how many years in the past?

I've been talking to my husband about this for quite a long time. There is still some people out there that doesn't get it. They don't get the importance of the internet as a social web. In this stage and age I'm still engaging on arguments to make people understand the importance of their prescence in the cyberspace. Today I was talking about it with somebody interested in making her own business and I offered to design a webpage for her. I was atonished when this person said: Oh... I don't want a webpage.
Sometimes people just refuses to think ahead of their times and sometimes people refuses to come out of the dark ages.

Sharing is Evil. Or how the Music Industry is trying to kill our freedom to share.

I'm ANGRYYYY!!!!!
When I was 12 years old my father took every pennie he had and payed for a custom guitar for me. It was the most wonderful present I ever had. It's not a professional guitar nor fancy either. Just a studio humble guitar. I learnt to play those wonderful folkloric songs my parents love and during the following years me and my guitar never separated, not even when after getting married I flew across the world to be reunited with my husband in the United States and started a new life. Because of this I know how wonderful OLGA is. What a beautiful resource and what an amazing way for musicians an amateurs like me to share our skills and learn how to play the songs we loved.
That my friends is globalization. To connect with people from the most unbelievable places in the world and share something that is understood in all languages: music.
But Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing. Because they are not happy with the fact that they are giving for free something that could bring the industry a few more bucks.
What they seem to forget is that many of those artist that they ae trying to "protect" started in music by learning other people's songs and sharing tabs and lyrics. What is next then? To stop every teenage garage band from covering their music idols songs?
This is pure f-ing greed and I'm tired and outraged by it. Somebody need to hit the brakes here.
After all if they are intending to go on they might as well start stoping the free access to internet... oh wait... that's already happening isn't it?

Lazy

I've been really bad.
I hate this. I hate when I start something all enthusiastic and then after a while I feel totally incapable of keep on going. The typical "then life happened" thing. In spite of the fact that I spend most of the hours I'm home in the computer I can't get anything done, either in the house or in the computer. I'm a useless woman.
Part of it is the fact I'm so absorbed by the videos I find in the web, the email, or simplely doing Skype to talk to my family.
also I feel sort of depressed by the fact that nobody in the whole world reads this blog. And I got to admit that is not really very interesting anyways. I just don't know what to do to make my blogs interesting to anyone.
I guess I'm in a funk.
I'm sorry Cisco Router, you are still sitting in the box waiting for me to wake you up. I'm sorry server for not working on you yet. I'm sorry blog for not keeping up with you due to the lack of things to record. Bust mostly I'm sorry for anyone that ends up at this blog and has to read this awful post.

The Sound of Music

I love music and I remember the first years of the mp3 format. I remember when my boyfriend at the time would compile wonderful cds with hundreds of songs for me. Good times.
Then the lawsuits came and the end of P2P sharing finally was consumated. But not everything was lost, and Apple came up with iTunes and the iPod. Good enough for the Record Industry. They would still get a slice of this cake. Now Microsoft is coming with a rival to iTunes: Zune.
I find it funny the name similarity.
This morning I read this article about a user's eperience with iTunes. I kind of agree with some ideas regarding the hard copy. I personally rather buying a cd where I can see the artwork and enjoy doing whatever I please with it, instead of having a hard drive full of songs only. And I hate making backups.

speaking of the devil...

I found this website and probably is not news for anybody, but I wanted to blog it anyways. Linuxboxadmin.com explains things with a very simple language that makes easy for everybody to understand. I love it! I think I will keep an eye on it, it might be a good resource for my future projects.

The IT life... reading and more reading

To keep up to date with technology you need to read... a lot.
I hate reading manuals and documentation, it bores me to death unless I have an specific problem I need to solve and then I consult the documentation and things make sense to me. Like a dictionary. I heard once somebody saying that "a manual it's only useful when you already know how things work".
I need to deal with the fact that in the last couple years everything changed. Just 2 years ago wireless was still in diapers and it wasn't very secure at all. Now life without wireless is unthinkable.
In my last trip to Borders I got another book to put in my colection: CCNA Potable Command Guide. I bought it because it have a very concise compilation of all the things I'm supposed to know and it kind of helps me refreshing my memory. I'm feeling a little discouraged though, because as I turn the pages I recognize the subjects but I can barely remember what were they about. I will get the big study guide I bought when I was taking the classes and see what happens then.

This misterious server...

We have stopped the process of setup of the server. We discovered tons of mp3s and videos we are very intereested in keeping so we decided to just go ahead and trasfer those to another media to then get rid of the windows partition and go totally linux.
So right now we are just going to take a little rest and after that continue this mission.

Unpacking the router

A couple years ago I started the CCNA program to get the certification. I got halfway through it and is my intention to resume the classes this coming fall. Back then I got this Cisco Router (800 series) and it has been sitting in its box since then. I decided that if I'm to get back in track in this field it would be a great exercise to start by finally setting up this router. It doesn't have the wireless optio but that is ok. I don't care really, I believe I can always purchase an access point and get it to work with my router and have wireless access anyways.
We'll see. For now I'm reading the documentation that came with the router plus my notes from the classes I took. Gosh! It's so easy to forget all this stuff when you are not practicing!!

Getting back on track...

I started this blog to track in some way the steps I'm taking to get back in what I really like, which is the technology field. For thousands of reasons I have not been able to do what I want and I decided to take the bull by the horns and work towards getting back on track. I'm going to be doing small things that will allow me to learn something new everyday. I'll also try to read more and keep up to date with what is going on out there. This is a predominately male dominated field and I want to make a place for me in spite of that.
When I started as a Programmer back in Chile I was several times discriminated for being a woman. After so much work and little recognition I kind of gave up. I kept on trying to learn but it's hard when you are busy with other things and not directly working on the things you are studying.
The years have gone by and I worked and many things and I hated it. I finally got tired of that so I left my previous job to work for a non profit that will give me the chance to learn and apply the things I learn while I do other administrative stuff. This is a great deal because even when I have the knowledge for an entry position in any IT department, I lack on experience and that seems to be a big deal of a problem. The idea is to gain that experience in a friendly environment doing work that makes me happy and help me to grow.
Well, I wish myself good luck and I will post my journey to become and really deserve to be called Geek.