Blog Post 0: Blooming Out of Season
September 28, 2024
“Why don't you just make a Facebook post and save yourself the extra work?" The thought comes to mind as I shuffle between links and resources on building a blog but my answer to that always remains the same: I want something of my own. This isn’t about the often elitism of DIY culture but really just a personal mantra I’ve always had. I have always wanted to grow with technology, evolve my understanding of it and increase my capability with computers. I remember when I got my first computer in my senior year of highschool. It was a macbook pro. A decade later and I can’t remember what I was doing exactly but I remember accidentally going to the system’s properties and looking at the configuration of some random file I had and I said to myself “I wish I knew what this means.” Funny enough, I never followed up with my initial curiosity. Sure, I learned a little bit of photo editing in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop in photography classes. I also used to record music on that Mac with Garageband but I never got into anything technical. Just surfed the web and did light creative work.
After filtering in and out of my English degree at my state university I delved more into traditional arts, completely shying away from any digital literacy. I eventually left that university and moved across the country during the pandemic and found myself finishing my degree plan in English and writing at the community college in the new state I moved to. I ended up taking a computer art class during my associates program but that was the extent of my computer literacy at the time. Though time had passed since I had first got my macbook pro I still had zero literacy when it came to computers. By the end of my community college days, living in the aftermath of the pandemic in a small southern coastal community in Mississippi I started working full time at a public library and spending too much time online and in isolation. But if it wasn’t for this unique digital era I found myself in, I would have never made the switch to go all into computing and digital culture.
Life is truly whatever you want it to be. Scary as hell, but like lightning, there are flashes of inspiration to be found in the most powerful storms. For me, my time in Mississippi was the opportunity I needed to finally get in touch with who I am and what I want out of life, though none of that was apparent to me at the time. Those days I stood behind a circulation desk inadvertently learning how to troubleshoot. Our library system had a dedicated IT department with just two staff members for the county. But while the IT staff troubleshooted the library system devices, the circulation staff were always helping patrons with their personal devices. In low income communities there aren’t always resources available to the public that can offer help with technology. Geek Squad was too far out of reach for most people in my town so the local public library was the one stop shop for those kinds of situations. “I need to reset my password to login into my Gmail.” “Can you help me find and print out this file that was sent to my phone?” “I’m trying to look something up online, how do I find a good website on this subject?” These are not complex technical problems but these are real problems for communities that don’t have the means or even a culture of computer literacy. That’s why the public library is such an important part of our society because anyone regardless of age, gender, race or income level can learn how to operate a computer, their mobile phones or software. It’s how I learned too. And with that, I became more curious about computers and actually welcomed the chance to help a patron with their device or learn how to fix a printer jam. Again, at the time, I thought nothing of this and was just simply doing my job.
During my second and final year in Mississippi at the library I got first hand experience at a cyber attack. Our county wide library system like many other library systems in the United States has their system integrated with the Oracle cloud infrastructure and their database. In October 2022 the Oracle database was attacked and down the pipeline our library system was hit with a denial of service attack, knocking us completely offline. We couldn’t use the staff computers, public computers or even our telephone system. We had to revert to managing business operations with just pen and paper. I’ve never experienced a cyber attack before and to see how it affected our little town was surreal. That following month I decided to enroll in University again, this time to study Cybersecurity Technology. During those times I got my first desktop from my uncle, and upgraded it with the components from another desktop my aunt had given me when her job got new workstations. I booted windows on it and configured it to play an old PC game from 2000. (I’ll make other posts about that and why later). Two years from that point and I’m here, writing this post, finishing my degree in cybersecurity, studying for my certifications and developing a blog site… Thanks for reading and stay tuned for future posts and updates to the site.
-CS[NDEX]