Today I will tell the story of how I became involved the computing world. It started all the way back in 1993. I was just a young lad, only 12 at the time. My family bought a computer, a custom build brick with all the AT fixings (you know how those things looked). This became my world, and I was absorbed in the mesmerizing glare of an 800x600 resolution monitor. DOS was a mysterious lady with which I tangled with, often lost, but always learned something new with each encounter. Windows 3.1 was my bread and butter. Oh, the joys of such simple games like DOOM and Wolfenstien 3D brought me to new worlds, and new depths in the gaming world. In the end though if I remembered one thing, it was my DOS experience. Such power at my finger tips. A simple command, and then, poof, there goes every bit of information stored on my massive 260 MB hard disk (yeah I said megabyte). 1K memory limits, and Config.sys and Autoexec.bat became a fascination, on how to tweak settings, adjust that pure and simple Award BIOS that was forced to 64K. (My family is a bunch of pains who would not allow me to learn about the internet so my knowledge was very limited at this time).

Now I know what your thinking. This dude is boorr-ring. There is a deeper reason I why disclosed such specific detail (I will elaborate later). A far more sinister force was at play in the future, but hey what can I say the 90's were a true joy for America where pretty much everything went right after the departure GWB. Dot com booms, and huge leaps went forward my first born PC was equiped with only 1.185 million transitors. By February 1999, the P3 was released containing 28.1 million transistor. Overall though, I was still stuck in a 16 bit world since PCs were still very expensive back then, and children not having money and all that. I never really was exposed to horrors Windows 95 and 98 pre SE (you foegies know what I'm talking about). So my knowledge never grew with the internet and I was left behind, as a teen with no path. My life hit a few tummultuous times (no PC available), then I found my self at college. I was not really prepared for the academic world, and I quickly washed out after year one. One thing was always mine to hang on to. My self taught PC knowledge at 12, would unfortunately be a blessing and a curse, as I was comfortable even then cruising the Command Prompt (when it was COMMAND.COM) without touching one for 5+ years.

Of course, it can never last. How did Al Gore get robbed and GHWB get elected? The millenium went off without a hitch though, so the end of the world was averted (try the Solar flare from 2012 if you want to see a real doomsday which is due.(http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2014/23jul_superstorm). Then IT happened. September 11th changed most people, who felt safe and cozy at home here in the good ole US of A. Oh holy hell, now everyone is a target. Watch the sheeple fall in line like some scared group of school girls. Here is the fact, 3,000/300,000,000 = 0.00001, or .001%, is a really small statistic of our actual population loss (and this statistically speaking so no offense intend to anyone) vs I don't know, say, Iraq. The point is the politicians screamed WAR at the top of their lungs, and while our undivided attention was on the shock and horror we just blindly gave away any bit of Democracy left. Freedom of Speech, don't think so anymore. Now we are just as a guilty as any society that has destroyed culture and knowledge. Now we finally have officially banned books! Freedom of the Press, yeah, right. Five corporations and two News Agencies in America do as they are told, by the puppet master, and no real news is reported. As a frequent viewer of the news i have seen stories that just disappeared shortly after being published, as the heavy hand of US Democracy quickly forces the new outlets to redact the bylines. Due process, naaaah, call 'em a terrorist and hold them indefinitely. Most of all what the Patriot Act does, is absolutely shredd Americans right to privacy, and more than half of the act is so CLASSIFIED that EVERYONE would just laugh off a FOIA request, or more likely make us a target for examination under the government's watch list, and the person(s) disappears.

Snowden brought light to many of the governments practices, but I'm pretty sure he's still holding some cards in his hand. I have been exposed to one the most devestaging hacking packages. A trojan/ rootkit/ BIOS virus/ flash the damn firmware off of the equipment mega RAT from our good friends at Homeland Security and NSA. Here is an article about the ultimate hacking tool, my archenemy, one of our finest weapons in cyberspace (http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/meet-badbios-the-mysterious-mac-and-pc-malware-that-jumps-airgaps/). My tragedy began in 2004, and didn't end until 2005 when I said, "To hell with you PC" (a very lovely Pentium 3) and it hit the dumpster. My life was forever changed by these events, which are to be revealed in my future postings...

Until the next time, and remember, "Just because you are paranoid, it doesn't mean that- someone isn't watching you."

zsanfusa