Of Pens and Swords

And another one to come…

So in my ultimate scheme, with me retiring after the kids are through college, and me being a CTO of some fortune 500 company, or startup, I have to meet certain requirements. No CTO out there is fresh off the street and knows nothing about technology. They’ve been armpit deep in it since DOS was the ‘kick ass’ operating system…

So, to get one of the thousand blocks checked off so that one day I too can retire rich and not so famous, I have decided to get myself a couple credentials (finally). Ultimately, I have to get about a dozen more (sadly enough), but they won’t involve a bootcamp….Yep, I kind of skipped over that, didn’t I. I have enrolled into a bootcamp for 2 weeks to have a library’s worth of stuff crammed into my head, so that (hopefully) I can regurgitate it back out in the form of an x in a box on a test.

Goddamn…I know most of this stuff. I’m a little rusty I have to admit, but it’s like a bike, get back into it for a day or two and it’s all there. So, ultimately, it’s not the actual knowledge that is hampering me…it’s studying for the test…

Let me explain.

Microsoft, it seems, was in the Army. It doesn’t matter if you are really really really good at your job, the Army will give you a test with arbitrary, outdated, and insane questions, give you answers that don’t even relate to the question, and expect you to pass. These tests aren’t quite that bad, but they can make a really good admin who knows his stuff feel really dumb. It’s annoying.

So now, after reviewing roughly 10,000 pages of printed material from MS, on a whole slew of domains, I have to now review about that many questions on practice tests, figure out how they word them, figure out what they’re asking…..dig through the 10 pounds of shit data in the question to find the one golden nugget question they’re really asking…

My brains are leaking. I feel perpetually hung over, getting 3-4 hours of sleep a night. I think I know less now than when I got here, or it’s all stuck in my brains L2 cache and is being processed….that might catch up with me in about 3 weeks.

Well, it’s 5.30pm. Means I have at least another 9 hours of studying to get done tonight.

I have never missed veging out in front of a tv until now. I want to soo badly…

I’ve just wasted 7 or 8 minutes writing this…shame on me.

I said that if Noah’s Ark was a real boat, and there was in fact a worldwide flood that destroyed everything but what was on this boat, and obviously organisms that can live in water, that there would probably be about 15 species left on this planet, since the bigger creatures with sharper teeth would most likely take care of the little ones that yap-yap-yap or exist solely for others to eat (hence, chickens probably wouldn’t exist, they’d be the first things in the fryer)

We also surmised that if humans did happen to survive the boat trip, not being accidentally eaten by the cuddly bears or tigers, and it was only Noah and his family that survived, well, the world would be populated by a species of humans derived from one genetic specimen pool….which means that humans nowadays would probably be about 5’5”, have large eyes that have migrated slowly towards the outside of our heads, and want to wear galoshes. We’d look like some of the human specimens that are from Arkansas or the interior of West Virginia….We may, as a species, be very adapt at playing the banjo however.

I started thinking, short, oddly formed, large eyes on the sides of the head…sort of sounds like an alien.

So what if the typical alien that we all see, the grey bodied, large eyed shorty, is actually a species that is on an ark full of inbred people? Say, they were on a planet 1000 light years away, they travel at a maximum of light speed, and found our planet. What if it was just a single family of space explorers that set off one day, and finally got to Earth 50 generations later….

That family of explorers might be inbred…Grey skin from never seeing the light of anything but dim 60watt bulbs, all short and one size because, well, they’re inbred. Large eyes, and a penchant for sticking things in others asses…squeal like a pig!

Just imagine, all the UFO buffs out there, wanting to welcome new visitors in, are extraterrestrial versions of the Beverly Hillbilly’s, driving a jalopy through the cosmos…YEE HAW!

It starts to drop, slowly, carried by the winds coming from the north, up-drafts from convections. It flits around on the winds, through the sky, for seemingly an eternity. While its fluttering around, seeing the small world down below, it grows larger through accretion, though it doesn’t know the process. It only has one life to live, one that makes a fruit fly’s life an eternity. It still drops, maybe a little more rapidly than before, but this is life, the older and bigger you get, the faster things move. It’s an exciting time for this young flake. It starts to be able to make out more detail of the ground below, trying to figure out what it all means. The winds pick up the flake again, send it flying higher again. This is when the flake realizes that if it wants to see what is below, it has to be bigger, so to fight the winds. It starts growing more, so it can see what is down below, fighting the winds.

Finally, little flake gets big enough to start dropping again. It sees the opportunity to skirt around the winds grasp as well, and starts it’s freefall to the ground…What an exciting rush this is; it gets to where it was before, and now is past it in an instant, dropping closer to the world below….what will little flake find when it gets there? Dropping faster and faster, it sees that parts of the ground are moving, looking like streams of something. The flake thinks, I wonder if I can catch a ride on that stream, and see more of the world? It would make sense, since flake can’t propel itself back into the air…it still has to rely on the winds for that unfortunately.

Flake picks out one of these moving pieces of ground, starts flipping end over end to help stabilize its fall; turns sideways into the winds so to tack the winds instead of being blown by them…it’s got this part down pat. Flake eyes his target as it gets closer, picks it’s aiming spot….What a rush, the world is finally here, so close…what is it all about?! Farther and farther it falls. Flake starts concentrating on maneuvering to keep the target in it’s crosshairs; tacking, flipping, tacking again. Suddenly, the winds die, flake is in a freefall. Flake looks down, sees the target, though the stream is not a stream at all, but a thousand large objects following a path, and moving a lot faster than it seemed before. Flake tries to change direction, it’s only got mere feet, but there is no wind to carry it…it pans flat, hoping to slow it’s decent, glide to another location…this is scary…but flake does it, starts changing direction.

All of a sudden, another wind, this time from below, grabs flake. It pulls it along with the path of moving objects, faster and faster, and dragging it down quickly. Flake realizes that this is it, maybe it has time to scrawl out a warning to others, so they don’t get trapped by the same fate. The winds are dragging flake faster down, it sees one of the large objects bearing right down on it……

Splat. The lady driving the car sees the small sized droplet form on her windshield, thinks that the forecasted storm must be on its way. Suddenly, another flake hits the windshield, and holds its integrity long enough for her to realize that this isn’t rain, but snow….

Living in Kansas, this lady is deathly afraid of snow….so she, moving at 65mph, slams on the breaks during rush hour traffic, causing two cars to rear-end each other, pushing her car into the wall- sideways, backwards, flips into oncoming traffic, hit by another car…….metal screeching beyond it’s tolerances, fire erupts, airbags deploy….

All because of that little snowflake…