and it was free without pirating it (this was really the least of it). Dave also showed me a website that used some of the script-fu capabilities of the GIMP (and FIGlet) in a browser for generating effects on writing, flamingtext.com, the likes of which would be in high demand in the Myspace.com and Livejournal generation. Flamingtext.com has since expanded considerably, including more features and even a premium paid version.
In tenth grade and eleventh grade I took computer programming classes in high school. Each was at a different different institution and it certainly showed. My first teacher, Bill, was a younger man (maybe in his early thirties) much more generous soul whose understanding nature allowed for my lack of technical skill to be somewhat made up for with my ability to show comprehension of the concepts. He was pretty cool, otherwise, too; we watched a few movies (Darren Aronofsky's Pi, Forbidden Planet, and some of The Wall: Live). By contrast, Mr. Little (not that we'd ever be allowed to call him by his first), was a middle aged hardass who made frequent offcolour jokes about hitting us with wifflebats, reference to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I don't remember which my textbooks were except that I seem to recall the second of my instructors using or referring to Cay Horstmann. From his age, it seemed as though Mr. Little could well have been an aging old school hacker, but he was nonetheless conservative enough in his temperament to send me out of the class (and maybe to the vice principal's office) for not standing for the national anthem. Around this time I would discover for myself a band which has grown to become my favourite, Autechre. Purveyors of an abstract form of techno, I had first heard them unknowingly on the soundtrack to the Aronofsky film I had watched in Bill's class. They would be one of my earliest exposures to what would in time become a beloved genre, but interestingly, they turned out to be users of a sophisticated programming language used for music and multimedia, Max/MSP and some of their music was based on sounds and patterns which were based on principles of algorithms and generativity, which was a pretty incredible concept to me. This was wild to even think about, along with their apparent influence from musique concrete, which I had already delved a bit into when I was younger.
Until I was about 19, I didn't really do so much in the way of computer graphics or think all that much about computer programming or hacking. The change came when I bought myself my first computer, an Acer Aspire, on which I installed Fedora with KDE as my GUI of choice. It would be my first attempt of a few to use Linux, which I suspect I chose because it was the spiritual descendant of the Red Hat I had seen years ago and it had some cool scientific programs including Kalzium, which was a whole lot more than just the periodic table of elements. It was a fascinating but frustrating experience because I had prioritized disk space above something equally or more important -- wireless firmware. The only place I could think of to take this computer with me to get looked at was a coffee shop dedicated to Torvalds' creation, the no longer extant LinuxCaffe. Whenever I went must have been always the wrong time of day or week or what have you to make the connections I was hoping to. Or maybe it was past the height of the place's popularity with the local FOSS scene or LUG types, but I didn't give up, except on that particular laptop. I would later have more success with Ubuntu, which I had and have known even some of my less technolgically minded friends to use and for awhile I'd daydream about moving to Montreal and finding some sort of job with the Canadian branch of Canonical Limited, which looking back at now I rather cringe at. I'd putter around with Ubuntu for awhile (I enjoyed the aliterative animal names for each version) as well as making some use of Debian in part because I thought it was fun to have an operating system named after a Toy Story character. Ultimately, the flavour of Linux I used most and would likely use again was a then newer one called BodhiLinux, which has the functionality and compatibility of Ubuntu but incredibly lightweight, highly customizable, and it came with virtually no packages and libraries installed.
Then I decided I wanted to try a *BSD. I had wanted for a time to get better at using Linux in a "under the hood" capacity, get more versed in administration and the commandline side of things (not primarily with a career in mind as the motivation), feel more 1337. I liked that despite its corporate origins, UNIX had still had a countercultural cachet of sorts to speak of, perhaps most obviously the Berkeley Software Distribution variants. Although I greatly admired and still admire the "political" things that Linux and those of the GNU project stood for when they did, I also think highly of the UNIX "philosophy", to the extent I understand the precept of simplicity applied to computer science. There was an infamous yet perhaps mostly apocryphal quote about two major products of the NorCal town being "LSD and UNIX". But as Linux marches slowly towards more and more corporate adoption and trying to appeal to wider audiences, maybe one of the most appealing things about learning UNIX was clear: the prospect of a more recent operating system that had worked much the same as it had for more than fifty years! In my search for a form of *NIX to check out, one particular *BSD stood out, due to its being more secure/focused on security. That would be OpenBSD, of course. Truth be told, I also found Puffy the pufferfish much cuter/more adorkable than Beastie the BSD daemon. So, I decided to christen a new laptop with the hostname fugu000 after the Japanese name for this fish along with the whole counting starting from zero thing. Then I found out that the sashimi of this often rare delicacy was sometimes called "tessa", which is also a woman's name, so I've adopted it as the alias I will use for this website. So here we are! This blog is going to be mostly dedicated to documenting my learning OpenBSD and hopefully also learning about how things like different types of image files and Photoshop/GIMP filters/effects, work and are programmed. I will also sometimes post a bonus paragraph or two in a feature called "technicallytessa" about techno music.
O tessa o
_\_ o
\\/ o\ .
//\___=
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