I'm an MCT!

Hooray!

When a new certification is earned, Microsoft adjusts that person's profile to display the courses they are certified to teach. Not that you care, but here's my current list.

( notice anything odd? )

On Saving Things

I'm a packrat. I don't think to a huge degree, but certainly to a certain degree. [what a useful statement. --ed] I have old textbooks, but only some. I have comic books I'll probably never read again (along with several hundred I like to read every once in a while). Where my packrat style really comes to the fore is on my hard drive(s). I have old music files, old TV commercials (Apple, Nortel, EDS, GAP), every website I've ever had (even if I never actually launched it), ... the list goes on and on. Most of the multimedia style stuff is from the past ten years, ever since I had insane bandwidth and speed when New Brunswick was testing DSL so UNB students could get it before other places in North America, and when Bell was testing DSL the next year so petele and I had 2Mb service back when *everyone* was on dial-up. Of course, it was expensive, but it rocked our worlds.

Today I was scanning through some of my saved text files from before 1995. In high school, several of my friends (jpman, saviolo, and others) had National Capital FreeNet (NCF) accounts. FreeNets, for those unfamiliar, are free dial-up services providing computer network / Internet access for all. Run off a UNIX system, but with a complicated menu structure on top so you never have to learn any UNIX commands. NCF had email, it had chatrooms, it had UseNet access, plus its own complement of NCF-specific newsgroups. I spent hours upon hours on that site, posting to various groups like the "ysig", the NCF-based youth special interest group. If you google my name, the YSIG yearbook appears. The first time I said "I'm gay" I actually typed it. It was great fun.

Back when I didn't have always-on Internet -- hell, back when I didn't have World Wide Web at all -- I would save things that I found funny, or weird, or meaningful, or technically informative. I found a one-page tutorial on UNIX permissions (back before I was certified and teaching it!), a treatise by iambic_cub on "making girls cry" (at the opera), an entire folder of dangerous thoughtcrime entitled BCS: Portrait of a Madman, and all sorts of other things. Oddest thing: fifty-four episodes of Star Trek Door Repair Guy, a fanfic satire of Star Trek written by a fellow NCF member from 1993 on. 1.3 MB worth of it. Insanely funny, especially due to the commercial-break appearances of Heritage Minutes, Bob Cowan, and more Ottawa- and Canada-specific references.

I also keep a folder called Forwards - Serious, which might as well be titled Chicken Soup For Cameron's Soul. I kept things that I really found touching or meaningful, and was re-reading some of them today. Some of them are kinda sappy -- scratch that. They're all very sappy. But my older and colder heart was warmed a bit by reading them. I include one below that actually made me cry. I suspect I am over-tired. :-)

( Information Please )

So that's today's little tale. Hope everyone's having a fun weekend. My parents will be arriving shortly for lunch and to see our new kitchen. Wooo!