Vermont Lasmarias

 
So I am reading an XML book right now. It's called:

XML in Action
Web Technology
by William J. Pardi


The boggling thing for me is that this was written four years ago, 1999, when I was a senior in high school. It brings back memories. That year when I entered my senior year from my junior year, my high school, Burnaby North Secondary School (BNSS) switched from old Intel 486 DX266 MHz computers to Pentium 2 300 MHz computers. That was a big difference and big upgrade. I was quite proud then to see my school so "technologically inclined". A cool thing was that BNSS also switched from using Turbo Pascal 4.0 for DOS to Visual Studio 6.0. Little did I know about Computer Science (SC) back then, I was so unaware of what was happening to the technological world being trapped inside the walls of high school. I did not know what XML was, what Visual Studio 6.0 would bring, where the technological world was going -- I really did not know much about the real world.

The cool thing, is that as if over the past year (2002-2003), I've been filled with revelations, of the sudden realization of what I really am studying, what I am learning at school, and so forth. In college, they stuff you with so many theories, you don't see much practicality of things. You see "uses", but don't really know how things are so interconnected. Your first two years, you learn baloney concepts, that probably shouldn't be focused too entirely on. What you need, is how the operating system works, how the architecture of the computer works, real programming skills and the underlying concepts, before going over data structures like linked lists. As I read all these books, I begin to understand why things are what they are, why things are going a certain direction, the revolution of the Internent (a perspective that goes beyond the "shallow" Information Highway), the attempts at subduing the internet, and so forth.

I guess, the point of this BLOG entry, without going to anymore detail because it would probably require a lot more paragraphs to explain my entire point, is that it's really cool to "understand" things, especially things of the past that you go through but didn't really have a clear picture. For example, everything that my high school provided, I did not know their importance until now, the power that BNSS afforded us students, the ability for us to create and explore new worlds -- this potential went primarily untapped because it was so new back then, but upon this realization, it feels great to be part of this, to say that hey, I've been developing with VS since I was 16, or that I've been doing HTML since I was 14, and now, at 21, I'm doing things and have done things like .NET, XML, DirectX, MFC, ATL, and so forth.
posted by Deal Hunter at 3:49 PM

 
This is my first weblog. This is quite interesting, I mean, the overall layout of the user interface as I type this weblog. What is a .pyra extension? I wonder what the used to embed all these cool looking forms. Very interesting. Testing with a link: Google.com
posted by Deal Hunter at 10:22 PM